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SoftwareEngineerNews

  • 50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO

    “You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten,” says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen. “We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.”

    John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, discusses the impact of 50 years of datacenter that will shift to the cloud over the next ten years, in an interview on CNBC:

    Software Is Now Eating the World

    Software is now eating the world as a lot of folks know. It’s how we bank, how we shop, how we do just about everything. These applications have gotten much more complex over the last five years as they have moved to cloud platforms. The spend in the traditional datacenter is declining quickly and the move is over to the cloud. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment. 

    For example, Carribean Cruise, one of our customers, is reinventing the travel experience for Millenials. They’re doing it all through software on their ships. They provide a little wrist band that interacts with software on ship and on shore to transform the experience. What we’re seeing is really still a continued focus on growth. New revenue streams, new opportunities, and taking in existing core application environments and rebuilding it to be cloud-native. That’s the shift that we see. Still growth, still attack market, still competitive advantage for most companies that are pushing forward aggressively. 

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud

    We’ve always built the company around a direct sales approach. Our products are used by enterprises. Enterprises want to connect directly with the company that builds these products. We’ve really always gone to market that way and it has served us very well. It makes it a very predictable business and a very strategic platform for these enterprises. We run across all of the cloud platforms and then some. We target the global 15,000 enterprise companies. We expect to talk to the CIO, CTO, and sort of the executive level that are driving this shift within their organizations’ digital transformation projects. That’s our focus. 

    What’s happening now is that the cloud is moving from the early days where people would put applications in the cloud to where they really are taking their entire datacenter and shifting it to the cloud. That’s what’s driving these webscale multi-cloud environments that we do so well in. It’s still early days. There’s a lot of room to go in this marketplace. You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten. We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast.

    Cloud Is So Much More Efficient and Economical For Companies

    This market is very large. We estimate it’s about $18 billion. Others have the estimates in the $20 billions. It’s plenty of room for a company like us to grow and actually probably multiple companies to grow in this space. We feel very secure and happy with our organic innovation. We’ve been able to reinvent the business several times now. It’s a very dynamic space, this application world. Organic innovation is our thrust going forward.

    The cloud is so much more efficient and economical for companies that as there is any kind of disruption anywhere in their markets they’re going to lean toward applications. The things that really drive connective tissue with their customers and their marketplaces that create more automation and more information that they gather when they go through digital channels.

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen
  • We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO

    We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO

    “What we’ve done at Scale is built the data platform for AI,” says Scale AI’s 22-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang. “AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe or reliable way. What we’ve done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way. Then they use the data to build their self-driving cars.”

    Alexandr Wang, Scale AI co-founder and CEO, discusses how his company has built the data platform for AI that enables safe and reliable autonomous vehicles. Wang was interviewed on Bloomberg Technology.

    We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Autonomous Vehicles

    What we’ve done at Scale is built the data platform for AI. AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe or reliable way. What we’ve done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way. Then they use the data to build their self-driving cars. I think it’s very exciting that all these companies have really incredible technology and it’s getting better and better every single year. We’re really getting closer and closer to solving the problem. 

    One of the big problems in machine learning is perception, being able to fully understand the environment around you using machine learning. So we process a lot of image data, LIDAR data, radar data, map data, etc. for some of these companies. Then for other companies, we process tax data or tabular data or speech data. The work we do is critical to building safe autonomous vehicles, for example, because without the data that we’re able to provide to these companies they actually wouldn’t even be able to build algorithms that could perform in any manner that is safe and reliable. 

    AI Is Really About Augmenting Humans With Technology

    AI is really about augmenting humans with technology and making them more effective and more efficient using technology. In particular, I think for a lot of the problems that we work on where AI plays a really critical role in self-driving or medical imagery, etc., you really want to make sure that humans are a part of the process to ensure that these systems are performing very safely and reliably. 

    One view that we really take in is, how do we solve this in the most tech-enabled way as possible? How do we use as much machine learning and technology on our side to make the process as efficient and high quality as possible? That’s a very differentiated view actually. Many of these other efforts are much more human-powered than technology powered.

    You Don’t Need a Degree To Be Able To Accomplish Your Goals

    I was really lucky I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, but after high school, I was lucky to be able to come out here to the Valley to work as a software engineer. That really exposed me to a lot of these problems where AI and machine learning are really core. I went back to school for a year and then after that year at school, I dropped out and started this company.

    I think if you know what you want to do, more and more these days, you don’t need a degree to be able to accomplish what you need to do. I think people care a lot more about what can you accomplish and what are your skills.

    We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang
  • The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO

    “What’s happening is that the subscription economy is just taking over the world,” says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. It shows up for our consumer lives with Netflix, Amazon, etc. It shows up at work as well. Because of that, all of those companies just can’t afford to just sell to their customers and move on. They’ve got to make them successful.”

    Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, discusses how both B2b and B2C subscription businesses are booming because they are better for the customer in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World

    I just heard about the deal (Salesforce buying Tableau Software for $15 billion) this morning. It just felt perfect for both sides. Tableau is one of the most respected companies in general and Salesforce has proven that they can buy companies and put them through their distribution channel. I think both customers are very committed to customer success.

    I think it just keeps accelerating. If you look at it overall there is a Subscription Economy Index that Zuora puts out and it shows that companies that are in subscription businesses are growing five times faster than the average S&P traded peer company. What’s happening is that the subscription economy is just taking over the world. It shows up for our consumer lives with Netflix, Amazon, etc. It shows up at work as well. Because of that, all of those companies just can’t afford to just sell to their customers and move on. They’ve got to make them successful.

    Subscriptions Are Great For Consumers

    Subscriptions are great for consumers. We get to choose what we want, we get to turn it on, and in most cases, we can turn it off. Sometimes we have to make a phone call to make that happen. The phone call is annoying but we have choice. In the business world that’s happening now. They have choice. Before they used to buy things, install them, and have no ability to switch. You were just stuck with what you got.

    In this new world customers have choice and therefore all the vendors, whether it’s a Salesforce or a Tableau or a Slack, have to proactively make sure that you are using all the stuff you buy and getting more value. Also, not just getting more value, that you are getting more value than any other alternative out there.

    There Is A Huge Megatrend That Is Happening

    Slack is a very special company. It’s sort of this triple threat. Customers love it, we run our whole business on Slack. The numbers are amazing in terms of growth rate, in terms of efficiency and net retention. Their existing customers keep spending more money with more than 140 percent net retention. They are also a great culture. I think Slack is one of those businesses that is built for the long term. They can go public in any market.

    There is a huge megatrend that is happening. We have almost this dissonance where technology in some ways is coming more into our lives and taking away more and more of humanity and the people in business. But on the flip side, all of us are longing for a more personal and human connection to the businesses that we work with. We are not ready to turn the whole world over to AI and machine learning. We need that human connection. What’s happening is companies are saying I need to treat my customers more like human beings. I need to be more proactively focused on customer success and make sure that they are getting value.

    They’re also saying I need to treat my employees more like human beings. I need to give them great technology like Slack, like Zoom, and like other great technologies that are going public this year that are helping employees be more successful. There’s this big approach, we call it human first business, which is really changing the way people think about work.

    The Subscription Economy Is Taking Over The World, Says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta
  • Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything

    Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything

    “Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything,” says the Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies Joe Batista. “That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. That’s public enemy number one for us. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.”

    Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies, discusses the challenges companies face with the exponential pace of changes in technology and innovation in an interview with theCube at WTGtransform 2019:

    Helping IT Re-Image the Business

    Literally, it (Joe’s ‘Creatologist’ job) sits at the nexus of business and technology. My job, simply, is to help IT re-image the business because now every company’s a technology company. So what does that look like? I’m involved in all sorts of really cool problems, opportunities, that customers are facing by re-imaging IT.

