Tag: SalesForce

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Supplier Report: 11/10/2017

This week is the tech-industry equivalent of a bad romance movie. First Google and SalesForce announce a partnership, and in the same week, SaleForces announces a partnership with Facebook that could negatively impact Google.

T-Mobile and Sprint are definitely (maybe) off again… probably.

Another acquisition that might go sour is the AT&T and Time Warner agreement. Customers don’t love the idea and there is a certain President of the United States that is potentially using his influence to get revenge on CNN (probably not).

AI is getting smart enough to realize it needs to grow on its own.

Acquisitions

  • Broadcom Proposes to Acquire Qualcomm for Over $100 Billion

    The cash-and-stock deal carries a value of roughly $103 billion and includes about $25 billion of debt. In a news release, Broadcom said it valued the deal at $130 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/broadcom-proposes-to-acquire-qualcomm-for-70-per-share-1509971816
    Broadcom offers to acquire Qualcomm for $70 per share

    Specifically Broadcom is offering to pay $70.00 per Qualcomm share, with $60.00 being in cash and $10.00 per share in Broadcom shares. It’s intending to use debt financing if it gets agreement for the deal.

    Although a Nomura Instinet analyst, cited by Reuters, suggests that a $70 per share offer won’t be sufficient for the proposal to fly.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/06/broadcom-offers-to-acquire-qualcomm-for-70-per-share/?ncid=rss

  • Proofpoint acquires Cloudmark for $110M in cybersecurity consolidation play

    As malicious groups continue to become more sophisticated in their hacking techniques, cybersecurity efforts are attempting to expand in their reach, and that is leading to some consolidation in the field. Today, cybersecurity firm Proofpoint — which provides SaaS products to protect businesses’ email, social media and other services — announced that it would pay $110 million to acquire Cloudmark, another firm that provides security protection for messaging services, focusing specifically on serving the ISP and mobile carrier markets.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/proofpoint-acquires-cloudmark-for-100m-in-cybersecurity-consolidation-play/?ncid=rss

  • Sprint and T-Mobile Call Off Merger

    The decision came after Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure, T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Tim Höttges, CEO of T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom AG, met for dinner at Mr. Son’s house in Tokyo to try to reach a final agreement, a person familiar with the matter said.

    In a joint statement, the companies said they couldn’t settle on mutually agreeable terms. They didn’t go into specifics.

    Instead of a merger, Sprint parent company SoftBank Group Corp. plans to buy shares of Sprint on the open market. SoftBank’s stake is around 80%, and it intends to keep its stake below an 85% threshold that would trigger a tender offer.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/sprint-and-t-mobile-calling-off-merger-1509818355

  • Continental buys Israeli co Argus Cyber Security

    Continental said that Argus would now become part of Elektrobit and would continue to engage in commercial relations with all automotive suppliers globally.

    The purchase price was not disclosed though Israeli media reported earlier this week that Continental would pay about $400 million (£305.4 million) for Argus.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-argus-m-a-continental/germanys-continental-buys-israeli-auto-cyber-firm-argus-idUSKBN1D31DR

  • Marvell Technology Group in Advanced Talks to Combine With Cavium

    Marvell is based in Bermuda but run from Santa Clara, Calif. Its chips are used primarily in storage devices, printers and wireless products, and can be found in cars. The company had long been run by husband-and-wife co-founders Sehat Sutardja, who was chairman and chief executive, and Weili Dai, who was president.

    Last year, activist investor Starboard Value LP took a 6.7% stake in Marvell and pushed for the company to cut costs and consider exiting its mobile-devices business. Marvell initiated a restructuring that would eliminate around 900 employees, or approximately 16% of its workforce. It also hired a new CEO to run the company.

    Cavium, based in San Jose, Calif., makes products that are used for networking, data-center and wireless applications.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/marvell-technology-group-in-advanced-talks-to-combine-with-cavium-1509744822

  • The merger between AT&T and Time Warner is a raw deal for the rest of us

    A combined AT&T-Time Warner could pass along the massive acquisition costs, which include billions of dollars in Time Warner debt, to consumers, just as AT&T did after acquiring DirecTV. Even if you subscribe to a different service for cable or satellite TV, you could wind up paying more, because AT&T could raise the prices it charges competitors for HBO, CNN, and other highly desirable Time Warner programming.

    Meanwhile, AT&T-Time Warner would have every incentive to favor its own content over that of others, meaning that AT&T users might not have access to the programming they want – like the competing content of Netflix and Hulu – on the same terms. Because of AT&T’s large footprint in the wireless internet market, their acquisition of a massive content provider poses a serious threat to net neutrality.

    And that’s not all. Should regulators sign off on this deal, it could have enormous long-term implications for the media landscape, as other major industry players — of which there are fewer and fewer — will increasingly argue that greater scale or their own vertical deal is necessary in order to compete with the behemoths of AT&T and Comcast.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/the-merger-between-att-and-time-warner-is-a-raw-deal-for-the-rest-of-us/?ncid=rss

Artificial Intelligence

  • A.I. Researchers Leave Elon Musk Lab to Begin Robotics Start-Up

    Their start-up, Embodied Intelligence, is backed by $7 million in funding from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Amplify Partners and other investors. The company will specialize in complex algorithms that allow machines to learn tasks on their own. Using these methods, existing robots could learn to, for example, install car parts that aren’t quite like the parts they have installed in the past, sort through a bucket of random holiday gifts as they arrive at a warehouse, or perform other tasks that machines traditionally could not.

    “We now have teachable robots,” Mr. Abbeel said during a recent interview at the new company’s offices in Emeryville, Calif., just across the bay from San Francisco.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/technology/artificial-intelligence-start-up.html

  • To keep up with demand, AI may have to build itself

    While companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft can throw money at the problem and pay “millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts,” per the Times, other companies are taking matters into their own hands and developing tools and neural networks to help companies build their own AI software. That’s where technologies like Google’s new AutoML come in. It hopes to automate the AI-building process by outsourcing it to AI itself. Per the Times: “Google said AutoML could now build algorithms that, in some cases, identified objects in photos more accurately than services built solely by human experts.”

    It’s not just algorithms either, but AI is getting really good at teaching itself skills like speech recognition, machine translation, and all sorts of other things thanks to a process that experts call “learning to learn,” or “meta-learning.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/40492277/to-keep-up-with-demand-ai-may-have-to-build-itself

Cloud

  • Google and Salesforce Ink Cloud, Apps Deal

    The deal, slated to be announced Monday at the start of Salesforce’s Dreamforce customer conference in San Francisco, comes a year and a half after the cloud-based business software vendor said it would move some computing operations to data centers run by the market leader, Amazon Web Services. Salesforce also operates its own data centers.

    World-wide revenue for the business of providing cloud infrastructure—that is, computing processing and storage service—hit $22.2 billion last year, and is expected to climb to $67 billion by 2020, according to industry research firm Gartner Inc.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-and-salesforce-ink-cloud-apps-deal-1510002301
    What about the AWS deal?

