Tag: SAP

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Supplier Report: 3/27/2020


Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

As more travel and movement restrictions are announced, there is less technology news being released… which is disappointing as I am looking for any news other than Corona.

Thankfully there is SOME news out there.  I am glad to see that AT&T is canceling plans to buy back stock and keeping cash reserves for the impending financial doom that is likely to come.

SAP Ariba did hold a virtual version of their Ariba Live conference last week and I have been picking over the videos.

Acquisitions/Investments

  • The Airlines Want A $58 Billion Bailout After Spending $45 Billion On Stock Buybacks

    Help in the U.S. is needed because “this crisis hit a previously robust, healthy industry at lightning speed,” Airlines for America said in a statement. The trade group outlined a proposal for $50 billion for passenger airlines and $8 billion for cargo carriers.

    But the request for taxpayer assistance via loans, grants and tax relief comes after a decade of massive consolidation — and billions in profits — that put the industry in a far more robust condition than before.

    What’s more, from 2010 to 2019, U.S. airlines spent 96% of their free cash flow, some $45 billion, to purchase shares of their own stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The world’s largest carrier, American Airlines Group Inc., was the biggest buyer, spending $12.5 billion.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-17/airlines-58-billion-bailout-request-puts-past-under-scrutiny?sref=P6Q0mxvj

  • SoftBank reportedly balks at commitment to buy $3B in shares from WeWork shareholders

    Citing a notice sent to WeWork shareholders, the Journal reported that if SoftBank reneged on the buyback, it would not go back on its commitment to give the office sharing company a $5 billion lifeline.

    According to the Journal’s reporting, the deal to buy back shares isn’t canceled, and could just be an effort to renegotiate terms in light of the global economic slowdown caused by the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/softbank-reportedly-balks-at-commitment-to-buy-3b-in-shares-from-wework-shareholders/

  • AT&T Warns Coronavirus Financial Impact ‘Could Be Material,’ Nixes $4 Billion Stock-Buyback Plan

    AT&T called off plans to repurchase $4 billion in stock during the second quarter — and has halted all other buybacks — saying it has decided to keep the cash to invest in its networks and in taking care of employees during the coronavirus pandemic.

    The telco, which made the disclosure Friday in an SEC filing, said that while its business “continues to operate effectively” during the COVID-19 outbreak the ongoing crisis could have a material impact on financial results.

    “The COVID-19 pandemic has [affected] and will continue affecting economies and businesses around the world. The impacts of the pandemic could be material, but due to the evolving nature of this situation, we are not able at this time to estimate the impact on our financial or operational results,” AT&T said in the filing.

    https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/att-coronavirus-material-cancels-stock-buyback-plan-1203540168/

Software/SaaS

  • Google halts upcoming releases of Chrome and Chrome OS to keep things stable for everyone working from home

    It makes sense that Google doesn’t want to risk unforeseen bugs popping up and making life more difficult for Chromebook owners and everyone doing their work in Chrome during these stressful days. This is also an admission that it’s difficult to balance Chrome stability and new features with the team so decentralized. So Google is wisely prioritizing the former.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/18/21185471/google-pausing-chrome-os-releases-coronavirus-work-schedules

  • SAP’s Ariba Live online: ‘The Network Effect for Buyers and Suppliers’

    Volume growth appears to be coming from three key areas — free supplier enablement options (for lower volume suppliers), general network/transaction growth for existing and new customers, and direct materials/EDI growth.

    However, from a network-value effect perspective, it is true that many of the benefits that we normally see in supplier portals and supplier networks are more oriented to the communication and exchange of documents between buyers and suppliers (rather than deeper and more complex collaboration) — with benefits generally being of greater value for the buyers than for suppliers.

    In Sean’s videoconference he mentioned that they have been working closely with its Supplier Advisory Board to understand what the most important supplier needs and wants are from an ecosystem perspective, and not surprisingly what suppliers want is more sales to drive more revenue and an easier way to use the Ariba Supplier Network (changing the way buyers & suppliers interact, better ways to manage the information, and more network-centric applications). It’s interesting that they didn’t mention a free network, at least for certain services and transactions; but that’s another story we’ve repeatedly addressed in Spend Matters’ coverage.

    https://spendmatters.com/2020/03/20/saps-ariba-live-online-the-network-effect-for-buyers-and-suppliers/

  • OK, Fine, Let’s All Get Back on Facebook

    It’s been almost exactly two years since Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. It’s also around two years since I wrote about why Facebook didn’t need to listen in on our mics. After all that, I didn’t #deletefacebook, but I vowed to take a step back from its products.