    I’ve been around for a long time, and, in the old days, we had swim lanes. You thought about certain vendors, they were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.

    You Have To Rethink the Logic

    There’s a couple of thoughts (regarding keeping up with the competition as things constantly change). You have got to look at these vectors that impact a trajectory of the thinking. I love the Peter Drucker quote: If you’re using yesterday’s logic, you’re probably going to get in trouble. You have to rethink the logic, and the example I give was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1968. As in the Fosbury Flop. So the question becomes what are those vectors?

    At Dell Technologies, we have a huge portfolio of technology. But how do you think about the parameter about how those things change over a depreciation cycle? During a conference talk I got a lot of post questions afterward and a lot of engagement regarding this, so it seemed to resonate with the field. The thing that they liked the most was the business conversation of IT. They’re like, we don’t do that enough.

    Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything

    Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything. That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. It’s Glass’s Law. Every 25% increase in function is 100% increase in complexity. That’s public enemy number one for us.

    I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence (before joining Dell) about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal. Not only about the hardware but the software. I think, actually, Jeff (Clarke) said it best. I think we have more software engineers now than we have hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we’re pivoting our talent to the software. But it’s the innovation that’s in this company. I think customers are amazed at that innovation.

    The supercharger on it is, how does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company, and what value do you extract from that? And that’s where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you, though, I’m really excited that Dell Technologies is doubling down on business outcomes. They’re really trying to change the culture in helping customers understand what the technology means.


    Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything – Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies
  • New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO

    New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO

    “We’ve launched the biggest change we’ve ever made to our product, an all-new desktop app,: says Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. “It evolves the Dropbox experience from a folder full of files to a living team workspace. You can have not just files but any kind of cloud content. We saw so many of our customers, and frankly ourselves, struggling. There are all these new apps and they’re great but how do you stitch them all together? We see a big opportunity to make that a much more seamless experience.”

    Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, discusses extensive new feature added to the Dropbox product from just a folder full of files to a living team workspace in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace

    We’ve launched the biggest change we’ve ever made to our product, an all-new desktop app. It evolves the Dropbox experience from a folder full of files to a living team workspace. You can have not just files but any kind of cloud content. So G Suite, things like Google Docs, Sheets,  and Slides, really anything that you’re using. It also includes integrations with tools like Slack and Zoom. From within Dropbox, you can send people messages, you can start meetings, you can send things out for signature, or see your calendar. It’s a much more integrated workspace.

    We saw so many of our customers, and frankly ourselves, struggling. There are all these new apps and they’re great but how do you stitch them all together? We see a big opportunity to make that a much more seamless experience. We’re really excited about it and can’t wait to get it out there.

    The New Dropbox Experience Integrates Your Workspace

    New Dropbox Organizes and Simplifies Your Working Life

    Most, if not all companies, are going to have integrations. The opportunity we saw is to organize it, to really bring it into a well-designed coherent experience, and different from some of the messaging tools. What Dropbox allows you to do is within a native app you can have all your content in one place work across all these different ecosystems. Instead of the interface of just being a list of messages, you can see here’s what you’re working on. Here are our projects and here are the most important pieces of content. We think from a design standpoint it’s a pretty different approach.

    What we’re seeing is that users want choice. They are using all kinds of different apps for communication, for content, for coordination. What’s missing is a way to stitch it all together. That’s the role that we think we can play. It’s very similar to the role we played in the beginning with helping you get to your stuff from all these different platforms and operating systems. Now we’re thinking about how do we organize and simplify your working life and help stitch together all these different things.

    Second, I’d say a lot of what we’re doing is complimentary. You’re not going to stop using Slack or stop using these other tools. In fact, we’re making it easier for you to get to them. We find that a lot of our customers love using these different tools but they need a more integrated experience. Not having that means you’re always switching back and forth and there’s a lot of friction.

    New Launch Evolves the Dropbox Experience To a Living Team Workspace, Says CEO Drew Houston
  • There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    “There really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud,” says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. “There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.”

    George Kurtz, Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, discusses their IPO (today) and CrowdStrike’s unique position as the first cloud platform for security in an interview on CNBC:

    We Built The First Cloud Platform For Security

    We’ll let the market dictate the (stock) pricing. What we’re focused on is really building long-term value for shareholders and obviously making sure that our customers are protected. That’s the way we built the business, focusing on preventing breaches for our customers. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security.

    When you think about Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce, there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud platform for security. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security. That was one of our goals when Demetri Alperovitch and I started the company in 2011. This cloud platform has allowed us to stop breaches and to scale different modules that really hit a specific customer need. It’s been well received by our customers.

    A Big Part Of Our Platform Is Collecting Data At Scale

    CrowdStrike really runs on your endpoint or computer or your server or workload in the cloud. What we found with traditional antivirus, as an example, we do way more than that, is that signature-based technologies were just not capable of stopping breaches. So a big part of our platform is actually collecting data at scale. We collect a trillion events per week. We use that data to train our machine learning algorithms and we can identify attacks and breaches that have never been seen before at the speed of the network.

    This crowdsourcing aspect, which is the crowd in CrowdStrike, really has enabled us to identify these attacks that are causing the most damage to large and small organizations around the globe. They just haven’t been able to do that with traditional, I call fossilized, vendors that are in the market. This architecture has really changed the game for us.

    Obviously, security is an evolving area. Adversaries continue to change their tactics. The good part about AI is that you can evolve it to identify these sorts of threats no matter if it’s stealing intellectual property or credit card information or breaking in and destroying data on someone’s computer. What’s important to realize is that at cloud-scale, and the way we operate, we have the ability to take all this data, synthesize it, and provide the best protection and prevention methodologies for our customers.

    AI Is Great But It Is Not a Panacea

    It’s really all about the data. You hear a lot about AI and AI is great but it has to be used in the right ways. It’s not a panacea. So it’s easy to come up with an algorithm but it’s really hard to collect this data at scale and be able to train these AI algorithms. This is really one of the things that we spent a lot of time on, building a very scalable architecture to get this data in (into our Threat Graph), which is one of the most advanced security databases around.

    It really allows us to get better efficacy and lower false positive rates in detecting these breaches. In my view, it’s all about the data. We will continue to get more and more data. It’s that network effect. Our threat graph gets smarter the more data we actually consume.

    CrowdStrike Threat Graph

    We See The Tip of The Breach Being The Endpoint

    When we look at the threats, whether it’s a nation-state or whether it’s an e-crime group obviously, the threats are evolving and they’re rapid. There are hundreds of thousands of new pieces of malware that come out every day. It’s incumbent on companies to be able to protect themselves. It’s just been an area that’s been underserved because most of the existing technologies have focused on stopping malware instead of stopping breaches, which is again part of our core mission.

    If you look in the past, there’s been a lot of point product companies that have come out and try to solve a specific problem. But if you just step back, the problem that most companies are trying to solve is not being breached. Whether that’s network technology or endpoint technology, at the end of the day we see the tip of the breach being the endpoint. That’s where the data resides, the servers, the endpoints, the desktops, and that’s what we’re protecting.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security

    From that standpoint, if you look back in history there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud. There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s the ability to rapidly install our technology, just have it work, and be able to scale with us and use different modules with that single agent architecture. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz
  • EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    “There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on,” says Qualtrics CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Smith. “So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.”