    It’s unclear exactly how using Google Cloud Platform fits into Salesforce’s overall infrastructure and global expansion plan. Salesforce is already using Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure to power a couple of its international cloud regions, and doesn’t have plans to move away from that investment. AWS will remain a “preferred” cloud provider for Salesforce, as it was when the two companies announced their partnership almost a year and a half ago.

    https://venturebeat.com/2017/11/06/google-and-salesforce-sign-massive-strategic-partnership/

    Facebook and Salesforce are teaming up against Microsoft Office and Google

    The cloud-software provider and the social networking giant are expected to announce Tuesday that they are enhancing the integration of Salesforce’s Quip productivity app with Facebook’s Workplace, which is a version of the company’s social network that was designed specifically for businesses. The collaboration is designed to make it easier to share Quip documents in Workplace and see there a list of all documents shared.

    The partnership could help the two companies better compete with Microsoft’s Office and Google’s G Suite.

    But the deal could have other benefits. The partnership will give both Salesforce and Facebook a way in with each other’s customers.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-quip-partners-with-workplace-by-facebook-2017-11

  • Microsoft, Oracle, IBM are said to alter pay to push cloud sales

    Previously, Microsoft had been bundling cloud services, such as Azure for storing and running data and cloud applications, with many of its multiyear deals. Althoff said the shift in pay incentives is a significant change.

    “We did have ill-informed behaviours,” he said. “We tried to sell Azure the same way we tried to sell everything else at Microsoft, which is adding it into our enterprise agreement. People were like ‘Do you want fries with that? Do you want Azure with that?’ That didn’t drive any meaningful work.”

    Also:

    IBM has been emphasising selling cloud infrastructure services and software and tools geared toward specific business processes and industries such as health care and finance. Oracle has been turning its focus to the cloud as well and investing in staff. The company said in August it was adding more than 5,000 people, including in sales, for its cloud business – following other related hires earlier in the year in the US.

    https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2017/11/03/microsoft-oracle-ibm-are-said-to-alter-pay-to-push-cloud-sales/

Datacenter

  • New IBM platform turns your data center into a cloud

    IBM Cloud Private takes middleware and other legacy applications, places them inside Kubernetes containers and transforms them into contemporary applications using Kubernetes container orchestration. The software itself is already containerized, including IBM tools and most major open source databases.

    Cloud Private also provides tools and APIs to connect cloud services like Salesforce with a company’s on-premises data center and share data from the cloud services with those legacy applications.

    https://www.networkworld.com/article/3236245/private-cloud/new-ibm-platform-turns-your-data-center-into-a-cloud.html

Security

  • Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Subpoenaed to Testify Before Senate, Says Report

    Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has reportedly been subpoenaed to testify to the Senate Commerce Committee about the massive cyber hack that compromised 3 billion accounts. The U.S. has charged four alleged Russian spies with the breach, which is now being investigated by the government for insight into Russia’s cyber espionage activities.

    Issued Oct. 25, according to a report by The Hill, Mayer’s subpoena reportedly came after the former Google employee and Yahoo chief executive declined multiple invitations to appear before the committee voluntarily. Since being served, she has agreed to testify willingly, says The Hill, though she has also reportedly asked for the court order to be lifted. A Mayer representative has refuted these events, The Hill reports.

    http://fortune.com/2017/11/07/yahoo-marissa-mayer-subpoena-testify-senate/

  • New tools help could help prevent Amazon S3 data leaks

    Today, AWS announced a new set of five tools designed to protect customers from themselves and ensure (to the extent possible) that the data in S3 is encrypted and safe.

    For starters, the company is giving the option of default encryption. That means every object that gets moved into an S3 bucket will have encryption on by default. What’s more, this will happen without admins having to construct a rejected bucket for unencrypted files. It’s not exactly foolproof, but it gives admins a good solid way to ensure the data is always encrypted in a much smoother way than before.

    If that’s not enough, Amazon is putting a signal front and center on the administrative console that warns admins with a prominent indicator next to each S3 bucket that has been left open to the public. If something slips through the cracks at the end user level, this should at least give admins an additional level of protection that something is amiss.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/new-tools-help-could-help-prevent-amazon-s3-data-leaks/

  • Equifax CEO to Congress: Not Sure We Are Encrypting Data

    But Mr. Barros stumbled when asked by Sen. Cory Gardner (R., Colo) whether Equifax was now encrypting the consumer data it stored on its computers—a basic step in hiding sensitive information from hackers, and one the company previously had admitted it didn’t take before the breach.

    “I don’t know at this stage,” Mr. Barros said.

    The answer was disappointing, said Avivah Litan, an analyst with the research firm Gartner Inc. “He should have asked his staff that the day he took over,” she said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/equifax-ceo-to-congress-not-sure-we-are-encrypting-data-1510180486

Other

  • Salesforce CEO dismisses Microsoft as a competitor

    You know, look. They’re 1 percent of the CRM market. You know the numbers. I like having competitors. But what I just get blown away with is how they just can’t keep, you know, that management team in place. They just keep leaving Microsoft. You know that. And I think they don’t have confidence in that ability to execute in that business. So that has weighed to our favor, and customers feel that.

    You know because you go to these conferences just like I do. There is no conference like this that they do and that’s the — in my opinion, the mark. That is — why is it that they don’t have anything like this? That when they put on a conference like something — it’s always the resellers who come together, and then — where are these people? Now, that isn’t to say they don’t have, like, Build, where they get these really high-end developers using the IDE. You know what I mean? Is that the conference I’ve been to where I’m like, Oh, yeah, these are all the — and they’re all Windows — they have a Windows fever. And they have Windows API fever at the conference. But I haven’t seen that in any other part of their business, other than the Windows API. Maybe they’ll get it in Azure — I don’t know. But I haven’t seen that yet. Because the last time that I went to the conference, I didn’t see that. I only see that fever around the Windows API. And the Surface laptop.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/salesforce-ceo-dismisses-microsoft-as-a-competitor.html

  • IBM’s Ginni Rometty: Comfort and growth will never co-exist

    Today, IBM has 10,000 staff working with clients on design thinking and 1200 doing work internally. “That started us on the journey of getting to that business-to-person approach,” she said.

    To answer the question of whether IBM could be big as well as fast, the business commenced on an agile journey where small multidisciplinary teams work to produce a minimum viable product and iterate.

    “What I realised is that our employees can’t work faster unless we changed the way they work,” Rometty said. Today, 200,000 employees are doing agile, a change that led to 170 building renovations globally, and a rethink of appraisal systems.

    https://www.cmo.com.au/article/629768/ibm-ginni-rometty-comfort-growth-can-never-co-exist/

Photo: Jon Asato

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Supplier Report: 5/26/2017

The keystone topics that drive this blog (AI and cloud) were quiet this week, while concepts like security and software claimed more space.

WannaCry was a dominant topic early in the week highlighting the need for IT security focus throughout the entire organization.

IBM has been making headlines not for cloud or AI, but for their remote work policies (again) and product line retirements.

