Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says that because they have a founder like Larry Ellison they are focused on generational changes. “At the end of the day what’s in our DNA deeply is to build for the future,” said Hurd.
Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO, discussed Oracle’s growth strategy in an interview earlier today:
We have a technical strategy. It’s very important in a technology company that you have a technology strategy. When you listen to companies that say here’s our strategy, produce a lot of cash flow, buy back stock, increase our dividend… that not a technology strategy.
Lead in Cloud Applications and Database Technology
Our strategy is to lead the applications market as it moves to the cloud and lead the movement of database technology as it moves to the cloud. I think our strategy is irrefutable. That said, almost everything in our company is at some stage in transition, moving from the old model to the new model. The company is going to grow its revenue and applications is just one example of that.
Our DNA is to Build for the Future
When you have a founder like Larry Ellison he’s very focused on generational changes. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about Quarter or care about our year, but at the end of the day what’s in our DNA deeply is to build for the future.
We have in some cases given away revenue that we could have had in the interest of moving our business to where we think the market is headed. If our sole objective was to grow our revenue on a quarterly basis we wouldn’t have deemphasized many of our businesses in order to pursue where we think the market is headed years from now.
If we Were Only Focused on the Short-Term Numbers…
We wouldn’t have made the applications transition. Our applications business is now in aggregate growing double digits. We could have stayed on the old model and probably had some short-term growth better than we had when we went through the transition. But it wouldn’t be where we want to be five years from now.
We’ve pretty much played the long game at every chance to move to where the market is headed. It will result in long-term revenue growth as our legacy businesses as a percent of our revenue goes down.
We Have No Business in Oracle Growing at the Rate of Oracle
We have no business in Oracle growing at the growth rate of Oracle. We have businesses either growing 40 percent or declining 30 percent and as you mix them up you get to the result of Oracle.
As those businesses become a smaller part of our total and the growth businesses become a bigger part of the total revenue will grow. One thing you can say when you look at the numbers is that when we hit revenue growth we know how to turn it into cash flow and earnings.
There Will Be Extreme Growth for Us
Executing the applications strategy, moving our customers, and then taking other peoples customers into the more modern world of SAT, there will be extreme growth for us. The ability to move our database to Gen 2 Oracle cloud infrastructure and Autonomous Database is actually more growth opportunity than the applications business. Just executing those two things is huge for us.
Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at 2018 International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Brussels last night and gave a bold and possibly controversial privacy speech. Cook directly challenged Facebook, and tech companies in general, to change their perspective on privacy. He also said that Apple is fully supportive of ‘a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States.’
Below is the full text of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s speech followed by the full video embed:
Apple CEO Tim Cook – The Privacy Speech
It is an honor to be here with you today in this grand hall, a room that represents what is possible when people of different backgrounds, histories, and philosophies come together to build something bigger than themselves. I am deeply grateful to our hosts. I want to recognize Ventsislav Karadjov for his service and leadership. And it’s a true privilege to be introduced by his co-host, a statesman I admire greatly, Giovanni Butarelli.
Now Italy has produced more than its fair share of great leaders and public servants. Machiavelli taught us how leaders can get away with evil deeds, and Dante showed us what happens when they get caught.
You Set an Example for the World
Giovanni has done something very different. Through his values, his dedication, his thoughtful work, Giovanni, his predecessor Peter Hustinx, and all of you have set an example for the world. We are deeply grateful.
We need you to keep making progress, now more than ever. Because these are transformative times. Around the world, from Copenhagen to Chennai to Cupertino, new technologies are driving breakthroughs in humanity’s greatest common projects. From preventing and fighting disease, to curbing the effects of climate change, to ensuring every person has access to information and economic opportunity.
We See Vividly, Painfully, How Technology Can Harm Rather Than Help
At the same time, we see vividly, painfully, how technology can harm rather than help. Platforms and algorithms that promised to improve our lives can actually magnify our worst human tendencies. Rogue actors and even governments have taken advantage of user trust to deepen divisions, incite violence, and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false.
This crisis is real. It is not imagined, or exaggerated, or crazy. And those of us who believe in technology’s potential for good must not shrink from this moment. Now, more than ever, as leaders of governments, as decision-makers in business, and as citizens, we must ask ourselves a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in? I’m here today because we hope to work with you as partners in answering this question.
Technology Doesn’t Want To Do Great Things – That Part Takes Us
At Apple, we are optimistic about technology’s awesome potential for good. But we know that it won’t happen on its own. Every day, we work to infuse the devices we make with the humanity that makes us. As I’ve said before, technology is capable of doing great things, but it doesn’t want to do great things. It doesn’t want anything. That part takes all of us.
That’s why I believe that our missions are so closely aligned. As Giovanni puts it, “We must act to ensure that technology is designed and developed to serve humankind and not the other way around.”
Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right
We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. But we also recognize that not everyone sees it that way. In a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.
As far back as 1890, future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis published an article in the Harvard Law Review making the case for a “Right to Privacy” in the United States. He warned, “Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade.”
Our Own Information is Being Weaponized Against Us
Today that trade has exploded into a data industrial complex. Our own information, from the every day to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. Every day, billions of dollars change hands, and countless decisions are made, on the basis of our likes and dislikes, our friends and families, our relationships and conversations, our wishes and fears, our hopes and dreams.
These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. Taken to its extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know YOU better than YOU may know yourself.
We Shouldn’t Sugarcoat the Consequences… This is Surveillance
Your profile is then run through algorithms that can serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into hardened convictions. If green is your favorite color, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles or watching a lot of videos about the insidious threat from people who like orange.
In the news, almost every day, we bear witness to the harmful, even deadly, effects of these narrowed worldviews. We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable. It should unsettle us. And it illustrates the importance of our shared work and the challenges still ahead of us.
We Support a Comprehensive Federal Privacy Law in the US
Fortunately, this year, you’ve shown the world that good policy and political will can come together to protect the rights of everyone. We should celebrate the transformative work of the European institutions tasked with the successful implementation of the GDPR. We also celebrate the new steps taken, not only here in Europe, but around the world. In Singapore, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, and many more nations, regulators are asking tough questions and crafting effective reforms.
It is time for the rest of the world, including my home country, to follow your lead. We at Apple are in full support of a comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States. There and everywhere, it should be rooted in four essential rights.
First, the right to have personal data minimized. Companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data, or not to collect it in the first place. Second, the right to knowledge. Users should always know what data is being collected and what it is being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t. Anything less is a sham.
Third, the right to access. Companies should recognize that data belongs to users, and we should all make it easy for users to get a copy of, correct, and delete their personal data. And fourth, the right to security. Security is foundational to trust and all other privacy rights.
There Are Those Who Would Prefer I Hadn’t Said All of That
Now, there are those who would prefer I hadn’t said all of that. Some oppose any form of privacy legislation. Others will endorse reform in public and then resist and undermine it behind closed doors. They may say to you, ‘our companies will never achieve technology’s true potential if they are constrained with privacy regulation.’ But this notion isn’t just wrong, it is destructive.
Technology’s potential is, and always must be, rooted in the faith people have in it, in the optimism and creativity that it stirs in the hearts of individuals, and in its promise and capacity to make the world a better place. It’s time to face facts. We will never achieve technology’s true potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it.
At Apple, Respect for Privacy and Suspicion of Authority Are in Our Blood
At Apple, respect for privacy and a healthy suspicion of authority have always been in our bloodstream. Our first computers were built by misfits, tinkerers, and rebels, not in a laboratory or a boardroom, but in a suburban garage. We introduced the Macintosh with a famous TV ad channeling George Orwell’s 1984, a warning of what can happen when technology becomes a tool of power and loses touch with humanity.