    The reality is, the company collects more personal data than it needs to perform the services it offers users, and has been evasive and even dishonest when asked about all of that data collection.

    Yet just one week into self-isolation, I’m pointing a Facebook-connected camera at my son.

    It’s the ultimate test of what we’re willing to live with after all we’ve learned over the last two years: To make our lives better—or at least easier—will we give the tech giant a pass on its fast and loose take on privacy?

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-fine-lets-all-get-back-on-facebook-11584763207

    Hell No… join Slack or get a Discord server.

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • YouTube joins Netflix in reducing video quality in Europe

    YouTube is reducing the quality of its videos in Europe, as an increase in home usage strains the continent’s internet during the novel coronavirus outbreak, Reuters reports. “We are making a commitment to temporarily switch all traffic in the EU to standard definition by default,” the company said in a statement.

    The decision comes after EU industry chief Thierry Breton called on streaming platforms to help reduce their load on the continent’s infrastructure. Internet traffic is increasing as more people spend time at home in line with social-distancing guidelines during the pandemic. There are fears about the strain this could place on the internet’s infrastructure, and cause further disruption to remote workers and e-learning activities now that businesses and schools have been shuttered.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/20/21187930/youtube-reduces-streaming-quality-european-union-coronavirus-bandwidth-internet-traffic

Other

  • ‘They don’t care about safety’: Amazon workers struggle with pandemic demand

    Workers say the hectic pace of work amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is devastating for their physical and mental health as they try to keep up with massive new demand. They also have to deal with their own worries and problems coping with the pandemic.

    “My kids are off from school. A lot of businesses are letting workers work from home. But Amazon workers are going in extra time, we’re doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing and due to the nature of our work, it’s hands-on. We have to do that,” said an Amazon warehouse worker in Troutdale, Oregon, who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

    “I usually work 40 hours a week, four 10-hour shifts. We’ve all been called in for a mandatory extra day, a 10-hour shift, which is usually reserved for holiday peak season,” the worker added.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/18/amazon-whole-foods-workers-stores-warehouses-coronavirus

  • Anthony Levandowski pleads guilty to one count of trade secrets theft under plea deal

    Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has pleaded guilty to one count of stealing trade secrets while working at Google under a plea agreement reached with the U.S. District Attorney.

    While Levandowski still faces a possible prison sentence of between 24 to 30 months, the outcome is much rosier than it could have been. In August, federal grand jury indicted Levandowski on 33 counts of theft and attempted theft. He was looking at a protracted legal fight and a trial that wasn’t expected to begin until 2021.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/19/anthony-levandowski-pleads-guilty-to-one-count-of-trade-secrets-theft-under-plea-deal/

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Supplier Report: 3/20/2020


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Tired of reading about the Corona virus? Me too.

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

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

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Unity acquires Dublin-based deep learning startup Artomatix

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

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

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

  • How the coronavirus outbreak will stress-test startups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Oracle Tees Up Another $15 Billion In Buybacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Software/SaaS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other

  • France Fines Apple $1.2 Billion for Antitrust Issues

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

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

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

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

  • Bill Gates to Leave Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway

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

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

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

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/13/2020


Photo by DDP on Unsplash

The Coronavirus continues to dominate the news feeds this week. Several companies are pulling out of or cancelling conferences and directing employees to stop traveling and work from home.

Articles from the New York Times and other respected news outlets are calling these preventative measures “unprecedented”. These actions beg the question, when will things go back to normal and how do firms plan around a global pandemic?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • BMC Software buys Compuware from Thoma Bravo

    By combining with Compuware, BMC said the companies will be better equipped to serve the enterprise technology stack. Together they plan to focus on mainframe operations, cybersecurity, application development, data, and storage as part of their enterprise DevOps strategies.

    “BMC continues to be focused on evolving and investing in our portfolio to address and even anticipate the needs of our customers, helping them to succeed today and into tomorrow,” said BMC chief executive Ayman Sayed. “It’s the ideal time to bring Compuware into our portfolio as the traditional mainframe AppDev market transitions to DevOps. We’re excited to welcome the Compuware team as we build best-of-breed modern mainframe solutions.”