AWS is getting good press for showing the value of experience in a culture that “doesn’t trust anyone over 30”.

Acquisitions

  • Red Hat to acquire Codenvy as part of its growing container strategy

    Codenvy is the company built on top of the open source project, Eclipse Che, which fits with Red Hat’s overall strategy to build commercial tools on top of open source projects. It offers a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDEs) for individual developers, teams or enterprises. IDEs are essentially workspaces for coding, building and testing apps.

    The company did not reveal the purchase price.

    http://wwpi.com/2017/05/25/red-hat-set-to-acquire-agile-and-cloud-native-development-tools-vendor-codenvy/

  • Microsoft to buy security firm Hexadite for $100M as Cloudyn still in progress

    Hexadite has to date raised $10.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase, with investors including HP Ventures, YL Ventures, TenEleven Ventures and Moshe Lichtman of Israel Venture Partners. Notably, Lichtman is a ten-year veteran of Microsoft, which could point to one connection between the startup and its alleged acquirer. Its last round, of $8 million, was raised last year.

    If accurate, the Hexadite acquisition would be one of a series of security acquisitions that Microsoft has made in Israel. Past deals include Aorato, Adallom and Secure Islands.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/24/microsoft-hexadite-100m-cloudyn/?ncid=rss

  • Softbank’s Nvidia stake is reportedly worth $4BN

    When Softbank announced the first close of its Vision Fund this weekend — securing an initial commitment of $93 billion, from investors including Apple, Qualcomm and Foxconn — it also quietly disclosed it had taken a stake in Nvidia.

    Bloomberg is today reporting the size of that stake is $4 billion, for 4.9 per cent of the company, which it says would make Softbank the fourth largest investor in the chipmaker.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/24/softbanks-nvidia-stake-is-reportedly-worth-4bn/?ncid=rss

Artificial Intelligence

  • Lawmakers aim to ‘get smart’ about A.I. with help from giants like Amazon, Google, and IBM

    On Wednesday, he announced the launch of the bipartisan Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus, which will look to inform lawmakers on the current state of AI and then push for policy that could boost economic activity around AI and help citizens whose jobs are being replaced by automation.

    Regarding potential job loss:

    Despite some fears about the effects of automation and AI on the workforce, Delaney is optimistic. “Data clearly demonstrates that innovation creates more jobs than it takes away,” Delaney told CNBC. The trouble is that people don’t understand the nature of the jobs that will be created, he said. The caucus will focus on these issues, as well as education, immigration reform and funding basic research.

    Delaney is familiar with the idea of universal basic income, where the government would pay all citizens a basic stipend to let them buy necessities. Some Silicon Valley leaders have discussed this as a way to help workers whose jobs will increasingly be replaced by automation.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/24/congressional-ai-caucus-working-with-amazon-google-ibm.html

Cloud

  • Marc Benioff Touts Amazon as Salesforce’s New Best Friend

    It is now clear that Salesforce sees AWS as a strategic ally as it battles all of those rivals. Salesforce had formerly been quite chummy with Microsoft, but that relationship soured fast when Microsoft outbid Salesforce in its $26.2 billion bid to buy LinkedIn. While Microsoft had always competed somewhat with Salesforce in sales software known as customer relationship management or CRM, the competition has heated up since that development. Speaking with Jim Cramer on CNBC Thursday, Benioff made sure to say that 21st Century Fox is moving 20,000 employees from Microsoft Office to Quip, business software that Salesforce acquired two years ago.

    http://fortune.com/2017/05/19/salesforce-amazon-benioff/

Security

  • Almost all WannaCry victims were running Windows 7

    According to data released today by Kaspersky Lab, roughly 98 percent of the computers affected by the ransomware were running some version of Windows 7, with less than one in a thousand running Windows XP. 2008 R2 Server clients were also hit hard, making up just over 1 percent of infections.

    https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/19/15665488/wannacry-windows-7-version-xp-patched-victim-statistics
    For WannaCry Victims, a Possible Way Out (not really)

    By Friday, a second French computer-security researcher, Benjamin Delpy, built a tool called Wannakiwi that does the heavy lifting of unscrambling the encrypted files. Europol, the European Union’s police agency, said Friday its cybercrime center had tested the tool and succeeded in recovering data in some circumstances.

    Because the Wannakiwi tool works by grabbing data from the computer’s memory, it only will work for a small number of fortunate users.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-wannacry-victims-a-possible-way-out-1495226045

  • All IT Jobs Are Cybersecurity Jobs Now

    Despite all the money we’ve spent—Gartner estimates $81.6 billion on cybersecurity in 2016—things are, on the whole, getting worse, says Chris Bronk, associate director of the Center for Information Security Research and Education at the University of Houston. “Some individual companies are doing better,” adds Dr. Bronk. “But as an entire society, we’re not doing better yet.”

    The article provides several suggestions on how to deal with security issues, especially for smaller companies:

    Retrain IT staff on security—or replace them. In today’s world of ever-multiplying threats and dependence on connected assets, all IT staff must now be cybersecurity staff first. “The good news is that you don’t need that dedicated person to run your email server anymore—they can run security,” says Dr. Bronk.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-it-jobs-are-cybersecurity-jobs-now-1495364418

  • Microsoft’s Old Software Is Dangerous. Is There a Duty to Fix It?

    All of this raises the question of whether Microsoft, which declined to comment for this story, should have done more to fix the faulty software in the first place. The company’s after-the-fact approach to safety differs from other industries, such as car companies, where manufacturers have faced massive liability for failing to warn people about faulty ignition switches and other defective products.

    There’s also the fact Windows is a closed software platform. This means any defects in its source code are hard to detect because the internal workings that make it run—the source code—are all but invisible to those outside the company. This is why some people like Eban Moglen, a noted computer law professor at Columbia University, considers platforms like Windows to be intrinsically dangerous.

    http://fortune.com/2017/05/20/microsoft-ransomware-legal/

Software/SaaS

  • IBM’s ShinyHappy™ SAP Ariba deal papers over SaaS fail

    IBM’s product is called “Emptoris”, from a company of the same name, and was reported to have come with a US$600m price tag when Big Blue acquired it in 2011. Big Blue bought Emptoris to advance the “Smarter Commerce” play it ran a few years ago, in pursuit of what it described as “a $20 billion market opportunity in software alone.”

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/23/ibm_discontinues_emptoris/
    Never knew the investment IBM made on Emptoris…

  • Hadoop: It Offers Rich Technology With Slimmer-Than-Expected Margins

    As technology, Hadoop is broadly used across the computing infrastructure of web service providers. Big Data is proliferating as well in commercial uses. As it is increasingly adopted in Enterprise computing, its attractiveness as a business will become increasingly clear. Hadoop is far less costly than present comparable Enterprise technologies such as Data Warehousing. Surely it offers strong growth. Yet for some specific reasons, Hadoop is relatively less profitable than other types of software, mainly because so much of the technology is Open Source and freely available.  There is no fee in its licensing, as we noted above. No fee revenue, less profit

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnsonpierr/2017/05/19/the-elephant-in-the-room-with-hadoop-it-offers-rich-technology-with-slimmer-than-expected-margins/#f137831518a1

  • Java creator James Gosling leaves Liquid Robotics (Boeing) to join AWS

    James Gosling plans to join Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a “distinguished engineer,” according to a Facebook post penned by Gosling on Monday. Gosling did not say what he’ll do at AWS. But in addition to programming, Gosling is also familiar with the process of deploying IoT systems, according to Venture Beat.