And way back in 2010, Steve Jobs said in no uncertain terms, “Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for, in plain language, and repeatedly. It’s worth remembering the foresight and courage it took to make that statement.
When we designed this device we knew it could put more personal data in your pocket than most of us keep in our homes. And there was enormous pressure on Steve and Apple to bend our values and to freely share the information. But we refused to compromise.
In fact, we’ve only deepened our commitment in the decade since. From hardware breakthroughs that encrypt fingerprints and faces securely and only on your device to simple and powerful notifications that make clear to every user precisely what they’re sharing and when they are sharing it. We aren’t absolutists, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. Instead, we always try to return to that simple question: What kind of world do we want to live in?
At every stage of the creative process, then and now, we engage in an open, honest, and robust ethical debate about the products we make and the impact they will have. That’s just a part of our culture. We don’t do it because we have to, we do it because we ought to. The values behind our products are as important to us as any feature.
The Dangers Are Real From Cyber-Criminals to Rogue Nation States
We understand that the dangers are real from cyber-criminals to rogue nation states. We’re not willing to leave our users to fend for themselves. And, we’ve shown, we’ll defend them, we will defend our principles when challenged.
Those values, that commitment to thoughtful debate and transparency, they’re only going to get more important. As progress speeds up, these things should continue to ground us and connect us, first and foremost, to the people we serve.
For AI to be Truly Smart, It Must Respect Human Values
Artificial Intelligence is one area I think a lot about. Clearly, it’s on the minds of many of my peers as well. At its core, this technology promises to learn from people individually to benefit us all. Yet advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency. For Artificial Intelligence to be truly smart, it must respect human values, including privacy.
If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound. We can achieve both great Artificial Intelligence and great privacy standards. It’s not only a possibility, it is a responsibility. In the pursuit of artificial intelligence, we should not sacrifice the humanity, creativity, and ingenuity that define our human intelligence. And at Apple, we never will.
In the mid-19th Century, the great American writer Henry David Thoreau found himself so fed up with the pace and change of Industrial society that he moved to a cabin in the woods by Walden Pond. Call it the first digital cleanse.
Yet even there, where he hoped to find a bit of peace, he could hear a distant clatter and whistle of a steam engine passing by. “We do not ride on the railroad,” he said. “It rides upon us.”
Those of us who are fortunate enough to work in technology have an enormous responsibility. It is not to please every grumpy Thoreau out there. That’s an unreasonable standard, and we’ll never meet it. We are responsible, however, for recognizing that the devices we make and the platforms we build have real lasting, even permanent effects, on the individuals and communities who use them.
What Kind of World Do We Want to Live In?
We must never stop asking ourselves, what kind of world do we want to live in? The answer to that question must not be an afterthought, it should be our primary concern. We at Apple can, and do, provide the very best to our users while treating their most personal data like the precious cargo that it is. And if we can do it, then everyone can do it.
Fortunately, we have your example before us. Thank you for your work, for your commitment to the possibility of human-centered technology, and for your firm belief that our best days are still ahead of us.
Sophisticated automated bots are being increasingly used on Twitter and Facebook by foreign governments as a method to silence dissent and to target journalist, according to Sam Wooley, Digital Intelligence Lab director.
“Governments including Turkey and Saudi Arabia but also within South America and Southeast Asia are making use of state-sponsored trolling as a mechanism to silence dissent and to target journalist to basically stop people from reporting,” said Wooley.
Sam Wooley, Digital Intelligence Lab director, discussed how Twitter and Facebook are being co-opted by authoritarian governments to silence dissent in a recent interview:
Bots Are Being Used to Amplify Attacks
Whereas before we saw a lot of very basic automated accounts on social media being used to amplify likes or retweets, now we are actually seeing bots being used to amplify attacks targeting harassment of journalists and women. This isn’t just happening in the United States, it is happening all around the world and arguably has been happening for quite some time.
State-Sponsored Trolling Used to Silence Dissent
We have found that state-sponsored trolling spreads all around the world. Governments including Turkey and Saudi Arabia but also within South America and Southeast Asia are making use of state-sponsored trolling as a mechanism to silence dissent and to target journalist to basically stop people from reporting.
It’s a real strike to democracy when Twitter and Facebook which were heralded as platforms for free speech are now being co-opted by governments for control.
Thousands of Twitters Accounts Used in Simultaneous Attacks on Journalists
We found that to some degree nations are learning from one another. Oftentimes what happens is 10,000 to 15,000 accounts on Twitter will be used to simultaneously attack multiple journalists to threaten and harass them. Also, a lot of the time these accounts are used to attack activists, to attack political opposition, and even to do transnational political attacks against news media and other organizations.
The Most Sophisticated Propaganda Comes From Cyborg Accounts
It’s a real challenge Twitter and other social media companies face to track automation and to track human-driven propaganda. Oftentimes the most sophisticated propaganda comes from cyborg accounts. They use automation to reach out to people to amplify the attacks and people add that element of sentiment of really targeted harassment.
Twitter has had since the mid-2000’s to try and combat this problem and it’s existed well before 2016. It’s a problem that should have been in hand a long time ago.
There Should be Flagging of Automated Accounts
There should be flagging of automated accounts. Any accounts that make use of automated accounts especially for political purposes should be known to the user. There needs to be curation of harmful accounts and they’ve got to keep deleting accounts and they have to look beyond the United States.
It wasn’t until 2016 that the companies really started paying attention to this problem, but this problem has existed around the world especially in authoritarian countries for a long time. It’s time for them to start doing some real cleaning of the house.
Propaganda Bots Are Much More Sophisticated
In my research and in my conversations with people who make and build this bot making technology they often say they are one step ahead of the social media companies and I think this remains true. The bots that are being made now to proliferate propaganda attacks or harassment are much more sophisticated than they used to be.
One of the things that are happening is the advent and use of headless browsing bots which don’t log into the API, the backend of a site like Twitter, they actually login through the home page. The detection algorithm on a site like Twitter has a really hard time finding them. The companies really have a bit of a mess on their hands.
Hilton is the most iconic hotel brand in the world, owning or managing over 5,400 hotels with over 880,000 rooms in 106 countries. Hilton is also the world leader in hotel innovation and technology launching the Connected Room and the Digital Key and even experimenting with the use of robots.
We invented the airport hotel. We all laugh but somebody did it first. Somebody figured out maybe you could put a hotel near an airport for those that get stranded, etc. So we were the first to do it at San Francisco Airport a long long time ago, way before my time.
We’ve had both a pioneering spirit and an innovative spirit and that spirit is alive and well inside the company with our product, with our service, food and beverage, and with loyalty. We are trying to figure out how do you not have loyalty just be about points and creating real experiences are things that differentiate us where the customers just can’t get from anybody else or get on their own.
We’re Not Gonna Have Robots Cleaning Rooms Anytime Soon
And then technology. There is a huge element of technological innovation that’s really important. It’s not to get the people out of the hotels. A core element of what we are and what we stand for at Hilton and I think as an industry is about being a business of people serving people. That’s never gonna change.
We’re not gonna have robots cleaning rooms or doing any of those tasks anytime soon. I’m not saying it won’t happen someday, but I doubt it in my lifetime. But there are a bunch of things and we’re doing them that is more mechanical and that the machines can do better than humans. Importantly, it can free up humans to think about how they can have a more direct relationship with a customer and how they can personalize the experience with the customer.