    Ryan Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Qualtrics, discusses the genesis of Qualtrics and how it has evolved into a sophisticated and integral platform for the enterprise in an extensive interview with Jason Calacanis:

    We View Ourselves As a System Of Action

    In the beginning, it was very much around being able to collect data, kind of being on the front end of that. You were able to collect data. You were able to put it into an analytical system and then you were able to report on it. Because of that, we were kind of branded as this survey platform for a long time. I’d say over the last eight to ten years all the survey is a form. There’s a form engine that allows you to do anything you could ever want to do with a form. A form can be through text, a form can be through a chatbot, it can be through anything. Then there’s an analytical platform and then there’s a reporting platform.

    A lot of our investment has been into actioning. We view ourselves as a system of action. How do you actually gather data that doesn’t exist? What experience management is — most organizations are in a world where they’ve resigned to the fact that they have all the data that they need. From our standpoint and what we see it’s the opposite. We’ve got operational systems that are telling us what’s happened. But the “why” is able to be collected in ways that never could have been done in 2002 because we have such amazing access to people. We think it’s just starting, especially now that we can go gather the “why” data through 13 or 14 different methods. It all comes together and you get a full picture. You see what happened and now you get to see “why” and that’s pretty powerful.

    If you’re thinking about the Google Analytics side it would be like these people visit our site. These people abandoned their shopping carts. These people are doing this. Or I’m an LA Hotel and I see a bunch of people from LA visiting. I don’t know why they’re visiting. They’re not staying with me. They used Qualtrics and the first ten people say that they’re there for the happy hour menu. The one person shop running IT just pops up the happy hour menu through Qualtrics without changing their whole website. Now they’re at home and they’re delivering a great experience and it only shows up for the people from LA.

    EmployeeXM – Coolest, Easiest, and Most Sophisticated

    If you look at the airline industry one of the interesting things is we power probably all the feedback on the 30 or 40 different airlines around the world. Most people know Qualtrics for the customer feedback because they’ll fly and they’ll get an email or a text that says thumbs-up thumbs-down, how was your experience? What we’ve seen as we launched the XM (Experience Management) platform, and this is what SAP is so excited about, we created this category because of all the uses we were seeing on Qualtrics. Our employee experience was taking off in a way where we were like, whoa, 50 percent of the customer problems have to do with an employee.

    Then at the same time, the average tenure here in the Bay Area is like 18 months. I don’t know one CEO that says we’re going to go recruit and spend all this money but we’re going to bring people in for only 18 months. So there’s a massive gap. There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on. So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.

    The Inside Manifests Itself On the Outside

    From the time they start in the company to the time they exit how do we know everything that’s going? Even in the recruiting process, how do we make sure that as a company what we think we’re delivering is being received on the other side? I believe the inside manifests itself on the outside. We’re seeing this across brands. Now we’re seeing the customer and the employee. If you look in an airline, they’re using us on the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand side.

    If you look at when someone goes and shows up to a gate a lot of times they’re upset before they even get there. The employee deals with an upset customer and that impacts the entire experience. When you rate or you think about how your flight was you’re only thinking about the brand. It’s a bunch of experiences tied together. We’re helping organizations manage all their experiences for the first time on one single platform. It doesn’t make sense that you’ve got five different software’s doing this. We’re doing this at an enterprise level. That’s how people are using it.

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product – Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith
  • Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP

    “The long-term goal (with Alexa) was to try to invent the Star Trek computer,” says David Limp, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services. “I grew up watching Roddenberry and loved it. We all loved watching it and the science had moved up enough where we thought we had a shot at it. It’s still going to take us years, if not decades more, to get to the shining star that is that Star Trek computer. But we think we can do it.”

    David Limp, SVP of Devices & Services at Amazon, discusses the future of devices and Amazon’s role in building trust and protecting privacy in an interview on CNBC at the Amazon re:MARS conference in Las Vegas:

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer

    The long-term goal (with Alexa) was to try to invent the Star Trek computer. I grew up watching Roddenberry and loved it. It was a lot more innocent than you might make it out to be. Which is, can we invent that computer? We all loved watching it and the science had moved up enough where we thought we had a shot at it. It’s still going to take us years, if not decades more, to get to the shining star that is that Star Trek computer. But we think we can do it.

    If you have that in your house or in your car or in your conference room, you’re going to find all sorts of things to do with it. Some, Amazon will invent and it’ll help Amazon. But much more, it’ll help developers. There are 90,000 plus skills and hundreds of thousands of developers building around Alexa right now. If you’d five years ago said there’s going to be a new developer ecosystem that’s not about an operating system and that’s not about applications, but about skills in the cloud, you would have laughed at me. But here it is sitting in front of us, all around us, right here.

    Star Trek popularized the idea of the Voice First computer. Amazon Alexa made it reality.

    Our Focus Is To Invent On Behalf Of Customers

    Our focus is to invent on behalf of customers. If we keep our focus there and build cool things that customers love to use and continue to earn their trust, which we have to do every day, then we think the outputs will speak for themselves. We focus on that. Customer trust is kind of the oil of the Amazon flywheel. We think about it every day. It’s thinking about privacy as you think about the kinds of products that we’re doing. Whether it’s a Ring doorbell or it’s an Echo sitting in your kitchen, it has to be foundational to the product. It’s not something you glom on later as an afterthought.

    We think about it at the very upfront when we’re beginning to invent the product. We’re gonna put these in our homes. What do we want to think about privacy? What do we think about trust? We build features into the products and into the services where (those concepts) are first and foremost and paramount. We’re continuing to evolve that as well. It’s not like you’re going to get everything right day one. As we learn from customers we’ll add new features and services that build on that and add more privacy and trust as we go on.

    The First Thing Is To Get Customers To Love A Product

    The first thing is to get customers to love a product. If you build a product that customers love and use then good things usually come in consumer electronics when you do that. For us, that’s the first thing that you want to do. It happened early on with Kindle. People loved it and then we figured out how to build a book business around it. Similarly, the great thing about Echo and Alexa is that customers love the product.

    I don’t think that they’re necessarily buying more yet because of that but they are doing certain things in digital that leads to buying some more things. Specifically, we’ve kind of brought music back into the home again. It had an atrophied in the home. Now music subscription services, Spotify, Amazon music, and Apple music starting last year. They’re growing on Echo and Alexa. People are listening to audiobooks. We have a business there in Audible with the subscription services. Those are the early signs where you start seeing that. In addition, people are buying more smart home products. Whether it’s a smart plug or a light bulb or a robotic vacuum, people are buying those more because it’s easier to control with a voice interface.

    Anything That Advances Privacy For Customers, I’m a Fan Of

    Anything that advances privacy for customers and gives them a more trusted environment, I’m a big fan of as a consumer. I don’t know enough about that product (announced on Monday by Apple) to weigh in on the specifics of it. As you think about Amazon and our credentials and being able to log on to Amazon, we’ve been doing that for 20 plus years. Your credit card number and your address which we ship your products to, that’s sacrosanct. We have to build trust every day. Any other company or any other person that’s furthering that I think it’s just great for the industry.

    Long-Term Goal With Alexa Is To Invent the Star Trek Computer, Says Amazon SVP David Limp
  • AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics

    AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics

    “This is next-generation sequencing,” says CareDx CEO Peter Maag. “It’s really the future in Diagnostics. We are applying this technology to match an organ with the recipient on a very granular level. We do that in organ transplantation, in bone marrow transplantation, and in transplantation overall. Now in the post-transplant area, we can actually detect the DNA of the transplanted organ in the bloodstream of the recipient. That’s a very novel technology.”

    Peter Maag, CEO of CareDx, discusses how their revolutionary AI-powered sequencing technology is extending the lives of organ transplant recipients and is the future in medical diagnostics. Maag was interviewed on Bloomberg Technology:

    AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics

    There are really two big issues in organ transplantation. On the one hand, you need to match an organ to a recipient. After transplantation, you need to care for that patient throughout the lifetime of that patient. We are applying very novel sequencing technology for matching the organ with the recipient. After that, we’re using the same sequencing technology to care for these patients detecting rejection episodes early and making sure that clinicians have the information to treat patients and to prevent rejection episodes from occurring in the past.