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/bmc-software-buys-compuware-from-thoma-bravo/

  • Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack

    Nvidia today announced that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.

    The company’s recent launches focused on improving its support for AI, high-performance computing and accelerated computing workloads, which is surely what Nvidia is most interested in here.

    The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but SwiftStack had previously raised about $23.6 million in Series A and B rounds led by Mayfield Fund and OpenView Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/nvidia-acquires-data-storage-and-management-platform-swiftstack/

  • HP Rejects Xerox’s Raised Takeover Offer

    Xerox this week launched an effort to acquire all HP shares outstanding, valuing HP at nearly $35 billion, or $24 a share in cash and stock. It had raised the offer from $22 a share. HP said the value of the offer’s equity component poses a risk to the company and would lead to uncertainties.

    The offer would leave Xerox “burdened with an irresponsible level of debt and which would subsequently require unrealistic, unachievable synergies that would jeopardize the entire company,” HP Chairman Chip Bergh said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-takeover-offer-11583408223

Cloud

  • Judge says Amazon is ‘likely to succeed’ on key argument in Pentagon cloud lawsuit

    The document provides the first indication of how Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims might rule in a high-stakes bid protest over the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud computing contract, which was awarded to Microsoft in October following intervention from the White House and members of Congress.

    In a blow to Microsoft and the Defense Department, Campbell-Smith recently ordered the Pentagon to halt work on JEDI. In a lengthy opinion explaining her reasoning, she sided with Amazon’s contention that the Pentagon had made a mistake in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from Amazon and Microsoft.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/06/judge-says-amazon-likely-succeed-key-argument-pentagon-cloud-lawsuit/

Security/Privacy

  • Halting $9.8 Billion in Theft Is Key to Crypto Growth, KPMG Says

    At least $9.8 billion in digital assets have been stolen by hackers since 2017 because of lax security or poorly written code, the accounting firm wrote in a report released Monday. Adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether among institutional investors has led to competition for a place in portfolios, making safeguarding the tokens more important that ever, KPMG said.

    “Institutional investors especially will not risk owning crypto assets if their value cannot be safeguarded in the same way their cash, stocks and bonds are,” Sal Ternullo, co-leader of KPMG’s crypto-asset services and co-author of the report, said in a statement. Among the first companies to offer custody services for crypto are Fidelity Investments and units of the exchanges run by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., Coinbase Inc. and Gemini Trust Co.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-02/halting-9-8-billion-in-crypto-theft-key-to-growth-kpmg-says

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer

    Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world’s largest industrial sites. It’s that kind of experience that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts.

    This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today’s announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.

    **

    The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.

    So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/honeywell-says-it-will-soon-launch-the-worlds-most-powerful-quantum-computer/

  • HPE Reports Sales That Miss Estimates on Weak Server Demand

    HPE Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri has sought to fuel growth at the hardware company by moving to a subscription business model and investing in more sophisticated server technologies. The strategy may take years to pay off. In the meantime, HPE is exposed to China, the origin of the coronavirus, through its supply chain and its H3C server joint venture in the country. The company opted not to give a profit forecast for the current period due to uncertainty over the effects of the outbreak.

    HPE’s server sales decreased 16% to $3.01 billion in the period ended Jan. 31 because of macro uncertainty, supply chain disruption and a factory consolidation, Neri said in an interview. Businesses have reduced the pace of purchases for major information technology products amid slowing global economic growth.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-03/hpe-reports-sales-that-miss-estimates-on-declining-server-demand

CoronaVirus (Breaking it out into its own section)

  • eBay bans face mask and hand sanitizer listings to halt coronavirus price gouging

    eBay is escalating its fight against online price gouging during the coronavirus outbreak with a new outright ban on all sales of face masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes. The new policy, outlined in a notice to sellers posted Friday, applies both to new listings and existing ones. eBay says it is in the process of removing current listings for these items as well as listings that mention the coronavirus, COVID-19 (the illness it causes), and other popular variations of the phrases like 2019nCoV.