Digital Check-In, Digital Room Selection, Digital Key
I’ll give you some examples of things that we’re doing, a couple of big ones. Digital Check-in, Digital Room selection, and Digital Key. Not everybody wants to do that in every market in the world but a lot of people do and the bulk of our customers, when you get down to it, our road warriors. They come in like I did last night. You’re tired and it’s nice to get an email coming in from the airport, pick your room, here’s your key, and you don’t have to do anything.
The bulk of travelers really want that. It means that in the end you probably need fewer people at the front desk if that really gets adopted at a mass scale, which I certainly hope it does, but that means you can have people instead of behind a desk, they can be out in the lobby, they can be out figuring out what they need to do to curate and personalize the experience.
The Connected Room
Another example is the connected room, which is not here on this continent yet (Africa) but will be coming soon, it’s not substituting for people but the reality is we all have content with us. We have our Netflix account or our Spotify or whatever kind of music. We all have these things now we can carry around in our device. We all have different needs in terms of temperatures and rooms and what we want from in audio-visual and what pillows we want, how we want to interact and order room service and all these things.
What we’ve developed is proprietary technology that allows you to control your whole experience when you’re in your room so that it’s much more personalized. It’s not taking away, it’s not robots doing everything, it’s machines creating a more personalized experience that give you more the comforts of home.
The one thing we all know as a road warrior myself, boy it’s nice when you go somewhere just to have some of the comforts of home. Imagine walking into a room and your accounts are all loaded up, all of your content, audio-visual, what temperature you want the room, level of lighting, all of those things are preloaded. Your pictures of your loved ones or your dog are rotating on the TV.
We can do all that before you get there because once you’re in the building and you’ve checked in with Digital Key we know you’re in the building and we can activate all that stuff.
Personalizing the Experience with Technology and Cloud Computing
That’s not really taking the human element out of it. It’s just personalizing the experience in ways that we can do very inexpensively with modern technology and cloud computing and we can do very consistently.
It’s things like that, not put the robots in charge but things that will take friction out of the experience and add a little bit more delight to the experience, create a little bit more of the comforts of home for those that are not at home and that have some level of stress or strain typically associated with their travel.
“We grew 41 percent in the cloud and SAP has now become the fastest growing enterprise application software company in the world,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott in an interview on CNBC. “For business software, we are the fastest growing company in the world. It’s amazing how fast the growth is in the cloud.”
Our cloud business is growing faster than anyone else’s, but we are also partnering. If you look at Microsoft and the Azure Cloud, of which Microsoft has been a great partner of ours for four decades now. If you look at AWS with Amazon or if you look at the Google Cloud platform or if you look at Alibaba in China, we have partnerships with all of these hyperscalers.
It’s All About an Open Initiative For Customers
Our reference architecture, our software, can also run in there cloud which gives us another set of distribution channels around the world to expand our market-leading software. They’re all going to grow fast and we’re going to grow fast.
It’s all about an open initiative for customers. Customers really need to manage their business in real time and the cloud is a great way to do it. It’s lower cost, faster innovation, easier to consume, it’s a winning formula.
Bill McDermott On the Economy
It’s really amazing. I’ve been obviously all over the world and if you go to China right now, things for us and all solution oriented tech companies are very strong. The Asian region is outstanding.
John Kerry and I hosted a meeting in Bankok and we met with 35 CEOs that simply could not possibly be more positive about the economic scenario.
Shortly thereafter, I was in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chancellor Angela Merkel talking about Industry 4.0, venture capital, and tech investment. Yesterday, in Canada with Prime Minister Trudeau where there is a huge AI opportunity with great young people highly skilled in AI. Everyplace you go there’s nothing but optimism.
Thank you Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau for your statesmanship and leadership. SAP is strongly committed to a bright future in Canada. We have outstanding customers and colleagues! https://t.co/idBVmXQUPJ
“Thank you Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau for your statesmanship and leadership. SAP is strongly committed to a bright future in Canada. We have outstanding customers and colleagues!”
Trade Tensions Have No Impact on the Tech Industry
The trade tensions are something that is obviously concerning, business people don’t like uncertainty, but in terms of the real impact of the business volume, new orders, global pipeline, I don’t see any impact at this stage for the tech industry.
Veeva Systems offers pharmaceutical and other highly regulated chemical manufacturers a cloud-based solution to make their employees and companies be more efficient and in compliance with the vast array of regulations these industries face. Veeva Systems CEO Peter Gassner modestly says that “we are just helping people to be more efficient.”
Peter Gassner, CEO and co-founder of Veeva Systems recently discussed how the company is growing by “reinventing” itself:
Veeva On Target To Be a Billion Dollar Company
We laid out a goal to be a billion dollar revenue company in 2015, saying we will get there in 2020 sometime. In our recent analyst day, we let people know we are actually a year ahead of schedule. I’m really proud of our Veeva team that executed so well on our long-term plan.
Reinvention Makes a Great Company
If you step back to when we went public about five years ago and if you look at our progress we’ve almost tripled the number of products we have, revenue is up four times, and profits are up six times. What makes a great company is people that can reinvent themselves, a team that can create new products, keep customers happy, and uses success to grow the business. Veeva has done that. Certainly, Adobe and Salesforce have done that as well.
Life science is a serious business. It’s a big business, a $1.6 trillion business. It’s doing some amazing things to improve and extend human life and we are proud to be part of that. When you are dealing with human lives, there are certain regulations and process and procedures mainly to do with safety for the patient.
We Are Just Helping People to Be More Efficient
You have to follow those things and some of those procedures, unfortunately, have been on paper until Veeva got in there with the right cloud software. We are just helping people be more efficient. The people inside those life sciences companies I think are doing their jobs slightly better because they get to use this modern software technology to help them do what they love to do which is making medicine for patients.
This Veeva team can accomplish so much. We started out in the commercial side of life sciences and then we moved into the R&D, the clinical trial area. That was our second big act with our Veeva Vault and has been huge for Veeva. Now we are going outside of life sciences with a product called Quality One.
A New Big Frontier for Veeva
You have to be careful when you are manufacturing and distributing a chemical, cosmetics, consumer packaged goods, and laundry detergent. You have to be very careful about that type of stuff and they have been burdened with client-server processes and paper processes. We want to come in and modernize that and help people do better work in those industries. That is a big frontier for Veeva.
Sometimes in these industries, you will be doing a very complex manufacturing process and you when you want to change that process, a lot of that is done on paper and spreadsheets still. They haven’t automated it because there hasn’t been a good cloud-based system so that’s what we are helping them with.
Intel recently released the Intel Next 50 Study which surveyed people on what they think technology will look like in the next 50 years. David Shaw, in Developer Relations at Intel and is part of the Intel Delta Force team explains:
What do you think technology will look like in the next 50 years? Maybe we’ll all be driving flying cars. Maybe there’ll be sentient robots. Okay, That might sound a little bit out there, but Intel recently conducted a study to find out what people are most excited about regarding the future of technology.
Intel’s Next 50 project aims to help researchers understand current attitudes towards technology and its role in day-to-day activities. It tries to paint a cohesive picture of what people think about technology and to identify key areas of excitement and concern.
For starters, over 80 percent of people believe that smartphones NPCs will continue to be important in 50 years:
But we can’t agree on everything. People are split on whether technology will bring them closer together or further apart from friends and family:
People also have mixed views of artificial intelligence. Over one-third of those surveyed don’t believe they use AI today. This might sound a little uncertain but research has shown that there’s still a great deal of excitement around the future:
According to the study, people express the most excitement towards familiar established technologies like computers and smartphones. The excitement even carried over to things like smart homes of which AI is a key building block:
In particular, parents tend to be more excited about AI research which shows that this group is more likely than consumers overall to look to AI to increase their quality of life by automating everyday tasks:
It doesn’t stop there either. Interestingly, they are also more trustful of artificial intelligence devices and according to the study tend to look forward to technologies predicting their needs:
The study gives good insight into how people feel towards technology and it might give you the lead on what to create next, with Intel technology, of course.