    Companies like AWS and Google are increasingly dependent on programmers to help them make technologies more useful to the general public by creating applications. Both companies have been known to give away cloud credits and other gifts to developers willing to help them. Bringing Gosling on board helps show programmers that AWS is programmer-friendly and could help the company attract more of them.

    http://www.ciodive.com/news/java-creator-james-gosling-to-join-aws/443407/

Other

  • China’s Lenovo to Reboot After Losing PC Crown to HP

    For the first time in four years, Lenovo—a company that gained acclaim a decade ago for turning around storied U.S. personal-computer maker IBM — slipped from the top spot this year to No. 2 in the personal-computer market, behind rival Hewlett-Packard. Lenovo has also fallen to No. 8 in the number of smartphones shipped globally, from No. 3 when it acquired another U.S. brand, Motorola, in late 2014.

    Lenovo’s Hong Kong-listed stock has fallen nearly 60% since the Motorola acquisition.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-lenovo-to-reboot-after-losing-pc-crown-to-hp-1495702920

  • SAP has designs on new government business

    “Imagine you’re a government employee and you take a trip. In the U.S., as soon as it’s approved and before you’ve even taken it, the government needs to set aside the money and record the liability for that approved spend, and then they need that approval to flow into all the impacted cost centers,” he said. “How you encumber, how you take that spend and how you put it as a liability, it starts to look like a core ERP use case.”

    Koch sees a billion-dollar opportunity for SAP and its integration partners in the 90,000 U.S. government entities that are potential users of ByDesign.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3197826/software-as-a-service/sap-has-designs-on-new-government-business.html

  • The FCC’s case against net neutrality rests on a deliberate misrepresentation of how the internet works

    This analysis is like saying that because someone built a bridge, they also created the entire city on far side of it. It’s absurd, and in fact the argument was already tried and found wanting in a federal court just three weeks ago. Anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge will find this explanation of how the internet and web work truly wrongheaded and entirely incorrect. It’s hard to think of this as anything other than a willful misrepresentation of the facts.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/23/the-fccs-case-against-net-neutrality-rests-on-a-fundamental-deliberate-misunderstanding-of-how-the-internet-works/?ncid=
    rss

  • How SoftBank and Saudi Arabia Settled Their Differences to Birth the World’s Biggest Tech Fund

    Although some level of wrangling is common in such deals, the back-and-forth from the Saudi negotiators, mostly PIF lawyers, made SoftBank executives begin to wonder if the Saudis were stalling. On at least one occasion, SoftBank executives sought assurance from PIF that the fund wouldn’t be scuttled. PIF negotiators assured their Japanese counterparts that MbS was 100% committed to its success.

    SoftBank, which has 80 people in Silicon Valley and London looking for and processing deals, already has lined up a dozen deals of a billion dollars or more for the fund to invest in, with plans to work on “blockbuster” transactions of tens of billions of dollars in the future, said a person who helped set up the fund.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-long-painful-birth-of-the-worlds-biggest-tech-fund-1495214782

Photo: Flash Bros

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Supplier Report: 11/26/2016

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GE is getting in on the artificial intelligence game with the acquisition of two AI firms. As the company tries to bolster their Predix cloud platform, Amazon and Google are about to officially unleash their own machine learning platforms.

As GE, Amazon, and Google grow their services, is IBM faced with the possibility of having to write off their cloud solution? It seems the company vastly overpaid for SoftLayer ($2B to buy, another $1B in enhancements) and it is bringing in a fraction of that cost.

AWS continues to quietly chalk up wins. They scored a hosting and platform provider deal with Tableau this week.

Acquisitions

  • Oracle Buys Santa Monica Offices for $368 Million

    Software giant Oracle Corp. has purchased a Santa Monica office building for $368 million, according to a source familiar with the deal. At roughly $1,165 a square foot, the transaction is one of the priciest ever per square foot for a large office complex in Los Angeles.

    http://www.labusinessjournal.com/news/2016/nov/18/oracle-buys-santa-monica-offices-368-million/
    This is the 2nd real estate transaction Oracle has been involved in over the last two months..

  • Oracle acquires DNS provider Dyn, subject of a massive DDoS attack in October

    Oracle plans to add Dyn’s DNS solution to its bigger cloud computing platform, which already sells/provides a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products and competes against companies like Amazon’s AWS.

    Oracle and Dyn didn’t disclose the price of the deal but we are trying to find out. Dan Primack reports that it’s north of $600 million. We’ve also asked for a comment from Oracle about Dyn’s recent breach, and whether the wheels were set in motion for this deal before or after the Mirai botnet attack in October, but our guess is that it was likely before.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/oracle-acquires-dns-provider-dyn-subject-of-a-massive-ddos-attack-in-october/

  • Symantec will acquire identity protection firm LifeLock in $2.3B deal

    The deal will create what the two companies described as the world’s largest consumer security business with over $2.3 billion in annual revenue based on last fiscal year revenue for both companies.

    The immediate opportunity for Symantec comes from the large number of consumers worldwide that have been victims of cybercrime, generating as a result greater user concern in digital safety. The companies estimate the market at $10 billion, and growing in the high single digits. In the U.S. alone, the total addressable market is estimated to be about 80 million people.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3143445/security/symantec-will-acquire-identity-protection-firm-lifelock-in-23b-deal.html

  • Google acquires Qwiklabs to teach developers cloud skills

    Qwiklabs, which launched in 2012, has only focused on teaching skills for Amazon’s AWS platform so far. Given AWS’ dominance in the marketplace, that made perfect sense. Amazon even uses Qwiklabs as its go-to service for offering self-paced labs for developers on its platform.

    Google says it will use Qwiklabs’s platform to focus “on offering the most comprehensive, efficient, and fun way to train and onboard people across all our products on Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Platform and G Suite.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/google-acquires-qwiklabs-to-teach-developers-cloud-skills/

  • What does Trump mean for tech M and A?

    On Monday, Trump announced that Mark Jamison and Jeff Eisenach were joining his “agency landing team.” These FCC appointees have both written about how they weigh antitrust issues.

    They could potentially make it harder for industry leaders like Alphabet to make large strategic purchases. “Potential headwinds include issues relating to increased regulatory review on deals,” said Page.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/what-does-trump-mean-for-tech-ma/?ncid=rss

Artificial Intelligence

  • GE wants to be the next AI powerhouse

    Today GE revealed the purchase of two AI companies that Ruh says will get them there. Bit Stew Systems, founded in 2005, was already doing much of what Predix Cloud promises—collecting and analyzing sensor data from power utilities, oil and gas companies, aviation, and factories. (GE Ventures has funded the company.) Customers include BC Hydro, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Scottish & Southern Energy.