    “We will continue to monitor the evolving situation and quickly remove any listing that mentions COVID-19, coronavirus, 2019nCoV (except books) in the title or description,” the notice reads. “These listings may violate applicable US laws or regulations, eBay policies, and exhibit unfair pricing behavior for our buyers.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168211/ebay-coronavirus-sales-ban-face-masks-hand-sanitizer-price-gouging

  • SXSW cancels its 400K-person conference due to coronavirus

    SXSW has officially announced it will cancel its tech and music conference slated for March 13th to 22nd in Austin, Texas due to concerns around coronavirus, though it’s exploring rescheduling. “Based on the recommendation of our public health officer and our director of public health . . . I’ve gone ahead and declared a local disaster in the city and associated with that, have issued an order that effectively cancels SXSW,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler at a press conference today.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/sxsw-cancelled/

  • SAP has cancelled all in-person events and says bookings on its Concur travel platform is down 20% due to coronavirus crisis

    SAP said the cancelled events include its Concur Fusion conference in Orlando which was supposed to take place next week and its SAP Ariba Live convention in Las Vegas scheduled later this month.

    SAP also will not participate in the upcoming SXSW gathering in Austin, Texas next week.

    SAP said its own data underscore “the impact of COVID-19,” the company said in a blog post: “We have seen travel transactions in our SAP Concur network down 20% year-over-year.”

    https://www.businessinsider.com/sap-cancelled-in-person-events-due-to-coronavirus-crisis-2020-3

  • As coronavirus pandemic spreads, demand for remote-work startups spikes

    Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing to say that it is “also about the need for people to feel connected and stay informed.” That means intelligent tooling, and smart workplaces norms and practices. (Mader also stressed low-code and no-code tooling as a possible way to empower remote workers).

    The remote-work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s earnings report. Its results bested expectations, and in its earnings call, the company said that it was seeing rising demand for its product in the wake of COVID-19, even if most of that rising usage was for its free service. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that in light of the spread of the coronavirus, many companies had quickly come to understand the need for a tool like Zoom. The CEO added that he expects more companies to deploy remote work tooling like his video service in the future.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/as-coronavirus-pandemic-spreads-demand-for-remote-work-startups-spikes/

  • Google recommends Washington State employees work from home, citing coronavirus risk

    The software giant has not closed the offices outright, nor is it planning to make an official statement regarding the recommendation, but the news certainly points to broader trend of serious precautions around the novel coronavirus outbreak. The move follows a similar decision by Lyft, which sent home employees in its San Francisco office.

    Google maintains a number of different offices throughout the state. Washington has become a major concentration for the spread of the virus in the U.S. Seventy cases have been reported, resulting in 10 deaths. The majority have been in King County, which includes both Seattle and Kirkland — both homes to Google offices.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/google-recommends-washington-state-employees-work-from-home-citing-coronavirus-risk/

Other

  • Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

    Warren’s campaign raised early red flags for tech’s giants, which are now recalibrating for the threat from Sanders.

    Through the 2020 race, the elite upper echelons of tech — executives, venture capitalists and the like — sought a moderate alternative to the economic upheaval they feared would be bad for business, even as their own workers aligned with the contest’s most progressive candidates.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/big-techs-sworn-foe-drops-out-of-2020-race/

  • Amazon Warehouse Workers Are Abandoning Their Jobs in Droves

    Between 2011—the year the first fulfillment center opened in California— and 2017, the turnover rate in five counties with Amazon warehouses leaped from 38 percent to 100 percent, according to the report. In other words, more warehouse workers departed from their jobs each year in counties with an Amazon presence than the total number of warehouse jobs.

    “What emerges is a troubling picture of Amazon’s business model—one in which the company views its workers as disposable and designs its operations to foster high turnover,” the report’s authors wrote. “The particularly high rate [of turnover for Amazon] workers as compared to the rate for similar workers suggests that Amazon’s presence has had a unique impact.”

    By comparison, overall turnover rates for warehouse workers in California are 20 percent lower than they are in counties without Amazon warehouses, at 83 percent.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkexdb/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-abandoning-their-jobs-in-droves

Posted on

Supplier Report: 1/24/2020


Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Even though Google is under investigation for monopoly tactics, the company announced another acquisition. The search giant is set to purchase cloud sales company Pointy, which helps small companies sell their products online.

The company also announced a long-term strategy to kill browser cookies, with the aim to better protect end-user privacy (and likely unleash their own tracking-standard for advertisers).