Singularity University Co-founder Peter Diamandis says that the power entrepreneurs have to solve problems is greater than ever before. He says that the convergence of technologies is transforming business models and that the world is not just changing faster than ever before, it’s accelerating.
The World is Not Just Changing Fast, It’s Accelerating
We truly are living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. Here’s the challenge, I want to give you a sense of how fast the world is changing but have you understand that it’s accelerating. What does that mean? The title of my next book, which I’m writing with Steven Kotler, is The Future is Faster Than You Think. There is an acceleration that’s actually accelerating the acceleration. In physics, that’s called jerk, but that’s not a very good name.
The reality is that people have no idea how fast the world is truly changing. We have ideas from our limited point of view if you’re the 3D printing scientist or an AI scientist or engineer, but what we don’t realize is the convergence of all of these technologies that are transforming business models. Every single company here, every single walk of life, every single way that we earn our living, is going to change not in 30 years or 20 years but this decade.
Acceleration of the Rate of Innovation
I’d like to give you a sense of why that is, both to have the excitement about that, but also the agility you’re going to need to sort of surf on top of the tsunami versus being crushed by it. When I talk about acceleration, it’s acceleration of the rate of innovation. What is innovation? Innovation isn’t just a better algorithm.
Innovation today is the exchange of ideas between individuals. I have an idea and I share with my buddy Naveen, he builds on the idea and shares it back with me. This is conversation that is back and forth and we can actually see this mathematically. As people moved out of the rural areas into the cities, into the coffee shops and the density of their conversations began to increase, so did the innovation occur.
The Most Extraordinary Time Ever in Human History
We truly are living during the most extraordinary times ever in human history. My challenge for you is to avoid complacency. There’s no way for us to truly fathom how fast the world is changing. Understand that the power that we have as individuals is extraordinary. We have the power of kings and queens. We have the power to solve any problem we want.
You have access to more computational power than any time in human history. You do, each of you do. You could spin up a thousand processor cores on AWS if you wanted to. You have access to more knowledge, more capital, there is nothing that you don’t have access to.
Your Massively Transformative Purpose
Ultimately, it’s your personal conviction. What we call your massively transformative purpose or your moonshot of what you’re going to do. The world is getting faster. The power that you have to change the world is getting greater. We are alive during a period of time that the world’s biggest problems or the world’s biggest business opportunities. For those of you who are the billionaires in the room, your mission is not to climb the Forbes list, it’s to discover in you what is the world’s biggest problem that you want to slay, that you want to change, that you want to put an end to because you can.
All of us have created tremendous networks of people or wealth, that’s why you’re here for one reason or another. How do you use the talent and the treasures and the technology you can access to solve problems that inspire you, that give you a purpose in life, that wake you up, that scare you a little bit?
An Entrepreneur is Someone Who Slays It
One of the things that gives me the greatest hope for our lives today is that an entrepreneur is someone who finds a great problem and slays that problem. The number of entrepreneurs is exploding and the power those entrepreneurs have to solve problems is greater than ever before. So I do believe that we’re heading towards a world of abundance, a world in which you can create abundance for all, where there will be a world where no man, woman, and child goes without.
Yes, there’ll be a world of haves and super-haves, but as long as there is a world where everybody has access to the world’s best education, healthcare, knowledge, that’s a world that we at Singularity University want to work towards. The world is changing fast and as I like to say, don’t blink.
Last week, Cloudera and Hortonworks announced that the companies were merging to “create the world’s leading next-generation data platform provider, spanning multi-cloud, on-premises, and the Edge.” Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly says that providing technology to help manage the huge volume of data generated from the Internet of Things is where “Cloudera is going to compete and that’s how we become the next Oracle of the future. “
Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, discussed the Hortonworks merger and how they plan to become the next Oracle type company in an interview with Jim Cramer on Mad Money:
This is a Wonderful Merger
This is a wonderful merger. Basically, by bringing these two companies together we are creating immense shareholder value. Our plans are that by 2020, just around the corner, our combined company Cloudera plus Hortonworks will be greater than a billion dollars in annual revenues, will be greater than 20 percent year-over-year growth, and will have greater than 15% operating cash flow margins. The amount of shareholder value we will create by bringing us together is immense.
Profitability of the combined company is our goal. This has been a rivalry that’s going on for nearly 10 years. We have been going at it really hard against each other and that has made us both better. Competition is wonderful, but now there’s a new set of competitors that we can combine ourselves to be a much stronger company at greater scale and we can take on a new set of competitors, and a lot of it are these cloud guys, where we are extremely well positioned to win in a different market.
What Does Cloudera Do?
Samsung Electronics, like all other manufacturers, are instrumenting and connecting the devices they create to the Internet. It’s called the Internet of Things. Every car, every cell phone, everything through a supply chain is being instrumented including autonomous vehicles. We sell technology for our customers to collect all that data and use machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand better how products are being used and to make them more efficient or to build autonomous vehicles. This is what we do. Cloudera and Hortonworks allow us to deliver an enterprise data cloud from the Edge where data comes from all the way to AI, getting insight out of that data.
Merger is a Win-Win for Everyone
This merger is a win-win for everyone. All of our customers are happy, all of our partners are happy, and yes our partner systems is going to get larger because Cloudera has some unique partnerships and relationships as does Hortonworks. Regarding our IBM partnership, Hortonworks and IBM have had a wonderful strategic partnership.
The new Cloudera is going to embrace that partnership much like we Cloudera have had a wonderful relationship with Intel. Now we’re going to bring in the Hortonworks customer base and they’re going to get the benefits of our relationship with Intel. We intend this to be a win-win not only for our shareholders, our partners, our customers, and all of our employees.
How We Become the Next Oracle
A lot of the excitement about this merger is people expect us to be the next Oracle. That doesn’t mean we’re replacing Oracle legacy business or their traditional business. No, the world is changing with this Internet of Things. Data is of much more volume and people want to do artificial intelligence machine learning against that data. That’s where we’re going to compete and that’s how we become the next Oracle of the future.
The fact of the matter is Oracle is a good partner of ours. Oracle has resold Qatar our software for a long time and we’re excited about what Oracle is doing in the cloud and we intend to work with them there. Cloudera plus Hortonworks working together will be the only provider delivering our software across all the major cloud guys. We work on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the IBM cloud and that’s our value proposition, enterprises they can work across all the cloud providers.
The CEO of Deloitte, Cathy Engelbert, calls the massive changes that are happening in business and society the 3 D’s: Data, Digital, and Disruption. These changes are bringing about new strategies of leadership and hiring and are requiring new skill sets of inventiveness and creativity.
Thaddeus Arroyo, CEO of AT&T Business says that this disruption is the new normal and that this massively impacts hiring strategies: “The generation of employees that are entering now are coming from this connected generation and they think and work differently.”
Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte and Thaddeus Arroyo, CEO of AT&T Business recently sat down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper to discuss disruption and how it is impacting business and beyond (watch video below):
Cathy Engelbert: The 3 D’s: Data, Digital, and Disruption
It’s a pretty amazing environment when you think about how to invest in AI, social, mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT), AR, VR, cloud, blockchain, or whatever shiny new tool or technology emerges. As a leader, you’ve got to make these choices. I call it the 3 D’s, data, digital, and disruption.