    This is next-generation sequencing. It’s really the future in Diagnostics. We are applying this technology to match an organ with the recipient on a very granular level. We do that in organ transplantation, in bone marrow transplantation, and in transplantation overall. Now in the post-transplant area, we can actually detect the DNA of the transplanted organ in the bloodstream of the recipient. That’s a very novel technology. The cell-free DNA technology is revolutionizing how we can care for patients because it detects rejection episodes earlier. When you add on this an artificial intelligence platform that allows clinicians to have a deeper insight in aggregating all the various data streams, it allows them to make better decisions and potentially detect issues much earlier than they can do today.

    Clear Focus To Improve Patients Lives By 3 Years

    We have a very clear focus as an organization to improve patients lives by three years. We’re very early in the ability to impact this but we are building an amazing platform at CareDX in order to do so. We can focus on immune modulation. We can focus on adherence and compliance and making sure that patients are actually taking their meds and seeing their doctors on a regular interval.

    Afterward, we also can focus on standardization and precision medicine, individualizing the care that the individual patient receives. The perfect care for that individual patient is really what we’re all about at CareDX. We’re applying precision medicine tools to the field of transplantation. We have built a tremendous platform to deliver and partner with the transplant ecosystem to make that available to transplant patients.

    A $2 Billion Market Opportunity

    This is really an amazing growth story. We have built this tremendous platform in transplant medicine. Over the last 18 months, we have already achieved five percent patient penetration in kidney transplant patients in the U.S. We see this as a $2 billion market opportunity. When we talked about this $2 billion market opportunity four or five years ago people were wondering, why is that? The reason is that these transplant patients really live for 10 to 15 years and there’s a recurring revenue opportunity for us on testing these patients throughout the lifetime of the patient.

    So CareDX has a model that follows these patients over a very long period of time, which financially is very attractive. But much more important, we are changing patients lives by making sure that we are detecting rejection episodes early. This is scientifically very interesting.

    AI Platform Will Role Out Into Many Other Areas

    You have on the one hand or transplantation is a unique opportunity in the context of being at the pinnacle of medical science. Some have called it the miracle of medicine. It truly is. If you think about it, innovation really happens at the top of the innovation curve. If you have innovation at the top of the pyramid this will allow us to learn a lot for other areas.

    We are doing now in transplantation about the top 200 medical centers in the United States that are doing transplantation. Once we have built an ecosystem that allows us to have artificial intelligence and augmented intelligence relationships with these centers and integrate into electronic medical records we can role that platform out into many other areas.

    AI-Powered Sequencing Technology Is The Future In Medical Diagnostics – Peter Maag, CEO of CareDx
  • Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    “Without data, there’s no great AI, says Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica. “Now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.”

    Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica, discusses how data is the lifeblood of the enterprise in an interview on theCUBE at Informatica World 2019:

    Without Data There is No Great AI

    The language that AI needs or speaks is data. Without data, there’s no great AI. This is something that we’ve known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.

    It has really helped to improve productivity and automate mundane tasks. There’s a massive skills gap and I think you look around the economy is fully saturated with jobs. There is still so much work to be done with more data and different data. AI is helping make some of those mundane activities become a lot easier and autonomous.

    Data is Becoming a Platform of Its Own

    Our data scientists have gone from heroes to superheroes. Think about it. What we are seeing in this world is that data is becoming a platform of its own. It is getting decoupled from the databases, from the applications, and from the infrastructure. To truly be able to leverage AI and build applications on top you cannot let it be siloed and be held hostage to its individual infrastructure components. We’ve seen that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along.

    In that context, the catalog becomes a very pivotal start because you want to get a fuller view of everything. You’re not going to be able to move all of your data to one place. It’s impossible. But understanding that metadata is where enterprises are going and then from there you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can also have an analytics journey in the cloud with an AWS or an Azure. You can have complete governance and security and privacy journey while understanding anomalous activity.

    Metadata Is the New OS

    Data is everywhere. It’s like the blood flowing through your body. You’re not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics. You’re going to let it be there. We say that metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place, and from there let AI run on it. What we think about AI is this; LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leverage the machine learning algorithm to create a social graph about you and me. If I’m connected to John I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer.

    When I’m doing analytics and I’m basically searching for some report, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level now we can tell you that this is another table or another report or another user and so on. We can give you help back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. That’s an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics, which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at enterprise scale.

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica’s Amit Walia
  • Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO

    “The reality is that attackers are targeting people,” says Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele. “They’ve done it traditionally on email but it’s expanding as more and more applications or workloads are running in the cloud. That’s where people are and that’s where they can be targeted. The point when people migrate to the cloud is a very important point where companies reconsider their security strategy.”

    Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint, discusses how the migration of companies to the cloud is significantly impacting security in an interview on CNBC:

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud

    The reality is that attackers are targeting people. They’ve done it traditionally on email but it’s expanding as more and more applications or workloads are running in the cloud. That’s where people are and that’s where they can be targeted. So we’re excited about our announcement of an acquisition last week called Meta Networks. It gives us the ability to help companies control the access of their employees and it fits naturally with this broader cloud strategy that we’ve been rolling out.

    The point when people migrate to the cloud is a very important point where companies reconsider their security strategy. Traditionally it was the perimeter that controlled everything. Today there really isn’t a perimeter as more and more of these apps and workloads end up in the cloud. One of the things that we liked about this new acquisition of Meta Networks is that one compromised person can’t bring the whole network down. You can really control the access for every single person. That’s a natural complement of how we think about securing the cloud.

    Key Driver For Our Business is Broad Migration To the Cloud

    One of the key drivers for our business has been this broad migration to the cloud and specifically to Office 365. We’ve been benefiting as organizations reconsidered their on-premise strategy and think about the cloud. Office 365 is an important way for them to go and they need additional security controls than what Microsoft’s providing today and we’re helping those customers be successful in a Microsoft environment. It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot going on globally. The geopolitical environment is very much at unrest and when those times happen you see a lot more global threat activity. As a result, that bodes well for our business over time, unfortunately.

    Broadly one of the philosophies we’ve had as a company is to have a strong ecosystem to make it easier for customers to digest all that security infrastructure. It’s everybody from an Okta, which we announced a relationship in the Fall, to relationships that we’ve had for a long time like Palo Alto Networks. We have basically done the technical integration between our products to make it out-of-the-box easy for our customers. We have many customers running on the broader G Suite and we support that just like we support Office 365.

    Threat Actors Taking Over Your Email Has Phenomenal Implications

    The one big theme and we’ve been seeing it for a while now, it’s been almost a year, but it’s really important, is threat actors taking over people’s email accounts. Think about someone owning your email account being able to send email as you. That has phenomenal implications. So we’re helping companies today identify that, remediate those kinds of events, and be safer as they move to Office 365 or Google for that matter.

    The primary threat actor that we’re seeing there is a threat actor group out of West Africa. But we do see it broadly used and employed by a range of threat actors. Two-factor authentication is a good start (to prevent this threat). Then we can obviously help detect and remediate.

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele
  • Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    “What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from,” says John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle. “One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information.”

    John Barcus, Vice President Manufacturing Industries at Oracle, discusses how technologies such as AI and blockchain are now helping companies manage huge volumes of IoT data in an interview with technology influencer Ronald van Loon:

    Companies Are Moving Toward Selling Products as a Service

    I think that (manufacturers connecting all the processes digitally) is the way that will differentiate them. It’s really the only way the companies will be able to survive into the future. There are all these business models and it has become significantly more competitive than it has been in the past. Companies have to work faster and they have to be more responsive to what their customer needs are. The only way really of doing that is to connect the various aspects of the business. They can’t work in silos anymore. That really will give you the whole value of the business.