Apple also announced an acquisition this week (AI startup Xnor.ai), but that news was overshadowed by the company’s refusal to unlock phones involved with the Pensacola shooting. Should tech companies intentionally open back doors for the government (even with the best of intentions) which could lead to much larger security issues?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Google acquires Pointy, a startup to help brick-and-mortar retailers list products online, for $163M

    The search giant is acquiring Pointy, a startup out of Dublin, Ireland, which has built hardware and software technology to help physical retailers — specifically those that might not already have an extensive e-commerce storefront detailing in-store inventory — get their products discoverable online without any extra work.

    The companies are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but a source tells us it is €147 million ($163 million).

    A source notes that this was a “good outcome” because Pointy has a “one of a kind” product that didn’t really have any comparables in the market. Pointy had also managed to pick up quite a lot of traction as a small startup, working with around 10% of all physical retailers in the U.S. in certain categories (pets and toys were two of those, I was told).

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/google-is-buying-pointy-a-startup-that-helps-brick-and-mortar-retailers-list-products-online/

  • Equinix is acquiring bare metal cloud provider Packet

    Sara Baack, chief product officer at Equinix, says bringing the two companies together will provide a diverse set of bare metal options for customers moving forward. “Our combined strengths will further empower companies to be everywhere they need to be, to interconnect everyone and integrate everything that matters to their business,” she said in a statement.

    While the companies did not share the purchase price, they did hint that they would have more details on the transaction after it closes, which is expected in the first quarter this year.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/14/equinix-is-acquiring-bare-metal-cloud-provider-packet/

  • Apple acquires Xnor.ai, edge AI spin-out from Paul Allen’s AI2, for price in $200M range

    The three-year-old startup’s secret sauce has to do with AI on the edge — machine learning and image recognition tools that can be executed on low-power devices rather than relying on the cloud. “We’ve been able to scale AI out of the cloud to every device out there,” co-founder Ali Farhadi, who is the venture’s CXO (chief Xnor officer) as well as a UW professor, told GeekWire in 2018.

    Xnor.ai also developed a self-service platform that made it possible for software developers, even those who aren’t skilled in AI, to drop AI-centric code and data libraries into device-centric apps.

    Those two threads of innovation are woven into the startup’s motto: “AI Everywhere, for Everyone.”

    https://www.geekwire.com/2020/exclusive-apple-acquires-xnor-ai-edge-ai-spin-paul-allens-ai2-price-200m-range/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud gets a premium support plan with 15-minute response times

    Google stresses that the team that will answer a company’s calls will consist of “content-aware experts” that know your application stack and architecture. As with similar premium plans from other vendors, enterprises will have a Technical Account manager who works through these issues with them. Companies with global operations can opt to have (and pay for) technical account managers available during business hours in multiple regions.

    The idea here, however, is also to give GCP users more proactive support, which will soon include a site reliability engineering engagement, for example, that is meant to help customers “design a wrapper of supportability around the Google Cloud customer projects that have the highest sensitivity to downtime.” The Support team will also work with customers to get them ready for special events like Black Friday or other peak events in their industry. Over time, the company plans to add more features and additional support plans.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/google-cloud-gets-a-premium-support-plan-with-15-minute-response-times/

Security/Privacy

  • Apple Said It Is Helping In The Pensacola Shooting Investigation, But It Won’t Unlock The Shooter’s iPhones

    “We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation. Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing,” the company said in a statement. “We responded to each request promptly, often within hours, sharing information with FBI offices in Jacksonville, Pensacola and New York. The queries resulted in many gigabytes of information that we turned over to investigators. In every instance, we responded with all of the information that we had.”

    But Apple said nothing about actually unlocking the gunman’s two iPhones. Instead, it reiterated its stance on privacy.

    “We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys,” the company explained. “Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. … We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users’ data.

    https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scottlucas/william-barr-apple-request-unlock-iphones

  • Google Says Chrome Will End Support for Third-Party Cookies That Track You. Here’s Why That’s Not All Good News

    So, let’s look at the good news and the bad news. If you’re a user, there’s mostly good news, because ending third-party cookies is generally good for privacy. The caveat here is that it’s not yet entirely clear how Google plans to have it both ways. Meaning, it’s not clear how Google thinks it can provide a privacy-protected browsing experience that also provides targeted ads.