Data, you’ve got to treat it like it’s the most valuable asset on your balance sheet, even though it’s not on your balance sheet. Disruption, it’s not the who anymore, it’s the what’s going to disrupt you? Then digital, AT&T is obviously investing a lot around the digital experience and the customer experience. You need a different leader in today’s day and age for that.
Cathy Engelbert: Worried About the Robot Apocolypse
Think about the reskilling that is going to need to be required. Everybody is worried about the robot apocalypse and are we not going to be doing what we are today in 5-10 years? I read something the other day that said that this is more about mass redeployment, not mass unemployment. It is an interesting time and people are worried.
I have a teenage son who came to me the other day and said, Mom, I’m afraid robots going to take over my job someday. I said thank goodness he’s actually thinking about this kind of stuff rather than playing video games. These millennials and digital natives and Gen Z’s are a little worried because that’s what they are hearing and reading and seeing.
The World Economic Forum put out a study last year that said 65 percent of school children today will eventually have a job that doesn’t exist today. By the way, back in 1999 at the dawn of the millennium, the Department of Labor put out a report that said 65 percent of school children today will eventually have a job that doesn’t exist today. So it’s actually not a new issue.
Thaddeus Arroyo: Disruption is the New Normal
I like to look at this as disruption is the new normal. This isn’t just in terms of how our business environment is being disrupted. We live in a world now of constant change. The generation of employees that are entering now are coming from this connected generation and they think and work differently.
I also think we are in a new era of leadership disruption in terms of how we approach modern problems. What wins in a world of constant change is creating a culture that can lead and create a north star to manage this change. We have to address a concept of leading in a world of change through constant evolution and moving beyond evolution to adaption.
Most importantly, recognizing that the single most important thing is it still about people. Is it human-centered? I don’t care what business you are in, in some way you serve people and what we put together is put together by the teams that work for us.
Thaddeus Arroyo: Creative but Collaborative
So this disruptive element, how do you put together a culture that is creative at its heart but collaborative that in such a way you can embrace the current generations and tomorrows. We have to ask are you looking for incremental and linear improvement or do you begin the conversation of how do you want it to work?
When you begin with how you want it to work you can do things that are transformative. And your culture has to create that because at the end of the day in this new disruptive world and the leadership model that we put in place culture wins.
Thaddeus Arroyo: CIO is Now the Chief Innovator
I think it has evolved. If you look at what we used to call the Chief Information Officer has moved because now the Chief Information Officer is the Chief Innovator. You can now tap into services rather than building those in the past.
I think we are moving deep into the heart of this fourth industrial revolution and while there is a lot of anxiety that comes with that because what we will be doing is probably as disruptive as when we went from an agrarian to an information society. The reality is that the demand for this influx of human talent to do the jobs that we haven’t even defined today requires constant evolution to create those skills.
An explosive Bloomberg Businessweek report details how China was able to pull off the most significant supply chain attack ever against American companies. Reportedly, China used third-party vendors to America companies, including Amazon and Apple, to insert a tiny microchip, no bigger than a grain of rice, onto motherboards for Supermicro. Amazon Web Services (AWS), reviewed these servers and found “troubling issues.”
“Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.”
The basic gist of this story is that in 2014 and 2015 a unit of China’s People’s Liberation Army implanted malicious microchips on computer servers bound for U.S. companies. Those computer servers wound up in very targeted, very large companies including Apple and Amazon.
What these malicious chips did was compromise the software on these hardware devices at the kind of level that you can’t detect, in many ways the ultimate silent attack. This was a very major discovery for these companies and for U.S. intelligent services.
This story has taken us well over a year to report and write and a lot of that is learning what is a hardware attack? It’s such science fiction in many ways to us as reporters and to the public at large. A hardware attack is simply the most effective type of computer hacking that any organization can engineer. The reason is if the hardware of the computer is compromised it will irrevocably compromise the software that sits on top of it.
There is no commercial security system that can detect that kind of manipulation. It’s a super serious attack that is almost impossible to detect without physical examination of the hardware which almost no one does.
Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Healthcare, says “It’s a historic time right now with whole health industry moving to the cloud.”
Peter Lee and Aneesh Chopra, former Chief Technology Officer of CareJourney, discussed how the healthcare industry and all of the cloud providers including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle are in agreement on data standards that are making this move to the cloud possible.
It’s a historic time right now with the whole health industry moving to the cloud. We now have viable new standards for health data and there’s some pretty smart policy that you had a direct hand in creating. It all seems to be coming together right now. – Peter Lee
A Wonderful Opportunity to Show Leadership
The consumer right to access their health information and to make sure it’s available when and where it’s needed is really a bedrock principle that’s having an impact in all aspects of this. Physicians, health plans, and health systems are all trying to figure out how to communicate to consumers and how to use that infrastructure to better serve them through care teams and others. I think it is a wonderful opportunity to show some leadership. – Aneesh Chopra
All of the Major Cloud Providers Came Together
It was a pretty high point in my career to be on stage holding hands with my counterparts from Google, Amazon, IBM, Salesforce, and Oracle. It was pretty awesome. The idea is can we intervene in just the right way so that when health data moves to the cloud we will be in a more interoperable place. – Peter Lee
Embracing a Common Language and Architecture
The fact that we are not going to be Betamax versus VHS, that we preemptively said that the industry when it makes this move is going to embrace a common language and common architecture. I think that’s kind of a big deal. The more important thing is that none of this is going to happen on its own. We are going to have to have people participate.- Aneesh Chopra
Health Responders Currently Can’t Access Health Data
We heard some amazing stories, even from Seema Verma, the CMS Administrator, about what danger we put ourselves in when we get ill or something happens and the people who respond and try to help us can’t access health data. It doesn’t flow and it’s not liberative. It’s just something that we need to work together to fix. – Peter Lee
This is a Unique Moment
Everyone’s known this has been a challenge and it’s been a challenge for decades but the moment seems to be right. There is this transition to the cloud, there’s a regulatory clarity from both political parties that says with one voice we want open API’s with no special effort.
Frankly, a commitment from the major EHR vendors as well as the health systems and other stakeholders should say we’re willing to participate and we’re willing to work together. That’s a unique moment that we’ve got to take advantage of for the industry.- Aneesh Chopra
There is Some Marketing But It’s Also Authentic for Microsoft
The HR vendors, that whole industry, has done an amazing job over the last 15 years getting everything to be digital. Now that that’s been accomplished, an amazing accomplishment that was, we now need to get the value out of that data. Really open it up, really enable it to be the thing improves costs and improves outcomes.
For us, it’s also just a chance for Microsoft to play a positive role in all of this. Sure, there are big business opportunities, but when you think about Microsoft today and how open it is, the ethos to empower people and organizations, there is some marketing there but it’s also an authentic real thing for us. – Peter Lee
The Time is Now
The fact that there is a table that’s been set with all the key players including the EHR vendors and the cloud providers and even organizations like Apple saying let’s all agree that this is a path let’s start to get to work on, setting up clinical notes and all the other data that has not yet been run through a standards process.
That’s why I think the opportunity for everyone to participate is now. If you have use cases if you have an opportunity to know how to move your data to a more open environment the window of opportunity is today.- Aneesh Chopra
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg says that 5G wireless to the home is “a revolution” while announcing the first active 5G in homes in the world. Two weeks ago Verizon started taking orders in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento and the response has been massive.
Fast wireless to the home has long been a goal of Verizon that is likely to spur on cable cutters since OTT programming is readily available and consumers won’t need to buy internet from the cable companies.
Vesterberg also says that they are in talks with many enterprise companies regarding their use of 5G which could truly make the IoT come to life.