    The second purchase, Wise.io is a less obvious purchase. Founded by astrophysics and AI experts using machine learning to study the heavens, the company reapplied the tech to streamlining a company’s customer support systems, picking up clients like Pinterest, Twilio, and TaskRabbit. GE believes the technology will transfer yet again, to managing industrial machines. “I think by the middle of next year we will have a full machine learning stack,” says Ruh.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/3065692/mind-and-machine/ge-wants-to-be-the-next-artificial-intelligence-powerhouse

  • AWS launching cloud-based machine learning service

    Colin Sebastian, an analyst for R.W. Baird, recently said he believes Google’s machine learning and AI efforts give it an edge over Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services in the enterprise. “Google would ultimately be able to differentiate its enterprise offering from competitors by leveraging advanced ML capabilities and monetize ML through a range of business services,” said Sebastian

    http://www.ciodive.com/news/report-aws-launching-cloud-based-machine-learning-service/430808/

Cloud

  • Amazon becomes one of the largest corporate backers of solar (wind, now solar)

    US electronic commerce giant Amazon has become the largest corporate backer of solar east of the Mississippi River with the launch of five new solar PV projects in Virginia totalling 180MW.

    Four of the projects, with a capacity of 20MW each, will be brought online before the end of next year and are located in New Kent, Buckingham, Sussex and Powhatan.

    The largest project in the bundle is the 100MW facility in Southampton County, known as Amazon Solar Farm US East 6. The five new projects join Amazon’s existing 80MW facility in Accomack County which is already operational.

    http://www.pv-tech.org/news/amazon-becomes-one-of-the-largest-corporate-backers-of-solar

  • IBM And SoftLayer: Is A $3 Billion Write-Off Looming?

    We believe a write-off of SoftLayer of similar magnitude (85%-90%) is almost certainly in the forefront of CFO Schroeter’s mind these days. To comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, a sizable write-down is necessary, since SoftLayer is likely worth a tiny fraction of what IBM has invested. As we’ll explain in a bit, SoftLayer is niche cloud player with limited functionality and limited upside. Its infrastructure products are not competitive in mid- and enterprise-level markets.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/4025920-ibm-softlayer-3-billion-write-looming
    sn_lizlemon_dontcry

Datacenter

  • HPE is creaming Dell in HPC

    If we add SGI revenues to HPE’s we get $480,343,000, which makes HPE more than twice as big as Dell EMC in this sector.

    IDC’s overall world-wide server supplier revenue market share numbers also show HPE comfortably ahead of Dell EMC. In the second 2016 quarter, HPE had a 25.4 per cent market share with $3.4bn in sales. Dell was second with $2.6bn in sales and a 19.3 per cent market share. No other supplier was in the double-figure market share percentage area.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/18/hpe_is_creaming_dell_in_hpc/
    sn_hpc_register

Software/SaaS

  • Red Hat CEO explains why tech giants are turning to open source

    The big issue is when you want to run something in production. The example I’ll use is Linux. You’re running your SAP application on Linux and that’s great, but now there’s a bug that needs to get fixed, and the open source community fixes that on the brand new version of Linux. If you’re running on a three-year old version of Linux, nobody’s looking at that version for a bug or a security hole, but you don’t want to re-integrate and re-test your SAP system every time there’s a new version. That’s what Red Hat does.

    http://fortune.com/2016/11/18/red-hat-ceo-james-whitehurst-microsoft-google-software/

  • Tableau Cozies Up to Amazon Cloud

    The news, to be formally announced next week at the annual AWS Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas is that Tableau Online will run on Amazon’s massive public cloud and that customers will be able to buy it through the AWS Marketplace.

    http://fortune.com/2016/11/23/tableau-cozies-up-to-aws/

Other

  • Salesforce, Inc.: This Is Sending CRM Stock Soaring Today

    Salesforce, the business software provider and CRM leader, posted revenue of $2.14 billion for the third quarter, beating consensus Wall Street estimates of $2.12 billion. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce said, “Salesforce delivered an exceptional quarter with year-over-year revenue growth of 25% in dollars and 27% in constant currency.”

    http://www.profitconfidential.com/stock/salesforce-inc-this-is-sending-crm-stock-soaring-today/

Photo: Urbex Clan

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/19/2016

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IT suppliers are looking to get more open. Microsoft not only joined Elon Musk’s OpenAI, they also join the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation… remember when Ballmer called linux a cancer?

But even as Microsoft and Google promote their open technology, they are targeting SaaS as the main driver for future growth. While the infrastructure may be open, their SaaS offerings will be decidedly less so. Smaller companies like Slack are promoting a more connected world, but will Microsoft shut that business model down?

And who will be the big winner in this open world of closed ecosystems?  Probably Amazon. They seem to be winning most of the hosting business (ala the $400M agreement with SalesForce).

Acquisitions

  • Samsung is buying Harman for $8B to further its connected car push

    Terms of the deal will see Samsung pay $112.00 per share. That’s a healthy premium on Harman’s current share price of $87.65, and it gives the deal a total value of approximately $8 billion. The transaction is expected to close by mid-2017, at which time Harman will become a standalone subsidiary of Samsung. Dinesh Paliwal will continue to lead the firm as its Chairman, President and CEO, both Harman and Samsung said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/13/samsung-harman/?ncid=rss

  • Verizon buys LQD WiFi to expand its IoT strategy into “smart cities”

    Verizon today has made another acquisition to build out its IoT business: the carrier has purchased LQD WiFi, a developer of outdoor interactive displays that provide WiFi connectivity along with news, emergency alerts and community information. They also act as sensors collecting crowd, weather and other data.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/14/verizon-buys-lqd-wifi-to-expand-its-iot-strategy-into-smart-cities/?ncid=rss

  • Ex-Autonomy CFO Indicted For Alleged Fraud In H.P. Acquisition

    A federal grand jury in San Francisco has indicted the former chief financial officer of a British software maker on charges he engaged in fraud to artificially increase the company’s share price and make it attractive to Hewlett-Packard.

    The grand jury indicted former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain on Thursday on wire fraud and conspiracy charges.

    Hussain’s attorney, John Keker, said his client defrauded no one and acted at all times with the highest standards of honesty and competence.

    http://fortune.com/2016/11/11/hp-autonomy-fraud/
    I honestly did not expect anything like this to happen.

  • Is Netflix Disney’s next big buy and is Reed Hastings its next CEO?