    One area that companies are moving away from is selling products. They’re going into selling more services which we’ve actually seen for some time. But what they’re now getting into is these new models where they might be selling products as a service. If you think about how do you sell a product as a service and the ability to support that it is a lot different than it was before. Connecting to that product and being able to anticipate activities, anticipate needs, anticipate failures, and to be able to monitor how it’s performing, how the customers use it and are able to expand on that to be able to provide a better outcome for the customer are important components.

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value

    What’s interesting is that IoT has been around for a long time but as companies start to enable it and start to leverage it more and more there’s just huge volumes of data that have to be managed and be able to analyze and be able to execute from. One of the technologies that is really exciting is this whole concept of AI. It really allows you to use that information and correlate it with a lot of different pieces of information. You can correlate with the data that might be in your ERP and your MES and other sources of information and actually provide some real value and provide the real outcomes. It can now do some predictions where it would be actually physically impossible for people to do the same type of calculations that they’ve been doing in the past with this huge volume today.

    The second area where there seems to be a little hesitation at the moment is around blockchain. But the technology is there and people have been trying to identify how best to use it. Some of the use cases that are coming out now are going to be quite impressive. I think the little bit of a lull was deserved. People who looked at it anticipate a little bit more than what was possible and now they’re really starting to develop some good use cases. I think there’s a lot of opportunities in that area.

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP John Barcus


  • Oracle CEO: Applications Market Changes Significantly As It Moves to Cloud

    Oracle CEO: Applications Market Changes Significantly As It Moves to Cloud

    “The applications market is about $125 billion per year,” says Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud. As it moves to cloud, the subscription that you pay for the cloud includes not only the application but includes all of the hardware, the servers, and storage. It becomes a bigger market just by the very nature of the migration of the application to SAAS.”

    Recently, Hurd noted that all of their current customers will eventually move to the cloud. “We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move to the cloud,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd. “In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move on their time frame. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.”

    Mark Hurd, CEO of Oracle, discusses their NetSuite acquisition and the growing size of the applications market as it moves to the cloud in an interview on Fox Business. Hurd was in Las Vegas for the Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld event:

    NetSuite Acquisition Has Been an Amazing Success

    We’ve invested a lot in the applications market. We’ve invested in big and small segments of the market. Big customers and small customers. We acquired NetSuite about two and a half years ago it’s really been an amazing success. There are roughly 10,000 customers here (in Las Vegas) for our event (Oracle NetSuite SuiteWorld). It is very exciting.

    When we bought NetSuite the company was growing about 16 percent in revenue. We’ve invested a lot in R&D and in tailoring the application for more industries. We’ve added sales people as well. It has resulted in incredible growth. Starting about a year ago we began to really grow our booking and that’s now translated to revenue. Last quarter we reported revenue that was almost double the revenue growth we had coming into the acquisition.

    Applications Market Changes Significantly As It Moves to Cloud

    There is a couple of phenomena going on at the same time. The applications market is about $125 billion per year. That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud. As it moves to cloud, the subscription that you pay for the cloud includes not only the application but includes all of the hardware, the servers, and storage. It becomes a bigger market just by the very nature of the migration of the application to SAAS.

    Inside that $125 billion about $75 billion is back office. That would be described as things like general ledger, accounting, supply chain, procurement, and HR. The other 30 percent is front office including things like sales automation and marketing automation. NetSuite has played in the mid-market, small customer side of that back office market. It’s had explosive growth. When you ask who’s moving (to the cloud), it’s really everybody from the biggest guys, whether those be as big as an AT&T all the way to your smaller startup.

    If you look today, half of the cloud application customers (and revenue) that we have came from our base and half came from outside.

    Oracle CEO Mark Hurd – Application Market Changes as it Moves to Cloud
  • We Expect To See the Peak of 5G In 2023, Says Ranplan Wireless CEO

    We Expect To See the Peak of 5G In 2023, Says Ranplan Wireless CEO

    “With respect to rollouts, what we expect, and there has been a lot of trials going on and a lot of demonstrations going on, but the initial trials were in-building last year,” says Alastair Williamson, CEO of Ranplan Wireless. “We expect these to accelerate in 2019 and we expect to see the peak of 5G coming through in about 2023.”

    Alastair Williamson, CEO of Ranplan Wireless, discusses the complex challenges of rolling out 5G in an interview with RCR Wireless News:

    We Expect To See the Peak of 5G In 2023

    5G was the main theme in Mobile World Congress 2019. That was not just with operators, but also with vendors. Let’s put it into perspective from where we come from and look at the 5G themes with respect to wireless network planning. What’s become apparent is that all the initial deployments in 5G are going to be within buildings and in dense urban areas, which is a key focus for Ranplan.

    Our tool is designed for planning and building wireless networks in conjunction with outdoor urban environments. With respect to rollouts, what we expect, and there has been a lot of trials going on and a lot of demonstrations going on, but the initial trials were in-building last year. We expect these to accelerate in 2019 and we expect to see the peak of 5G coming through in about 2023.

    Complex Challenges to a 5G Rollout

    Just to focus on the Japanese opportunity, we did secure a large order in Japan through our reseller early this year. The main challenges that operators are going to face when it comes to rolling out 5G networks can really be split into two different categories. The first challenge is 5G is complex. There is new feature functionality that is being brought into 5G such as beamforming and massive MIMO. These are all new capabilities that the planning tool has to cope with. We’ve invested a lot of money in 2018 to get our tool 5G ready so we’re compliant with all the 5G NR standards. We can actually demonstrate that capability now and customers are actually using our tool now to deploy trial 5G networks.

    The second complexity that our customers taught us about is how to plan networks in the millimeter wave space, so 28 gigahertz and above. Radio waves interact very differently the higher spectrums compared with traditional lower spectrums that mobile networks have been deployed in, so at Ranplan we’ve developed a propagation engine and that allows you to propagate all the way up to about 60 gigahertz. We’re way into the millimeter wave space. From a propagation perspective, we can support these high frequencies. We’ve also done a lot of work on understanding how those radio waves interact with different materials such as concrete, brick, wood, trees, people, and water. We’ve done all of that investigative research and we’ve put that information into our tool to allow us to actually predict very accurate 5G planning.

    More 5G Focus on Public Safety and Industrial IoT Markets

    We repositioned our products a bit at Mobile World Congress to specifically fit to specific markets. Ranplan Professional is still our flagship products allows you to design in-building wireless networks in conjunction with dense urban outdoor wireless networks. But we also launched a new product called Ranplan In-Building where we’ve taken the outdoor capability away from it and it focuses solely on customers who just want to design and plan in-building. wireless networks. We also launched another product called Ranplan In-Building Light which is focusing on the public safety market. We took a lot of the feature functionality that was not required for public Safety and put in new feature functionality that the public safety market demands and we launched that product at Mobile World Congress 2019.

    Our plans for 2019 I split that into two separate areas with a look at the business first and then the market. In 2018 we doubled our revenues from 2017. In 2019, we’ve already received purchase orders which are in excess of our total 2018 revenue. From a business perspective it is about keeping that momentum going. From a market perspective, a lot of our focus has been in Japan, the US, South Korea, and Asia-Pac We’re going to continue that focus but we’re also going to put a lot more focus onto public safety and a lot more focus on the Industrial Internet of Things. There’s a real pent up demand in those markets to look at a planning tool to help roll these networks out.