    There’s also the fact that some less ethical advertisers will no doubt resort to other types of more nefarious tracking, like browser and device fingerprinting. Those technologies create a profile of you based on information sent by your browser about your device, the operating system, your location, and other unique identifiers. Safari has introduced protection against that, and it will be interesting if Google takes a similar approach with Chrome.

    https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/google-says-chrome-will-end-support-for-third-party-cookies-that-track-you-thats-not-all-good-news.html

Software/SaaS

  • Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue

    In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this action. The overall number may still be higher, though, as Mozilla is still looking into how this decision will affect workers in the U.K. and France. In 2018, Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-waits-for-subscription-products-to-generate-revenue/?guccounter=1

  • Daily Crunch: Goodbye Hipmunk

    Founded by Adam J. Goldstein and Reddit co-founder Steve “spez” Huffman, Hipmunk was one of the first well-made “metasearch” travel sites. It scrounged up flights (and hotels/car rentals/etc.) from across myriad services like Expedia, Priceline, etc., presenting all the times and prices in one big, skimmable interface.

    Now the Hipmunk team says the website and app are both shutting down. Oh, and we’ve confirmed that Goldstein and Huffman tried to buy the company back from SAP Concur, but that doesn’t seem to have panned out.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/daily-crunch-goodbye-hipmunk/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Report: Intel CPU Supply Issues Will Likely Persist Through 2020

    Intel has previously admitted to being stuck between a rock and a hard place and their CEO, Bob Swan, gave a very candid explanation for the situation they are in right now. It does, however, mean that AMD *will* be eating away more market share from Intel as OEMs and AIBs have to switch to AMD parts to maintain their volume as Intel’s foundries are running at peak capacity and cannot keep up with demand. Every chip order that Intel is not able to meet means market share gained by AMD.

    It also doesn’t help that Intel’s chips ship at a premium (and it makes no sense to kill that premium right now when demand exceeds supply) and OEMs/AIBs have to pass that cost down to consumers who may prefer to go with AMD alternatives anyways. If there is one thing we know for sure it is that 2020 is going to be a make or break year for Intel and things won’t start looking up for the company till late 2021.

    https://wccftech.com/report-intel-cpu-supply-issues-will-likely-persist-through-2020/

Other

  • Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World

    Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said much the same last year. “Chinese companies are growing faster, they have higher valuations, and they have more users than their non-Chinese counterparts,” he said. “It’s very important to understand that there is a global competition around technology innovation, and China is a significant player and likely to remain so.”

    This is a full reversal of the language that tech promoters used to sell Silicon Valley–style innovation and competitiveness for decades. Saxenian has noticed the change in how the Valley describes itself, or at least in how the dominant firms do. “Advocacy of the small, innovative firm and entrepreneurial ecosystem is giving way to more and more justifications for bigness (scale economics, competitive advantage, etc.),” Saxenian wrote to me in an email. “The big is beautiful line is coming especially from the large companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple) that are threatened by antitrust and need to justify their scale.”

    This sort of talk prompts one obvious, knee-jerk response: It’s simply hypocrisy. When Google and Facebook were start-ups, their executives said start-ups were good. Now that Google and Facebook are huge, their executives say huge companies are good. It’s cynical, if not unexpected.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/why-silicon-valley-and-big-tech-dont-innovate-anymore/604969/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 12/13/2019


Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

Google’s founders are leaving the company at a time when employees are actively protesting leadership decisions and the US Government is building a monopoly case. Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is going to be very busy.

Google is not the only IT firm with labor issues… The Labor Department’s case against Oracle for underpaying women and minorities is underway and Oracle isn’t looking very woke (is that still a thing?).

Finally… It seems that the e-Scooter fad is slowing down. Bird, one of the more popular companies is laying off staff after an acquisition and a knock-off company named Unicorn is closing their doors before they ever even ramped up (I hope this is a sign of things to come).

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Adobe is buying the Oculus Medium VR sculpting app

    Why is Oculus selling Medium? It could be Facebook scaling back its non-gaming VR efforts. But Medium is also slightly redundant for Oculus. The company also launched a professional-oriented art app called Quill, which was relaunched as Quill 2.0 in August with expanded animation capabilities. And where Quill is a 3D painting app in the style of Tilt Brush (which is owned by Google), Medium works a lot more like a traditional 3D modeling program, so it fits better with Adobe’s existing offerings. As for its impact on VR in general, it depends on where Adobe takes the product in 2020 — and how deeply it integrates Medium into its larger creative suite.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/6/20999185/adobe-facebook-oculus-medium-vr-sculpting-app

Cloud

  • Google Co-Founders Page, Brin Give Up Management Roles

    Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from active management of the internet giant’s parent, surrendering immediate control to a low-key company veteran who must navigate global regulatory threats as well as employee discontent.