    And, despite its rosy Q3 numbers, Netflix ultimately needs a buyer.  As I recently wrote, Netflix faces fundamental long-term existential business challenges of its own.  Its singular content-focused subscription-based business model can’t compete with the complex multi-faceted, multi revenue-streamed business models of AT&T, Amazon, YouTube (Google), Verizon, Apple and Amazon.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/13/is-netflix-disneys-next-big-buy-and-is-reed-hastings-its-next-ceo/?ncid=rss

  • HPE Eyeing Purchase of SimpliVity (HPE)

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), is rumored to have its eye on leading hyperconvergence infrastructure (HCI) vendor SimpliVity. The Westborough, Mass.-based niche market leader is estimated to go for $3.8 billion to $3.9 billion, reports the Register. The rumored price stands at quadruple the company’s valuation in its latest series of funding in March 2015.

    http://www.cnmeonline.com/news/dell-emc-unveils-new-additions-to-its-all-flash-portfolio/

  • AOL lays off 500 employees as Verizon-Yahoo acquisition looms

    The cuts, which Armstrong said would consolidate recent AOL acquisitions, presage the type of staffing changes that could affect Yahoo in early 2017 as Verizon closes its $4.8 billion acquisition of the Silicon Valley icon.

    https://news.fastcompany.com/aol-lays-off-500-employees-as-verizon-yahoo-acquisition-looms-4025323

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft teams up with Elon Musk’s OpenAI project (thanks JD!)

    OpenAI will also make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform, in part because of its existing support for AI workloads with the help of Azure Batch and Azure Machine Learning, as well as Microsoft’s work on its recently rebranded Cognitive Toolkit. Microsoft also offers developers access to a high-powered GPU-centric virtual machine for these kind of machine learning workloads. These N-Series machines are still in beta, but OpenAI has been an early adopter of them and Microsoft  says they will become generally available in December.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/microsoft-teams-up-with-elon-musks-openai-project/
    sn_elon

  • MIT students and others teaching IBM Watson about cybersecurity

    Several universities involved with that project began having students train the system within the past several weeks, explained IBM Watson’s Jeb Linton, chief security architect.

    “We’re ramping up from the phase where we have a little over 30 people selecting documents and annotating documents, to the phase where we’re… a much larger group by bringing in these college students,” Linton explained.

    “It’s very much an interactive process. You put the machine-learning process into Watson and see what you get from it. I wouldn’t say anything has really surprised us so far,” Linton said. “We added in a level of complexity a few months ago that was a little less than optimal, and we trimmed some of that complexity back out.”

    http://www.techrepublic.com/article/mit-students-and-others-to-teach-ibm-watson-about-cybersecurity/

  • IBM’s Watson would do a better job at being a bank teller than most current staff

    Watson can take all of a bank’s rules and regulations and data about customer’s requirements and behaviours and provide an intelligent interface for customers to get things done with the confidence that Watson understood what the customer wanted and also understood what the bank could provide to satisfy those requirements.

    Not surprisingly however, banks worldwide are not investing in innovations like cognitive computing. Innovation is often lumped in the general IT budget and often forms a tiny part of that spend. By viewing it in the same category as buying computers or complying with regulatory requirements, the overall value and benefit is much harder to see.

    http://theconversation.com/ibms-watson-would-do-a-better-job-at-being-a-bank-teller-than-most-current-staff-68725

Cloud

  • Microsoft, Amazon turn to wind energy to power cloud data centers

    Microsoft is also pushing for more renewable energy sources. Referring to the new agreement, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said “these agreements represent progress toward our goal of improving the energy mix at our data centers.”

    http://www.ciodive.com/news/microsoft-amazon-turn-to-wind-energy-to-power-cloud-data-centers/430405/
    Microsoft now runs one data center entirely on wind power

    Microsoft has a stated goal of using 50 percent renewable energy in its data centers across the U.S. by 2018, and it just took a big step forward in that plan, purchasing additional 237 megawatts of wind energy capacity.

    In the process, this helps allow its Cheyenne, Wyoming, data center run entirely on wind power and brings the company’s total wind capacity to 500 megawatts across the U.S.

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/3142785/data-center/microsoft-now-runs-one-data-center-entirely-on-wind-power.html

  • Google’s cloud GPU undercuts, outperforms AWS, Microsoft

    Google’s plan to stand apart from the competition is to be more granular. Amazon’s machine-learning-oriented GPU instances are rented by the hour and come in a discrete instance type. Google, however, is planning to allow users to “attach up to 8 GPU dies to any non-shared-core machine,” regardless of instance type.

    Even more critical, Google’s GPU pricing will follow its existing model: by the minute, same as Google’s VMs. This isn’t about consistency alone; it also reflects how GPU-powered machine learning is actually used. If a machine learning application employs only GPUs for training, it makes sense to be able to toggle off the GPU when it’s not needed instead of changing instance types.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/3142028/cloud-computing/googles-cloud-gpu-undercuts-outperforms-aws-microsoft.html

Datacenter

  • Dell EMC unveils new additions to its all-flash portfolio

    The deployment of the new Data Domain Cloud Tier software within Data Domain, according to Dell EMC, increases the total volume of data that can be managed through a single appliance by 200 percent, with a maximum logical capacity of 150PB. Data Domain Cloud Tier establishes Data Domain as the only protection storage to natively tier de-duplicated data to public, private, or hybrid clouds for long-term retention, including Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage and Virtustream Storage Cloud.

    http://www.cnmeonline.com/news/dell-emc-unveils-new-additions-to-its-all-flash-portfolio/

  • NetApp tops 2Q profit forecasts

    On a per-share basis, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said it had net income of 38 cents. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, were 60 cents per share.

    The results exceeded Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of 15 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 54 cents per share.

    http://sports.yahoo.com/news/netapp-tops-2q-profit-forecasts-211649286.html

  • Infinidat’s energy efficient offerings

    Below is an Infographic that takes a bottoms up look at INFINIDAT’s InfiniBox and how its underlying technology drives more efficiency than any other array on the market today. InfiniBox keeps your data center footprint from sprawling out of control and keeps your power costs low by taking only 2kW/TB to operate.

    http://www.infinidat.com/blog/infinibox-energy-efficient-storage/
    sn_infinidat_greenstorage

Software/SaaS

  • In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters

    Over time, more “infrastructure” services will become software services. Because once it’s SaaS, the boundaries between infrastructure, platform, and software don’t matter to the IT customer—it’s merely a service. That’s a mental shift from IT’s on-premises view, where the boundaries matter in how IT delivers the ultimate service. Those boundaries will still exist for the provider, but won’t be IT’s concern.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/3142407/iaas/in-five-years-saas-will-be-the-cloud-that-matters.html

  • Why the next great SaaS company will look nothing like Salesforce

    Conversely, once a startup’s product is being used every day like Slack, it may start keeping more information within it and over time wean people off whatever they were using before (Outlook, Sharepoint, etc).

    The game-changer could well be artificial intelligence: if AI software could extract signal from the unstructured product feedback in Intercom or the sales forecasting information in Clari, the data in those systems could become more valuable than the limited fields captured in today’s systems of record.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/13/why-the-next-great-saas-company-will-look-nothing-like-salesforce/

  • Is Google crashing the Microsoft open source party?

    So Microsoft’s move is a giant retraction of that sentiment, one which it has been trying to undo for the past couple of years with various announcements regarding a more open approach to Linux and the open source community.

    Unlike Microsoft, Google has already established itself as having a pedigree in open source and so its joining of the .NET Foundation isn’t a huge surprise.