  • Google Unveils Stadia Game Streaming Platform and is Dead Serious About Eliminating Barriers and Making High-End Gaming Accessible for Everyone

    Google Unveils Stadia Game Streaming Platform and is Dead Serious About Eliminating Barriers and Making High-End Gaming Accessible for Everyone

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled their Stadia game streaming platform at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco today. Stadia is designed to bring high-end gaming to Chrome and other devices and aims to eliminate the many barriers to gaming. It will likely be a subscription service similar to Netflix but focused on games that can be played without a console right in Chrome or other devices.

    Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, introduces Stadia, Google’s new streaming gaming platform at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco:

    Biggest Impact of Gaming is How it Pushes Technology Forward

    Perhaps the biggest impact of gaming is how it pushes us to make big leaps in computing and networking power, high fidelity graphics, and the infrastructure that supports it all. All of it is pushing computing and technology forward and I find it really exciting. At Google, we have always believed that technology should adapt to people. Not the other way around. We’ve been building towards this vision for some time. For example, when we launched Chrome a decade ago we envisioned that it could be a modern platform for web applications. We wanted to bring the power of the web to everyone including use cases that seemed impossible at that time like high-quality games.

    Finally, we are making progress towards that goal. In fact, over the last two years, we’ve been hard at work on game streaming technology. Last Fall, we launched our first public test with Project Stream. But a technical test wasn’t the whole view of our ambition. It was probably the worst kept secret in the industry. Internally, we were actually testing our ability to stream high fidelity graphics over a low agency network. We learned that we could bring a triple-A game to any device with a Chrome browser and an internet connection, using the best of Google to create a powerful game platform.

    Google Committed to Paying Billions to Game Developers

    When we say best of Google, it always starts with our cloud and networking infrastructure. Our custom server hardware and data centers can bring more computing power to more people on planet Earth than anyone else. Today, we are in 19 regions, and in over 200 countries and territories connected by hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optic cables. The best of Google also includes our open platforms that allow us to reach billions of people. With Google, your games will be immediately discoverable by over two billion people on a Chrome browser, Chrome Books, Chrome Cast, Pixel Devices, and we have plans to support more browsers and devices over time. That’s in addition to all of the people playing and watching games across YouTube and Google Play.

    When we build these ecosystems, we always take the approach that we only succeed when our partners do. Collectively, our partners across web, Google Play, and YouTube have earned more than $110 billion over the last four years alone. We are committed to this approach here as well. So now, we have focused on our next big effort, which is to build a game platform for everyone. And, when we say for everyone, we really mean it. It is one of our most cherished values as a company. Be it Android or Chrome or AI, we are dead serious about making technology accessible for everyone.

    Google is Dead Serious About Eliminating Barriers

    But, if you think about games, there are a lot of barriers for users to play high-end games. Beautiful graphics really need high-end consoles or PCs. And games don’t have instant access. Think about the way the web works. You can easily share a link and it works seamlessly. We want games to feel that way too. Instantly enjoyable with access for everyone.

    I think we can change the game by bringing together the power and creativity of the entire community, people who love to play games, people who love to watch games, and people who love to build games. That means all of you. We are really excited to work with you. We want to build a platform and we want you to show us what’s possible. And together, I think we can create a new games experience powered by best of Google and built for everyone.


  • 5G to Change the Form Factor of Devices, Says Qualcomm President

    5G to Change the Form Factor of Devices, Says Qualcomm President

    Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon sees enormous potential for 5G to change the form factor of devices. “The most important thing is as you change your experience with 5G you’re going to want a different type of device and a different type of screen size and resolution,” says Amon. “The apps are also going to become way more powerful and you will actually have more powerful hardware that goes along with.”

    Cristiano Amon, President of Qualcomm Inc., discusses how 5G is going to prompt changes to the form factor of mobile devices in an interview with Bloomberg Technology at MWC Barcelona 2019:

    5G to Change the Form Factor of Devices

    I feel that there’s enormous potential for 5G to change the form factor of devices. We’re very proud of this partnership with Samsung and how they have been a great partner pioneering this new technology with us. We also see a number of different devices being announced and we see a potential for form factors to change. The most important thing is as you change your experience with 5G you’re going to want a different type of device and a different type of screen size and resolution. The apps are also going to become way more powerful and you will actually have more powerful hardware that goes along with.

    Bigger screens are here to stay. I think you will see the opportunity for larger screens as you have flexible OLED technology. You’re also going to see devices that are more specialized for more capable gaming because 5G will allow you to have mainstream gaming on 5G devices. You’re going to see devices there are going to converge between productivity. Over time, we expect to see virtual reality or augmented reality devices as well as a companion to your phone that is going to be using 5G technology. We hope that they look like eyeglasses.

    Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Technology

    One of the big announcements we’ve made at the show (MWC Barcelona 2019), we’re very proud of it, is the Qualcomm 5G PowerSave technology. That is actually a technology that is allowing the first generation of 5G phones to allow you to have all-day battery life. We have a very mature smartphone base today and users won’t settle for any less than we have on your phones currently. I think that’s the bar for those new 5g flagships. We’re happy a number of OEMs announced phones at this show with this technology.

    I will do a comparison because I think sometimes we forget about what happened in 4G. When we were about this time launching 4G technology, that was over a decade ago, we had two operators and four devices. Look where we are right now. We have 20 operators and 30 devices. It’s an order of magnitude different. Actually, it’s a proxy about how much faster 5G is going to get deployed.

  • AI and Robotics Are Fundamentally Changing Healthcare

    AI and Robotics Are Fundamentally Changing Healthcare

    AI, machine learning, and robotics are fundamentally changing healthcare, says Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky. “One of the most exciting parts of my job right now is to see the technology that’s usually equated with California and the West Coast,” said Gorsky. “Whether it’s AI, machine learning or robotics, you’re seeing it more and more being integrated into healthcare.”

    Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson CEO, discusses the reinvention of healthcare via technological innovation in an interview on CNBC’s Mad Money:

    AI, Machine Learning, Robotics Integrated Into Healthcare

    One of the most exciting parts of my job right now is to see the technology that’s usually equated with California and the West Coast. Whether it’s AI, machine learning or robotics, you’re seeing it more and more being integrated into healthcare. With this remarkable partnership that we have now with Apple where we’re taking this technology built into the iWatch to help detect things like atrial fibrillation or when you get a heart fluttering earlier. We know that there are over 35 million people around the world that suffer from this condition.

    If we can detect that earlier we can get them to write medication and we can help them be compliant on these medications over a longer period of time. Ultimately we’re going to save lives. I think it really shows how some of this new technology is coming to healthcare in new, innovative, and unique ways. We couldn’t have even imagined this just a few years ago. We’re talking about algorithms that are built into the watch that are monitoring health in real-time. It can detect these anomalies far before something really manifests itself that the patient’s going to recognize in the terms of symptoms.

    Robotics Technology Fundamentally Changing Healthcare

    Auris (recently acquired) is another great example of how this technology is fundamentally changing the way we’re thinking about healthcare. Today, less than five percent of surgeries are done with a robot or digitally. In the future, we think that’s going to be significantly greater. What we’re so excited about is just as technology has changed the way that we drive a car, where you pull up your map system or you see that light go on if you start to change lanes, think about that in surgery.

    Robotics Technology via Auris is Fundamentally Changing Healthcare

    Suddenly, a surgeon can go in preoperatively, utilized imaging to help him or her really navigate their way specifically to the lesion, and they can actually get guidance. We know that’s going to lead to better precision, better outcomes for the patient, and better value overall for the healthcare system.