    Page and Brin, who had been chief executive and president, respectively, of Google parent Alphabet Inc., said Tuesday they would hand control immediately to Sundar Pichai, Google’s existing CEO. They remain on Alphabet’s board and will still together control a majority of voting power over company decisions under Alphabet’s dual-class share structure.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/sundar-pichai-to-replace-larry-page-as-ceo-of-alphabet-11575409229

    Why Alphabet’s days could be numbered under its new CEO

    Shielding Google from those “other bets” such as driverless cars no longer seems so urgent. Alphabet and other tech titans — particularly those effectively controlled by their founders — have a relatively long leash from investors to invest in both the projects that generate earnings now and on whatever comes next. Amazon, for example, spent $14 billion to buy a niche grocery store chain, and it’s investing in far-flung businesses such as health care and entertainment.

    Amazon has always received a longer leash to tinker than most other companies, but I think Google’s cash firepower also lets it experiment without creating an artificial structure to shield Google from its less mature corporate cousins. There may be a reason that Alphabet never became a blueprint for other technology companies that wanted to keep up with the times.

    https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/12/5/20995520/alphabet-obsolete-sundar-pichai-ceo-page-brin

Security/Privacy

  • How Ring Went From ‘Shark Tank’ Reject to America’s Scariest Surveillance Company

    Although there’s no credible evidence that Ring actually deters or reduces crime, claiming that its products achieve these things is essential to its marketing model. These claims have helped Ring cultivate a surveillance network around the country with the help of dozens of taxpayer-funded camera discount programs and more than 600 police partnerships.

    When police partner with Ring, they are required to promote its products, and to allow Ring to approve everything they say about the company. In exchange, they get access to Ring’s Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, an interactive map that allows police to request camera footage directly from residents without obtaining a warrant.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjp53/how-ring-went-from-shark-tank-reject-to-americas-scariest-surveillance-company
    A World With a Billion Cameras Watching You Is Just Around the Corner

    The report, from industry researcher IHS Markit, to be released Thursday, said the number of cameras used for surveillance would climb above 1 billion by the end of 2021. That would represent an almost 30% increase from the 770 million cameras today. China would continue to account for a little over half the total.

    Fast-growing, populous nations such as India, Brazil and Indonesia would also help drive growth in the sector, the report said. The number of surveillance cameras in the U.S. would grow to 85 million by 2021, from 70 million last year, as American schools, malls and offices seek to tighten security on their premises, IHS analyst Oliver Philippou said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billion-surveillance-cameras-forecast-to-be-watching-within-two-years-11575565402

Software/SaaS

  • SAP customers are revolting – here’s why

    The problem for both customers and SAP can be summed up in the words of a retiring executive with close on 30 years SAP experience. He said that his greatest disappointment is that SAP has not really delivered what it promised in terms of end to end integrated business processes and that the addition of many new acquired technologies only makes the ability to create a seamlessly integrated landscape nigh on impossible. The R/3 days when integration was a reality are long gone. It should therefore be no surprise that even showcase customers like Jazz describe a business technology landscape that includes SAP, Workday and Salesforce.

    Equally worrying for me was the degree of frustration across the SAP ecosystem at what one partner described as ‘appalling communication’ around what SAP is doing to help customers get across the S/4 line. Hillary Blinds, an early Suite for HANA customer for example shrugged at the prospect of moving to S/4, despite its commitment to SAP across departments other vendors could own.

    https://diginomica.com/sap-customers-are-revolting-heres-why

  • Oracle allegedly underpaid women and minorities by $400 million. Now the details are set to come out in court.

    The first witness, former employee Kirsten Hanson Garcia, who worked for Oracle for more than 16 years, most recently in human resources as senior director of talent development, testified that during a meeting in the mid-2000s with top executives, the head of human resources said, “Well, if you hire a woman, she will work harder for less money.”