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg made discussed the 5G rollout on Bloomberg:
Verizon Launches 5G to the Home in 4 Cities
Verizon has worked for a long time with 5G and there are many use cases. The first use case is active 5G in the home. Instead of having fiber to the home we’ll have wireless to the home. It’s just a revolution as to what you can do with wireless. We announced 5G two weeks ago that you can order it and today we are going to make the first customers in the world, in the four cities, get 5G in the home. It’s an exciting time for us.
Many things are happening in 5G. We are doing home, there’s definitely going to be a lot of enterprise solutions, IoT and all of that. Of course, we as consumers are going to get the 5G in smartphones in 2019 which is going to be a totally new experience.
5G in the Home Reduces Latency
There are so many facets of 5G compared to 3G and 4G where basically throughput and speed were the only two things you could trade on. There are so many more things you can do with it including reducing latency. That’s why we started 5G with the home because we think that is a totally new market for us where we can address our customers.
We’ve had a massive interest but we do this limited, there are only four cities, but I can tell you there are so many people coming in and checking if their zip code is included, so we are starting it a little bit small and when we have established a global standard of 5G we want to roll it out to the masses throughout the country.
Enterprise Use of 5G is Very Important.
Enterprise is very important and of course, when it comes to 5G you can think about the real-time enterprise, you can take away all of the cords. We’re already talking to many enterprises and what use cases they see from 5G.
The CIO of Verizon Business Markets, which is Verizon’s small business segment, says that “We have to humanize technology.” What Rajeev Chandrasekharan is talking about is Verizon’s push internally to modernize the customer experience and to make it less frustrating.
The Verizon Business Markets CIO says that they are modernizing and becoming more customer-centric with the help of Salesforce CRM and other tools. Their goal is to ensure that the customer’s concerns and information follow the customer, regardless of who at Verizon the customer is speaking with.
Our industry is seeing a lot of need for transformation and if you really look at it there are three different pillars. One is we’re engineered for scale and not for speed to market. We do something well and we are big and now that whole equation is changing with needing to get to the market quickly with products. The second aspect is we’ve been around for a while and use different kinds of technologies and we need to refresh them so we need to start using some of the cooler capabilities that exist.
Lastly, there’s a lot of pressure on us with all the other industries, the digital unicorns, trying to provide this amazing customer experience and it’s not good enough now just to provide service or be a commodity. The intersection of those three needs is creating a need for a huge digital transformation.
My role here in Verizon Business Markets is while we launch new products try to build digital business and try to leverage all of this technology and customer experience while we penetrate newer customer segments.
Verizon Business Markets in the Midst of a Digital Transformation
Generally, when you do a digital transformation there’s a lot of work and a lot of investment and the question companies always have is how much is it worth to go change everything that I’ve done? Luckily for us since we have multiple business units we pick the small business unit and said we see a tremendous potential here for new products and for penetration of the market so the investment is well justified. So go, do not compromise on things, drive this digital mobile first omnichannel thinking to the extreme and build something that’s like a beacon for all the other business units to follow.
We’ve taken this to a place where revenue is going to be generated and when you have a promise of being able to grow the top-line it’s easy to justify all the work that goes into it. The other aspect is we’ve got a lot of buy-in from the top on trying to do things differently, so we’ve tried to put together a few rules of how we want to operate. We call them the big rules. Then build on that, where we’re trying to make sure the whole organization is saying, don’t fall into the trap of doing things the old way and make sure we focus on these big rules. Culturally and then opportunity wise Verizon Business Markets, the small business segment, becomes a fantastic place to try out this concept and we’re going all-out.
This is a Customer-Centric Digital Transformation
This is a customer-centric digital transformation. We started with the customer, we looked at the product research, we looked at the capabilities and then we decided what platform we wanted and what processes we can change. We also challenged ourselves by saying that we need to break our own rules and do something different. For example, if you’re going to get into a house differently and you can’t get to through the window, you can’t build another door, you can’t break in and you have got to use the key, then different about it? We challenge ourselves to break those rules.
That customer in mindset is what we are struggling with and that’s the one thing I would say that we didn’t have, the digital native aspect, the customer-centric aspect as much. We have that in our service, in our network, and in our products, we have amazing stuff. When we top it off with this we’re going to be in a good place.
We Have to Humanize Technology
I think we have amazing products and services so innovation is constantly going to happen there. The two things that I see is operations are going to become digital with artificial intelligence and those sort of new age technologies, which is very important for you to be competitive in the marketplace or you’re not going to survive against your competition. Then, the most important thing is the way you go to deliver capabilities to a customer.
We have to humanize technology. The customer is basically saying what do you think, what do you say, what do you do, and we then turn it into some garble technology talk. We need to operate as a digital entity and make the customer feel like we as a company are doing one-on-one personal services for you in think, say, and do.
We’re giving you intelligent recommendations, executing your orders, and we are communicating with you effectively. That is going to almost take you back to the olden days of manual stuff which were one-on-one but without the human and instead with technology. That is the sweet spot for us going forward.
CEO’s of Adobe, Microsoft, SAP announced the launch of the Open Data Initiative, a new data repository in the cloud dedicated to facilitating collaboration across the global research community. This is an initiative squarely aimed at Facebook and Google, in effect challenging them to provide all customer related data back to the customer. Here is Microsoft’s portal to the Open Data Initiative.
Below are key highlights from a discussion the three tech CEO’s had on CNBC…
Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft:
The insight that all three of us had based on the work we’re doing with many customers, such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Walmart, today as customers they’re all excited about this open data initiative. It’s their real insight that led us to do this, how do we work to put them in control of their own customer data, because that’s the real currency.
Any brand out there cares deeply about the continuous improvement of their own customer data understanding. The three of us coming together is going to be central to them feeling in control of their own customer data.
Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP:
There isn’t a CEO in the world that does not want to have a single view of their customer and they have to connect their demand chain to their supply chain and do so in real time. If you think about the consumer whose social, mobile, they’re geospatial, they’re always on the fly, they’re going to shop different companies in all channels, direct to consumer and retail, and you have to make sure that connection point with that consumer is really intimate.
These companies need to be intelligent enterprises because more and more AI and predictive analytics is going to rule how you engage with that customer. Ultimately, what you have to do is fulfill, so now you’re going to see the demand and the supply chain completely integrated and that data will be shared evenly among our companies so the customer is the major benefactor of the Open Data Initiative we announced today.
Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe:
All three of us shared this vision of how do we enable enterprises to put customers at the front of the digital journey. Getting behavioral data, getting transactional data, and getting customer engagement to be the front and center is the most important thing that enterprises can do so that digital is actually a tailwind rather than a headwind.
What Marketo does is add to our offerings in the Experience Cloud of being able to create this unified profile for all customers. The thing that every customer will tell you today is that they want an engaging experience with whoever they’re doing business with, whether it’s financial services, automotive, or retail. Adobe focused a lot more on B2C customers, but the same requirements that were true for B2C customers are now true for B2B customers and that’s what Marketo provides.
Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft:
The name itself should tell everything, it’s an open data initiative. It’s about really unlocking the data that is our customers’ data about their own customers. I think what is foundational here is trust. In other words, ultimately customers will decide.
Also, compliance with their own customers trust in them is also going to be very key, because if you think about it one of the top considerations for anything around customer data is privacy and regulation around privacy. So the most important thing here would be for each vendor to think through how they participate here and ensure that there is more trust in the entirety of the value chain, starting with the end consumer to the brand and to us as software vendors or tech companies.