    Healthcare Being Reinvented by Technology

    Think of it, for example, with our Auris Monarch Platform which is used for something called bronchoscopy. Now, if you happen to have a lesion or a tumor at a very far out section in your lung, they, of course, would have to go in through minimally invasive surgery to do a biopsy to better diagnose what you have. Imagine we take a tree and turn it upside down and that tree is your lung. We can run this wire down through the system, way out to the outer ends of the leaf. Think of it almost like the acorn.

    Once we get there we can do a biopsy or we can use imaging in the future to actually determine what kind of a cancer it is, or we could deliver a therapeutic, perhaps a new kind of immuno-oncology agent to that specific lesion, or we could go ahead and cut it out. Those are the kinds of things are being made possible by this new technology at a company like Auris.

    AI, Machine Learning, and Robotics Are Fundamentally Changing Healthcare

  • Oil & Gas 4.0 – ADNOC Embracing Digitalization

    Oil & Gas 4.0 – ADNOC Embracing Digitalization

    The world of oil and gas in the Middle East, although very lucrative, still operates in a very traditional way. But that’s changing. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is the state-owned oil company of the United Arab Emirates and holds the seventh-largest proven reserves of oil in the world at 97.8 billion barrels.

    ADNOC is embracing digitalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a big way. They are calling it Oil & Gas 4.0.

    Abdul Nasser Al Mughairbi, Senior Vice President, Digital, ADNOC Group, tells the audience at the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum in Abu Dhabi that the oil and gas industry must embrace digitalization:

    We Have to Embrace Digitalization

    ADNOC is a national oil and gas company that has been in business for more than 45 years. We have been a solid and reliable provider of oil in the market, of energy, of refined products, and of petrochemicals. We are also a company that fueled the growth of the UAE. We are so proud of our company that we thought maybe we need to go to the next step. We are looking forward in how we are going to develop ADNOC to meet the challenges of the new and future demands.

    Global energy demand is growing and is fueled by a bigger middle class coming on the market with more consumers. To understand this and to become an oil company of the future we have to change. We have to embrace innovation. We have to embrace change. We have to embrace digitalization. We look at this as our way of fueling Future Industry 4.0, the future revolution. We call it Oil & Gas 4.0.

    Digitalization Starts With Big Data

    We see this as a methodology for us to be agile, to be flexible, and to impact and speed up the decision making process. In this day and age of information superhighways that are changing and social media everything gets impacted by everything. You hear people in the East impacted by people in the West. Where does an oil and gas company fit into this? Do we transform ourselves into just an energy company? Are we a product company?

    Regardless of where we go and regardless of our smart growth strategy and how we want to be a reliable supplier, digitalization fits right in the center of this. Where does our digitalization start? Our digitalization starts with our big data. Everybody says it’s culture. Yes, but the foundation is big data.

    The Foundation is Connectivity

    The foundation is connectivity. We have 14 operating companies that are all connected. In reality, we are operating in one geographical location. On the ground we are connected through pipelines throughout our facilities. We share facilities and products. We supply and give to each other and we do a lot of work together. Yet, our decision making process was not compliant. It was silo-based because we are 14 operating companies. Upstream and downstream.

    All of you know the difference in culture between upstream and downstream, between manufacturing and the cowboys of the upstream. They make so much money, and we need them definitely, but digitalization has always been a part of the downstream. Remember, we are the original IoT. We had sensors everywhere. We were operating the plants using sensors in a closed network. We were doing this for such a long time. Now, this has moved out.

    Real-Time Data Screen Like the Star Trek Enterprise

    What did we do in ADNOC? Based on our big data and our connectivity that was already there, a lot of subsurface activity in data, we collected all this in one location. We did this through a fiber optic network, through 4G wifi, and made this connection is a secure closed network. We brought all the data in real-time to ADNOC’s head office.

    We put this screen (below) on one floor as a panorama. It was an exciting journey to build that place. It’s a 50-meter screen and beautiful. The place looks like the Enterprise on Star Trek and it will help ADNOC to go where no other company has gone before!

    Real-Time 50-Meter Data Screen Like the Star Trek Enterprise

    Oil & Gas 4.0

    The way see it is data is there. We collaborate with people in the oil and gas industry but we are looking beyond that. The new technology of artificial intelligence, algorithm, and data analytics, are much more advanced in other industries such as social, marketing, sales, and everywhere else. Yet, we in oil and gas have always been very traditional. In the beginning of the 20th Century and beyond we were the innovators. We drilled where nobody could go. We led the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions. We were fueling it.

    Now how do we fuel the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Oil & Gas 4.0? We do this by harnessing our big data and by putting together connectivity. But what’s more important I think is changing our culture. The culture that we have currently is still a very traditional culture. Our decision-making process takes a very long time. A company of the future needs to take decisions very fast. They have to be accurate. They have to de-risk their investment and understand how to de-risk it.

    Oil & Gas Coping with Technology Moving at Warp Speed

    Things are moving at light speed, at warp speed. We really have to cope with this. To do this we need the information readily available for our management, for our leadership, for our engineers. At the same time, we need to allow these decision processes to go fluidly into the business process. That means we have to reduce costs. We have to look up how we optimize. It’s not oil and gas at any cost. It’s oil and gas at a cost. The cost is very important in the future because that’s sustainability.

    Digitalization will help reduce the environmental impact of our facility. At the initial stage, it’s measurement, monitoring, knowing what we are producing, knowing what we are wasting, and knowing how we impact our environment. How do we do it? We do it through measurement, through optimization, reducing our energy footprint, doing a lot more carbon capturing, and doing less with more. Digitalization helps with that.

    Easy oil is over. Now we have to go with very difficult to extract oil and gas which are very unsafe. Some of our oil reservoirs have 25 percent H2S. It’s a very poisonous gas that can kill. How do we reduce the impact on the environment and the impact on the people? We do this by going into remote operations, by doing a lot more with robotics, drones, all the new technology that is used everywhere else. We need to start adapting it.


  • Geek+ Robotics CEO Says There is No Strong Competitor Outside of China

    Geek+ Robotics CEO Says There is No Strong Competitor Outside of China

    The CEO of Geek+ Robotics Robotics, a China-based company, says they don’t see any strong competition outside of China and this includes the United States. “We’ve already entered Japan, Europe, Australia, and the United States and we are seeing a big demand for robotics and automation,” said Zheng Yong. “We almost cannot see any strong competitor outside of China.”

    Zheng Yong, the CEO of Geek+ Robotics, discussed the companies future this morning on Bloomberg:

    Robotics Market Potential is Quite High

    We think the market potential is quite high. We hope in the next four years we can deliver 20,000 to 50,000 robots per year. Our customers come from two directions. One is the retail companies including ecommerce. The second direction is the manufacturing companies.

    There is very strong competition in China with lots of strong robotics companies that are growing very fast. We are not only starting automation solutions with robots to our customers, but we also provide logistic service to our customers. We own a lot of operational experiences and we combine those experiences inside our system. We have a lot of data and that will be a long-term advantage.

    No Strong Competitor Outside of China

    We haven’t got any money from the Chinese government directly. But because the government is promoting this concept in their Made in China Industrial Plan it can help us in the market. Overseas expansion will be our first priority next year. We’ve already entered Japan, Europe, Australia, and the United States and we are seeing a big demand for robotics and automation. We almost cannot see any strong competitor outside of China.

    Our business is being impacted by the trade sanctions, taxes are higher. Our plan to grow our business in the United States is a little bit slowed down. We want to see the results of the trade conference between China and the US.

    About Geek+ Robotic

    Focusing on Logistics and Warehousing, Geek+ leads the technology revolution, by applying advanced robotics and AI technologies to realize high-flexibility and intelligent logistics automation solution. Geek+ provides leading, reliable, one-stop enterprise-level service with strong technological strength, precise customer understanding, thorough after-sales service, and ISO 9001: 2008 quality system.