    Google is already an active contributor and joining the Technical Steering Group just expands its participation.

    The Alphabet subsidiary has already begun labeling itself as the ‘Open Cloud’ and Microsoft has revealed that it needs to be a bit more willing to work with the open source community because of its growing popularity.

    http://www.cbronline.com/news/enterprise-it/software/google-crashing-microsoft-open-source-party/
    sn_silval_dunno

Other

  • Salesforce’s Benioff thinks Microsoft is up to its old tricks again

    “The message was ‘Why don’t you meet with Scott Guthrie? He runs Azure and would really like to walk you through the details of your business because maybe we could get Salesforce to run on Azure’… and I’m like OK, and it was clear also that he was someone not in our business, he was running Azure.”

    Benioff notes a few weeks later Guthrie was suddenly promoted to also run Microsoft’s CRM business, which is a direct competitor to Salesforce and not long after Salesforce was disinvited from a Microsoft customer event without prior notice.

    https://mspoweruser.com/salesforces-benioff-thinks-microsoft-is-up-to-its-old-tricks-again/

  • Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is done cozying up to Microsoft — now he’s BFFs with Amazon

    Instead, Benioff has turned to Amazon this year, striking a number of major deals. In May, Salesforce announced a $400 million deal to use AWS, while Amazon rolled out Salesforce’s software company-wide. Salesforce said Amazon added even more Salesforce services this quarter, during the call with investors.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-stops-cozying-up-to-microsoft-befriends-amazon-2016-11

  • You Can Thank Twitter For Trump, According To Salesforce CEO

    I think it’s a great company, I think it’s a great CEO. I think it has a huge vision and has a unique position in the world. As evidenced by this election, I think it’s more important than ever… Without Twitter, I don’t think you would have President-elect Trump. I mean, that’s reality. He said it very well. He said, “I have a beautiful Twitter account.”

    http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/11/you-can-thank-twitter-for-trump-according-to-salesforce-ceo/

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise to outsource global IT team to CSC borg

    “To ensure that all three companies are successful going forward, HPE intends to partner with ES/CSC to receive IT services through an IT Services Agreement that includes IT infrastructure and application development/support. This will result in a majority of our IT family moving to ES/CSC, which will become a leading provider of independent IT services in the world,” Spradley and Nefkens stated in the memo.

    The HPE contract is in addition to outsourced service provision for HP Inc, and Micro Focus, which by next summer will be the new home of HPE’s Software business.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/16/hpe_to_outsource_global_it_team_to_csc_borg/
    I believe this is called “eating your own dogfood”

Photo: Álvaro Serrano

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/12/2016

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IBM continues their fight against cancer.  This week they announced they are investigating why certain cancers are resistant to certain treatments and what leads to re-occurrence.  As Watson fights cancer, it is also trying to figure out how to get installed into every electronic device you own.

A mass of people greater than the size of the entire US population ditched Internet Explorer and Edge this year in favor of alternatives like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. While Microsoft ponders how to get those users back, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the press why he and Bill Gates are no longer friends (hint: its because of mobile).

Acquisitions

  • Oracle Set to Complete $9.3 Billion Deal to Buy NetSuite

    The deal has been complicated by opposition from NetSuite’s largest institutional shareholder, T. Rowe Price Group Inc. The investment firm, which held 14.4 million NetSuite shares or 17.7% of the company’s outstanding stock as of Nov. 1, said in September that it wouldn’t tender its shares in support of the deal. It cited the conflict of interest created by the substantial NetSuite stockholdings by Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison and his family, saying the $109 a share price was too low.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-set-to-complete-9-3-billion-deal-to-buy-netsuite-1478324011

  • How LinkedIn Drove a Wedge Between Microsoft and Salesforce

    The two companies stayed close and by the spring of 2015 their conversations evolved into another deal: Microsoft would acquire Salesforce. In May 2015, CNBC reported that the talks had fallen apart because Salesforce was demanding around $70 billion, about $22 billion more than the company’s market value at the time.

    Several people briefed on the talks said that account was accurate, though two of them said another factor was that Mr. Benioff thought Microsoft was not respectful enough of his accomplishments in building Salesforce. It was unclear whether Mr. Benioff would be happy in a subordinate role at Microsoft after building Salesforce from the ground up, and it was equally hard to imagine a successful Salesforce without him.

    Also:

    For the next several months, Microsoft and Salesforce privately made competing offers for LinkedIn, each sweetening their bids as the competition increased. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and a board member, wooed Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and chairman, according to the LinkedIn filing. Salesforce code-named its LinkedIn effort Project Burgundy.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/technology/how-linkedin-drove-a-wedge-between-microsoft-and-salesforce.html

  • Why Google really spent $625 million on a company generating $92 million in revenue

    It’s not like Google needed an API platform,” this person said. “But they did need revenue. They did need executive talent, they did need logos.”

    Apigee has an experienced enterprise salesforce who have landed a long list of enterprise customers such as Allstate, AT&T, Burberry, First Data, Kaiser Permanente, Walgreens etc. All told, Apigee has more than 335 customers, it says.

    More importantly, Apigee is a big AWS customer. Apigee’s cloud service is built on Amazon’s Web Service and a number of its customers also host their API apps on AWS as well. Once Google moves Apigee to Google’s cloud, it has a compelling inside sales track to convince 335 more enterprise customers to do the same.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-spent-625-million-on-apigee-2016-11

Artificial Intelligence

  • How AI (Artificial Intelligence) Creates A Better Customer Service Experience

    Some may think that Watson would eventually be able to replace a call center rep. No doubt that Watson can deliver a better self-service solution. But, what if rather than replacing the employee, it supported the employee. This would allow for the company to keep the human touch with its customers, but also provide quick and accurate support. This, according to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, is when AI, or artificial intelligence, takes on a new meaning. This is when AI becomes augmented intelligence.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/shephyken/2016/11/05/how-ai-artificial-intelligence-creates-a-better-customer-service-experience/#4ba9bd47ef2c

  • IBM’s Watson to use genomic data to defeat drug-resistant cancers

    While a growing number of treatments can hold cancers in check for months or years, most cancers eventually recur, according to the Broad Institute researchers. This is in part because tumors acquire mutations that make them drug resistant.

    That cancer drug resistance is a major cause of nearly 600,000 annual deaths in the U.S. alone, according to Eric Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute. While scientists have discovered the cause of drug resistance in a small number of cancer cases, which has led to the development of new, successful treatments, most cases are not fully understood.

    The new five-year, $50 million genome project will study thousands of drug resistant tumors and draw on Watson’s computational and machine learning methods to help researchers understand how cancers become resistant to therapies.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3140188/healthcare-it/ibms-watson-to-use-genomic-data-to-defeat-drug-resistant-cancers.html
    Additional information on their partners:
    IBM Watson Health partners with MIT, Harvard on 5-year cancer initiative

    IBM Watson Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have launched a five-year $50 million research project to delve into cancer drug resistance.