    Palantir, a data-mining company, settled the claims in 2017, while the department’s investigation into Google has been mired in a dispute over access to compensation data. That makes the Oracle hearing a rare airing of testimony from the employees who allegedly faced discrimination, as well as compensation data at a major tech company. Oracle and Google are also facing private pay, promotion, or hiring discrimination lawsuits filed by current and former employees.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/05/oracle-allegedly-underpaid-women-minorities-by-million-now-details-are-set-come-out-court/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Bernie Sanders’ Broadband Plan Is Comcast’s Worst Nightmare

    The plan would restore the FCC’s authority and net neutrality rules stripped away by the Ajit Pai FCC, subjecting ISPs to far greater oversight. It also proposes banning ISPs from imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, which critics have long said are little more than punitive price hikes on captive customers.

    But Sanders’ plan also spends a lot of time advocating for community broadband. First by proposing $150 billion in new funding to aid the growing roster of towns and cities that have begun building their own networks after years of industry neglect. Secondly by eliminating the 19 protectionist state laws big ISP lobbyists have used to try and crush those efforts.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjjmn/bernie-sanders-broadband-plan-is-comcasts-worst-nightmare
    Love the idea Bernie – but where is the $150B coming from? How does this idea become reality?

  • Ericsson to pay over $1 billion to resolve U.S. corruption probes

    The bribery took place over many years in countries including China, Vietnam and Djibouti, the department said. The total charges include a criminal penalty of more than $520 million, plus $540 million to be paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a related matter.

    The company admitted it had conspired with others to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) from at least 2000 to 2016 by engaging in a scheme to pay bribes and to falsify books and records and by failing to implement reasonable internal accounting controls, the Justice Department said in a statement.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-ericsson/ericsson-to-pay-over-1-billion-to-resolve-u-s-corruption-probes-idUSKBN1YA2HU

Other

  • Elon Musk Cleared by Jury in Defamation Case Over ‘Pedo’ Tweet

    The legal battle stems from Mr. Musk’s involvement in a high-profile effort to rescue a youth soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand last year. British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth, who helped in the early days of the operation, criticized Mr. Musk’s effort to use a mini-sub to save the boys as a public-relations stunt. The device was never used, and Mr. Unsworth told CNN that Mr. Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-cleared-by-jury-in-defamation-case-over-pedo-tweet-11575678498

  • Amazon Leases New Manhattan Office Space, Less Than a Year After HQ2 Pullout

    The giant online retailer said it has signed a new lease for 335,000 square feet on Manhattan’s west side in the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, where it will have more than 1,500 employees. The new lease represents Amazon’s largest expansion in New York since the company stunned the city by abandoning plans to locate its second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City.

    The deal comes the same day The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is in talks to lease 700,000 square feet in a neighborhood nearby. Combined with Facebook’s other recent deals in the city, such a move would catapult the social-media company into the top ranks of the city’s largest corporate tenants, alongside JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. , which have had a major presence in New York for many years.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-leases-new-manhattan-office-space-less-than-a-year-after-hq2-pullout-11575671243

  • Bird lays off several Scoot employees

    Bird has laid off less than two dozen employees, The San Francisco Chronicle first reported. The layoffs affect employees Bird brought on board as part of its ~$25 million acquisition of Scoot earlier this year.

    Those affected were salaried employees and/or people with technical backgrounds, according to Bird.

    “The integration of Bird and Scoot does not impact or change our previous or future commitments to San Francisco or to providing its residents and visitors access to the highest quality and most reliable shared micromobility vehicles and services,” a Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are planning to relocate a number of Scoot team members to our Santa Monica headquarters while also maintaining an office in San Francisco for our operations and maintenance teams as well as a number of regionally specific roles.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/bird-lays-off-several-scoot-employees/

    I was hoping this stupid scooter fad was dying down, but this is just corporate restructuring. Oh wait…
    Unicorn, e-scooter startup from co-creator of Tile, shuts down with no money for refunds

    Unicorn, the electric scooter startup from the co-creator of gadget tracker Tile, is shutting down operations after blowing all its cash on Facebook and Google ads but only receiving 350 orders for its glossy white e-scooters, it claims. In an email to customers, the company says it lacks the resources to deliver any of its $699 two-wheelers, and won’t be issuing refunds “as we are completely out of funding.”

    In a remorseful email, Unicorn CEO Nick Evans said the company had “totally failed as a business” and has also “spread the cost of this failure to you, the early customers that believed in us.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/7/21000094/unicorn-electric-scooter-shut-down-refund-tile