    Geek+ R&D team consists of Ph.D. and master graduates from Tsinghua, PKU, CAS, BEIHANG, USTB, etc., with much solid research and practice experience in the fields of robotics, embedded development, software engineering, artificial intelligence, most of them have joined domestic/international robotic contests and won the championship. All products are developed independently and possess the core patents, with a world-class level performance.

  • Domino’s AI-Powered ‘Piedentifier’ Stars in New Ad Campaign

    Domino’s AI-Powered ‘Piedentifier’ Stars in New Ad Campaign

    Domino’s software engineers and digital ad team have created a unique AI-powered ‘Piedentifier’ to launch it’s Super Bowl week marketing blitz. Domino’s is encouraging people to send in a photo of any pizza, even if you made it yourself, and it’s system will determine what type of pizza it is and give you ten points toward a free pizza in their rewards program.

    ‘Piedentifier’ launching for Super Bowl week marketing blitz

    Ritch Allison, CEO of Domino’s Pizza, discussed the new Piedentifier ‘Points for Pies‘ ad campaign with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Domino’s AI-Powered ‘Piedentifier’ Ad Campaign

    We’re going to give Piece of the Pie Rewards points for any pizza. Our customers are going to be able to use our great technology to take a picture of any pizza, send it up to us, and earn ten points toward a free Domino’s Pizza. The great thing about this is our team got together and created something called the ‘Piedentifier.’ What it does is it uses your phone to look for what they have referred to as the open-faced expression of crust sauce and cheese. Anything that looks like a pizza and you’re getting ten points.

    Today we’ve got more than 20 million active members of our Piece of the Pie Rewards program. We don’t know the exact number of how many customers will come on board with us, but as the leader in the pizza category, we see this as a great opportunity not only to grow the overall pizza category, but also to invite new customers in to download our app and to try our product. We feel that when customers try our product we’ve got the opportunity to bring them back again and again.

    This Sunday is a huge day for us. On Super Bowl Sunday, we’re typically up about 40 percent over a normal Sunday. We’ll sell about 2 million pizzas and about four million chicken wings. Each year, it’s the biggest day of the year for us. It tends to not matter which teams are in the game. Certainly in individual cities maybe it does, but broadly across the US it’s a huge day no matter who’s playing.

    Average Franchise Makes $140K Per Year EBITDA

    Opening up a Domino’s Pizza store is still a terrific return for our franchisees. Across the globe cash on cash returns are better than three years in our business. Just a few weeks ago at our Investor Day, we released again our unit level average for our franchisees in the US. Once again it went up. We’re expecting it to be somewhere between $137,000 and $140,000 a unit in the US on EBITDA on a Domino’s Pizza store that you can open for $350,000.

    Driving is Still a Great Opportunity

    Driving for Domino’s is a great opportunity because of the volume that we do out of our stores. In a lot of cases, drivers are able to come in and earn a lot more than they can driving for some of these other businesses. As we continue to tighten down our territories through our fortressing program, it’s giving our drivers the opportunity to get more runs per hour. That means more tips per hour and in turn, higher wages.

    In addition to a job that earns a decent wage driving at Domino’s is also an opportunity potentially to be a franchisee in the long term. Over 90 percent of our franchisees today started as drivers or started in as CSRs answering our phones in our stores.

    Self-Driving Cars Will be Here Someday

    Self-driving cars will be here someday. We don’t exactly know what day but we’re working hard to really try to understand how our customer interface with that car when it pulls up to their curb. They’re used to having a uniformed Domino’s pizza delivery expert bring that pizza to the door. So we’re learning. As the technology evolves we’re going to learn how the customer wants to interact with us and we’ll be ready when it does get here.


  • Aurora is Democratizing Transportation, Says CEO

    Aurora is Democratizing Transportation, Says CEO

    Aurora CEO Chris Urmson says that there is this amazing opportunity to go and take the next step in democratizing transportation. Aurora, an independent autonomous vehicle technology startup, has secured over $530 million in funding led by Sequoia, Amazon, and T. Rowe Price. The inclusion of Amazon in this round raises the prospect that Aurora will help power Amazon’s well-known ambitions to provide autonomous delivery.

    “This is a company that is a technology giant and they’re a massive logistics company,” says Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson. “We’re just excited to have them as a partner and we’ll see if we can make them a customer at some point.”

    Chris Urmson, Co-founder & CEO of autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora, discussed the most recent investment in the company and the future of driverless technology in an interview with Bloomberg Technology:

    It’s Amazing to Have a Great Partner in Amazon

    It’s amazing to have a great partner in Amazon. This is a company that is a technology giant and they’re a massive logistics company. We’re just excited to have them as a partner and we’ll see if we can make them a customer at some point. I can’t really speak to Amazon but let me tell you how we think about it. At Aurora we’re building a driver and that driver can move people and ultimately it will move goods as well. We look at Amazon and see this incredible logistics company and we look at an opportunity to help them with that over time.

    We’re really excited about the investment in Aurora. That’s an incredible vote of confidence for us as a young company. The folks we have around the table with Sequoia and Amazon and T. Rowe Price is great. We’re going to spend it on hiring great people and bringing it in. This is a big problem and we need lots of people and that’ll be a big part of it.

    We’re Building a Driver

    We’re building a driver and the idea is you should be able to get in your car and sit back read a book or have a nap and get from A to B. We’ve been at it for about two years now and we’ve got this great group of people who’ve joined us, so we’re about 200 people now. It’s just exciting to see the progress we’re making on the software. We’re still developing it so we don’t have a product yet that we ship to customers, but our test team is out on the roads. We’ve got vehicles on the roads in California and Pennsylvania as well.

    I think our approach is probably similar to the way that Google is approaching it. They’re building a driver and they’re integrating that. They’re buying vehicles from people and then doing what they’re going to do with it. Our model was to do the thing that we can be the best in the world at, and we think that is building that driving capability. Then we go and work with companies like Volkswagen and Hyundai and ultimately with other companies in the transportation sector. What we’re really excited about though is that we’re actually an independent player. So people that are working with us have confidence that we’re going to be supporting them and their interests.

    Aurora is Democratizing Transportation

    What we’re seeing is this technology that has an incredible opportunity to save lives and make the roads more efficient and make it less expensive and more accessible to get around. Like anything that’s going to be transformational, it takes a while. It’s a new technology and it’s bridging between two industries, between the technology industry and the automotive industry. Anytime you have that level of complexity it takes a while to figure it out.

    We look at it and we see this incredible green field. There’s this amazing opportunity to go and take the next step in democratizing transportation. We’re going to be there with our partners and we think there’s lots of room for others to play too.

    Heart of the Technology is Anticipation

    I think the heart of the technology is really anticipating how others are going to drive on the road. Our vehicles today do a good job of seeing other people, whether it’s a pedestrian or cyclist or another car, and then it’s anticipating what they are about to do next. Are they about to step in the road? Is that vehicle about to make a lane change in front of us? If you can do that well then you become what we talk about as a defensive driver and you avoid these kinds of catch-22 situations.

    There are subtle cues. As a car’s driving along, even if it doesn’t turn on the turn signal, if it starts to drift in the lane it might be about to make a lane change. If you’re approaching an intersection it might be that some car wants to make a move over. Part of the magic of this technology is getting to the point where we’re picking up those subtle cues in the software and then reacting to them safely.

    Car makers are recognizing that this is an important technology. They see this as part of their future. For many of them, they’re going to move from being car makers to companies that provide mobility. The key ingredient to that is having a driver in their system and that’s what Aurora brings to them.

    Aurora is Democratizing Transportation, Says Aurora CEO Chris Urmson