    Researchers will study thousands of drug-resistant tumors and draw on Watson’s computational and machine learning methods to understand how cancers become resistant to therapies.

    http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ibm-watson-health-partners-mit-harvard-5-year-cancer-initiative

  • IBM’s Watson AI could soon be in devices from PCs to robots, thanks to Project Intu

    “Intu is an architecture that enables Watson services in devices that perceive by vision, audition, olfaction, sonar, infrared energy, temperature, and vibration. Intu-enabled devices express themselves and interact with their environments, other devices, and people through speakers, actuators, gestures, scent emitters, lights, navigation, and more,” IBM explains on its GitHub page.

    The project is in search of all manner of developers, whether they’re hacking together Raspberry Pi with various sensors to create robots, or businesses exploring bots for customer service.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibms-watson-ai-could-soon-be-in-devices-from-pcs-to-robots-thanks-to-project-intu/

Cloud

  • Greening the cloud: How Amazon, Microsoft and Google are pursuing the goal of renewable power

    AWS, along with its rivals, is trying to cut the pollution its data centers emit by building wind and solar farms. Most recently, the cloud leader announced plans to built a 189-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Hardin County, Ohio, that will generate 530,000 megawatt hours of power per year starting in December 2017. That’s enough to power about 50,000 homes U.S. homes for a year.

    http://www.geekwire.com/2016/greening-cloud-amazon-microsoft-google-pursuing-goal-renewable-power/

  • Hewlett Packard Emphasizes Importance, Potential of Blockchain, Decentralization

    However, Dare notes that irrefutability and decentralization are two of the most important features of the Blockchain network as they enable participants in the network to send payments to each other without mediators. They could also allow banks and major financial institutions to conduct labor-saving operations.

    Currently, a massive number of banks and financial establishments are gearing towards the development and implementation of the Blockchain technology. But, even multi-billion dollar institutions like Accenture have proposed the concept of editable Blockchain.

    https://cointelegraph.com/news/hewlett-packard-emphasizes-importance-potential-of-blockchain-decentralization

  • Why IBM Is Betting Big on Blockchain

    Another example is a project involving Visa and DocuSign that would allow car buyers to configure a lease and drive away with a new car immediately, without the time-consuming process of filling out mountains of paperwork. La’Zooz, a start-up in Israel, is using blockchain in a ride-sharing app that allows drivers and customers to connect directly, without the need for a middleman ride-sharing company.

    Making supply chains more efficient is another area where blockchain could potentially shine. IBM estimates that blockchain could generate more than $100 billion of efficiencies annually if applied to global supply chains — a staggering number. Both Toyota and the U.S. Postal Service are currently looking into using blockchain for exactly that purpose.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/10/why-ibm-is-betting-big-on-blockchain.aspx

Datacenter/Desktop

  • Ex-Microsoft CEO Ballmer says his push on smartphones strained relationship with Bill Gates

    “There was a fundamental disagreement about how important it was to be in the hardware business,” Ballmer said. “I had pushed Surface. The board had been a little — little reluctant in supporting it. And then things came to a climax around what to do about the phone business.”

    Microsoft entered the market in 2012 with the Surface RT, a tablet that sold poorly and required Microsoft to take a $900 million charge to write down the value of inventory. Now, the rejiggered Surface business is profitable and generated more than $4 billion in sales for the most recent year.

    http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/ex-microsoft-ceo-ballmer-says-his-push-on-smartphones-strained-relationship-with-bill-gates/
    sn_ballmer

Software/SaaS

  • 331 million people ditched Internet Explorer and Edge this year

    Microsoft is trying to keep its users, no doubt, by trying to convince everyone that Edge is much better at battery management. It introduced features like Cortana support, pinned tabs and more, but none of those functions seem to be worth sticking around for. Chrome, a notorious system hog, wasn’t the main beneficiary this time, though. Instead, Computerworld said that Mozilla’s Firefox saw a user increase of about 2 percentage points, gathering a large chunk of the 2.7 percent of the user’s bailing from Microsoft’s ship. The pace doesn’t seem to be slowing, either, with a decline predicted to continue into the next several months according to Computerworld.

    http://www.technobuffalo.com/2016/11/04/331-million-people-ditched-internet-explorer-and-edge-this-year/

  • Is IBM Cool Again?

    Bots are one feature of Slack’s platform, and the first step of the partnership will see Watson used to power an improved version of Slackbot, Slack’s customer-service bot. Eventually, developers will be able to use various Watson services when building bots and other tools for the platform. Since Watson is a machine learning system, it has the capability to become more accurate and useful over time.

    In terms of revenue, this partnership with Slack is likely to be a drop in the bucket for IBM. But it’s notable because it’s an example of a tech start-up choosing IBM for — well, anything. My guess is that IBM rarely comes up in the conversation at small tech companies like Slack. That was certainly true a few years ago, and it’s probably still true today. That Slack turned to IBM is a fairly significant development, and it could spur more deals and further expand Watson’s presence.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/06/is-ibm-cool-again.aspx
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  • Salesforce users: if you buy it, you integrate it

    That’s the finding of a recent survey of 300 Salesforce users by Jitterbit, an integration vendor. While the vendor obviously has a horse in this race, the results underscore the urgency of application and data integration between Salesforce and on-premises systems. Yet, respondents are divided as to whom should take responsibility for the effort. Forty-four percent said that integration projects were the responsibility of the non-IT users adopting the solution. Another 43 percent said the IT department is expected to own the responsibility for integrating these solutions.

    The result: integration chaos from the cloud. Integrating information from other business applications with Salesforce is crucial to gaining a 360-degree view of the customer, yet users often don’t have a clear integration strategy in place.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/salesforce-achilles-heel-integration/

Other

  • CEO lured from Amazon AWS with millions in cash, stock options

    Selipsky, who joined Tableau in September, got a $1 million signing bonus, $500,000 in base salary and up to $500,000 in annual performance bonuses. He was also granted $14 million in restricted class A stock with an option to purchase 75,000 shares.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2016/11/07/tableau-ceo-amazon-adam-selipsky-cloud-computing.html

  • IBM moved jobs to India: Trump

    “IBM laid off 500 workers in Minneapolis and moved their jobs to India and other countries. A Trump administration will stop the jobs from leaving America, and we will stop the jobs from leaving Minnesota,” Trump said in his speech yesterday in Minneapolis, as part of efforts to woo voters in Minnesota state which has been a Democrat stronghold.

    http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/ibm-moved-jobs-to-india-trump/1/804146.html

  • Turbonomic Grabs Former HP COO Bill Veghte As New Top Exec

    Former Hewlett-Packard executive Bill Veghte has joined Turbonomic, an application performance management developer and Hewlett Packard Enterprise strategic technology partner, as its full-time executive chairman.

    Turbonomic, which until August was known as VMTurbo, Thursday unveiled the appointment along with the news that the privately held company has closed its 25th consecutive quarter of revenue growth.

    http://www.crn.com/news/data-center/300082785/turbonomic-grabs-former-hp-coo-bill-veghte-as-new-top-exec.htm

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