I think the real challenge is going to be for some who may want to join but their business model is probably not going to allow them to join. I think overall though what we have all anchored on is if we can create an architecture and an incentive system that turns the tide to put customers in control of their own customer data I think the overall economy will be better off.
Slack Technologies CEO Stewart Butterfield was recently interviewed on “Bloomberg Studio 1.0” where he discussed the likelihood that Slack will continue to grow and dominate messaging and workplace efficiency:
Slack’s Enormous Growth and Future Goals
We’re unbounded in terms of opportunity and we’re unbounded in terms of resources. The market is just way bigger than we thought. There are, excluding China, 200 million people in the world who will inevitably be using Slack or something like Slack. We don’t necessarily win, but the advantages are just so big that everyone will eventually switch.
There are a hundred thousand plus people using Slack every day out of IBM. There are also farms, dentist offices, small tax preparers, and police departments using it. The Norwegian Department of Labor and Welfare uses it. Almost every academic research lab here in San Francisco, UCSF, Berkeley, Stanford uses it. Also, the Federal Government uses it. The range of utility was way greater than we thought when we first got started.
Slack Can Be a Positive or Negative
If your company or organization has really serious cultural problems using Slack can exacerbate it, it can actually make it worse. If your a company that has really healthy patterns of communication where there’s a high level of trust and respect using Slack can make it even better.
Slack Will Be Even More Useful in the Future
I think what really is interesting about the future of work when you look at people in their individual functional roles today versus a few decades ago, they’re just massively more powerful in their ability to get things done. Where we haven’t seen as dramatic of improvement and what ends up being the limiting factor on performance is communication and how difficult and hard it is to gain the kind of alignment that you need.
The difference between the best and the worst performing team is far greater than the worst performing individual. So we’ve concentrated most of our effort at individual worker productivity, time management skills, life hacks, to do lists and things like that.
We have focused far less on what is probably the more important thing to change like the degree of transparency, clarity around goals, trust, respect, alignment. The output there could be several orders of magnitude greater.
Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos recently talked about why Amazon is so successful, what he looks for when buying companies and how the business miracle of AWS came about.
Here are some key excerpts from his Q&A at The Economic Club Of Washington:
The secret sauce of Amazon, the number one thing that has made us successful by far is our obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer, as opposed to obsession over the competitor. I talk so often to other CEOs and also founders and entrepreneurs, and I can tell that even though they’re talking about customers they’re really focusing on competitors. It is huge for any company to stay focused on your customer instead of your competitors.
On Buying Companies: Is the Founder a Missionary or a Mercenary?
Amazon buys a lot of companies, usually, there much smaller than Whole Foods, but we buy a bunch of companies every year. When I meet with the entrepreneur who founded the company, I’m always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost, is that person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service and love their customer and are trying to build a great service.
The great paradox here is that it’s usually the missionaries who make more money!
You can tell really quickly just by talking to people whether they are a missionary. When I met John Mackay who’s the founder of Whole Foods, it’s a missionary company and he’s a missionary guy. What we’re able to do is take some of our resources, some of our technological know-how and expand the Whole Foods mission.
They have a great mission which is to bring organic nourishing food to everybody, but we have a lot to bring to the table in terms of resources, but also in terms of operational excellence and technology know-how.
How AWS Reinvented the Way Companies buy Computation
We started AWS (Amazon Web Services) about 15 years ago and worked on it behind the scenes for a long time before we finally launched it. Since then, it has become a very large company that has completely reinvented the way companies buy computation.
Traditionally, if you’re a company and you needed computation, you would build a data center. You’d fill that data center with servers, you’d have to upgrade the operating systems of those servers, keep everything running and so on. None of that added any value to what the business was doing. It was kind of the price of admission. It was undifferentiated heavy lifting.
What we saw at Amazon while we were building data centers for ourselves is that there was a tremendous waste of effort between our applications engineers and our networking engineers, the ones who run the data centers. They were having to have lots of meetings and planning fleet sizes and all these non-value-added tasks.
We said what we can do is develop a set of hardened API’s that allow these two groups, the applications engineers and the networking engineers, to have roadmap meetings instead of these fine-grained meetings, and then we’ll expose those API’s to the applications engineers and they can just take as much compute resources as they want. As soon as we hatched that plan it became immediately obvious to us that every company in the world was gonna want this.
Then A Business Miracle Happened
Then a business miracle happened. This never happens. This is like the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business. We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. It’s unbelievable.
When I launched Amazon.com in 1995, Barnes & Noble launched Barnesandnoble.com in 1997, in just two years. That’s very typical if you invent something new. When we launched Kindle, Barnes and Noble launched Nook two years later. After we launched Ecco, Google launched Google Home two years later.
When you’re a pioneer if you’re lucky you get a two-year head start. Nobody gets a seven-year head start! That was incredible.
I think it was because of a whole confluence of things. The big established enterprise software companies did not see Amazon as a credible enterprise software company and so we had this long runway to build this incredible little feature-rich service. It’s just so far ahead of all the other products and services available to do this work today and the team doesn’t let up.
Over the past decade, there has been an exponential rise in the integration of artificial intelligence in many areas of our daily lives. You encounter it every time Amazon recommends a product for you, or when Google predicts what you are looking for before you’re done typing it in the search box. AI is also likely to be the first thing you talk to when you call your bank to check your account.
Because of AI’s efficiency and ability to give consumers a one-to-one experience, its use will continue to grow. A Gartner Study predicts that by 2020, as much as 85 percent of all customer interactions will be done without humans.
If you own an eCommerce store, it’s essential to make yourself aware of these trends and decide on how you will apply them to your business.
Take a look at some of the ways AI is changing eCommerce:
Provides More Personalized Customer Experience
One big advantage of using AI is how much it canpersonalize a customer’s shopping experience. A good example is The North Face’s collaboration with IBM to assist customers in finding the right jacket.
[Image of user interface via TheNorthFace.com]
When customers visit The North Face website, IBM’s Watson pops up to ask where and when the jacket will be used. The AI will also ask follow-up questions based on the answers the customer gives. Once it has enough data, it will scan The North Face’s inventory and recommend several jackets based on its relevance to the client’s answers.
Boosts Customer Trust and Exposes Fake Reviews
Online reviews have a big impact on whether a consumer will make a purchase. Unfortunately, not all reviews are made by people who legitimately bought a product. This can affect a site’s algorithms and result in mistrust between buyers and sellers. AI can combat this dilemma. Let’s take Amazon’s example. Its AI puts more weight on verified customer purchases while also taking into account reviews that are marked “helpful” or new.
Making sure that the reviews consumers read on your site regarding your products are trustworthy is essential to building your reputation and brand loyalty. Customers will also be more willing to return and buy more if they know the reviews they’re reading are genuine.
Makes Search Easier and More Customer Focused
As a consumer, you’ve probably experienced seeing something that you want but have no idea what it’s called, who makes it, or even if it’s on sale. AI is now making it easier for you to find the information you need, thanks to its enhanced capabilities to interpret, classify, and understand images.
Pinterest has already been making use of AI technology with its enhanced visual search tool. Now, if a cool pair of shoes catches your eye while looking at Pinterest, you’ll be shown items that are visually similar to it.
The tool reduces the time a consumer will spend searching for an item. It also boosts conversion rates and retargeting options for businesses that market their items via the platform.
Improves Inventory Management
AI is also making a big difference in how companies manage their inventories. People who work in retail understand how difficult it is to keep shelves stocked, track everything accurately, and ensure that inventory is up-to-date.
Inventory management traditionally utilized a hindsight perspective, something that doesn’t work in today’s dynamic online marketplace. AI technology uses predictive analysis to assess what demands will likely rise and gathers key information about factors that are driving this demand.
AI’s machine learning feature also means that the longer the company uses it, the more it learns about the business, its customers, and site visitors. It will then get better at accurately predicting what items the company requires in its present inventory and what it will need in the future.
AI is becoming a driving force in how businesses cater to their clients’ interest and needs. With it, eCommerce platforms can give more personalized services, provide better recommendations on products and improve trust between the customer and the brand.
Security firm Radware has uncovered malicious extensions believed to infect more than 100,000 Google Chrome users. According to areport released on Thursday, malware was discovered in the browser’s official Web Store.
Using machine-learning algorithms, Radware was able to pinpoint a zero-day malware threat to one of its clients. These malicious extensions spread via links sent over Facebook, pilfering login credentials, mining cryptocurrencies, and engaging in click fraud, among others.
Cybercriminals involved with the latest malware campaign were said to have been active since March 2018. Since that time, they infected 100,000 users worldwide, the company said in its blog post. Called “Nigelthorn”— a name derived from the Nigelify application, the malware redirects victims to a fake Youtube page and prompts them to install a Chrome extension to play the video. Once installed, these computers become part of the botnet as harmful JavaScript download additional code from the command center. The infection process continues when the victim’s Facebook contacts click on the sent malicious link.
Image via Radware Blog
To bypass Google’s extension validation checks, attackers modified copies of legitimate extensions and added malicious script inside. Thanks to Google’s security algorithms, seven of these extensions were removed right after their discovery, including Nigelify, PwnerLike, Alt-j, Fix-case, Divinity 2 Original Sin: Wiki Skill Popup, keeprivate, and iHabno. Radware emphasized that the malware only infected Chrome users on Windows and Linux so other browsers are unaffected by the attack.
Radware pointed out that the malware went undetected despite tight security over the network. The firm also warned that attackers might identify other ways to bypass security controls with mutated malware disguised as browser plug-ins. And it seemed that bad Chrome extensions are one of Google’s weak spots.
Meanwhile, Trend Micro has identified the return ofFacexWorm, a malicious extension that propagates via socially engineered links on Facebook Messenger similar to Digmine. Apart from stealing credentials, FacexWorm redirects potential victims to cryptocurrency scams and referral links of attackers, installs bad mining codes, and takes over transactions on trading platforms and in web wallets. It was first spotted in August of last year but resurfaced recently in certain countries.
In January, analytics firmICEBRG identified four extensions that were likely used in a click-fraud scam to generate revenue. These were removed from the Web Store once discovered, but not after infecting 500,000 Chrome users.
Despite being regarded as one of the safest browsers, Chrome is far from being invulnerable. Attackers continue to work around security protocols through third-party extensions loaded with malicious codes. Chrome users should verify an extension before installing it. That, or just stay away from third-party providers, even if they’ve been vetted by Google’s stringent security process.
The numerous data breaches that occurred over the years clearly indicate that cybersecurity is still prone to failure. Every new security measure system defenders come up with is eventually thwarted by hackers.
The number of affected users is staggering. A minimum of 500 million Yahoo users were affected by the 2014 security breach that hit the company. The last US presidential election was rife with reports of hackers stealing sensitive emails. Meanwhile, the US Navy, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Justice Department were also targeted by hackers.
While there have been large-scale attacks on government agencies and the technology sector, hackers have also targeted businesses. As a matter of fact, 15% of international businesses have estimated that their sensitive data was potentially breached or compromised over a one-year period.
The Operation Aurora attack in 2009, saw companies increasing perimeter security using firewalls and VPNs. By that time, Google had already developed a new security architecture—Zero Trust. As the name implies, trust is removed from the system so everyone, whether outside or inside the firewall, is considered a suspect. Everything attempting to connect to a company’s systems must be verified before being given access.
Understanding Zero Trust
The Zero Trust Architecture model was developed by John Kindervag in 2010. Thesecurity system’s concept revolved around the idea that institutions should not blindly trust anything or anyone outside or inside its perimeters.
Previous security paradigms worked on the idea of “trust but verify.” Organizations concentrated on protecting the perimeter under the assumption that everything inside has already been cleared for access and therefore didn’t pose a threat. This method is clearly dangerous now as more corporate data centers are being housed in the cloud, with users (ex. customers, employees) accessing it using applications from devices in multiple locations.
With Zero Trust, the idea is basically “trust no one.” According to Charlie Gero, Akamai Technologies’ CTO of Enterprise and Advanced Projects Group, Zero Trust doesn’t allow access to machines, IP addresses, etc. until it knows who the user is and whether or not they’re authorized.
Benefits of a Zero Trust Security Network
Thezero-trust model meets the security demands that companies need today. The rise of cloud technology, ubiquitousness of mobile devices, and the use of third-party sources have opened a lot of loopholes in security systems.
One major benefit of the zero trust architecture is how it enabled the system to take into account the changing nature of users and their devices. It does so by redefining the user’s corporate identity, along with their device at a given point in time. This provides the system with the context required to make trust decisions at the actual time.
It also diminishes the importance of static credentials, which is an element often used in an attack. Since each access request is individually authenticated and accredited, every credential required to start a secure session is given a limited scope depending on the user and device linked to a particular resource.
Challenges of Zero Trust
As with any security system, organizations that use zero-trust will face challenges. One major challenge is the fact that this is not an install-and-forget setup. Organizations that implement a zero-trust system have to comprehend access rights starting from the lowest level of the technology right up to the topmost level.
It’s often impractical for any corporation to have a complete, exact and detailed picture of all the resources used at each level through the whole enterprise architecture on an ongoing basis. Companies that do take on this daunting task will see their efforts rewarded.
Cost and employeeproductivity can also be an issue with a zero-trust network since there’s some tradeoff between productivity and security. For instance, an employee might be unable to start working while the system is verifying their credentials.
Fully employing a zero-trust system also demands the acquisition of expensive tools and a large amount of administrative manpower to get everything working smoothly. Luckily, sectors like IT support and employee productivity will see reduced spending once the system is running.
There are still a lot of questions and doubts about the zero-trust security system. Some sectors believe doing away with trust is virtually impossible. There’s also the issue of cost and implementation. But there’s also no denying that the principle of the system is a good and achievable goal.
Google has just recently removed four extensions from the Chrome Web Store after they were discovered to be malicious. The extensions, which already had over 500,000 downloads, were used to carry out click fraud and SEO manipulation.
The malicious extensions were discovered by researchers from ICEBRG, a Seattle-based internet security company when they investigated spikes in outbound traffic from a customer’s workstation. Upon verification, the researchers found that these outbound data transmissions were caused by a Google Chrome extension named HTTP Request Header. Apparently, the workstation was used to visit links that they suspected were advertising-related.
The same ICEBRG researchers went on to discover three more malicious extensions that basically did the same thing as the HTTP Request Header: Nyoogle, Stickies, and Lite Bookmarks. ICEBRG then notified Google of its findings and the malicious extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store.
In the past, malicious browser extensions have been used to infect the workstations of unsuspecting Chrome users with spyware or even malware. At the moment, ICEBRG believes that the extensions they discovered may have been used to scam advertisers who pay on a per-click scheme by generating fake clicks using the infected workstations. However, it is likewise possible that the same malicious add-ons could be used to spy on anyone.
In a report published on Friday, ICEBRG explained the risk malicious extensions may pose to browser users. “In this case, the inherent trust of third-party Google extensions, and accepted risk of user control over these extensions allowed an expansive fraud campaign to succeed. In the hands of a sophisticated threat actor, the same tool and technique could have enabled a beachhead into target networks.”
Of course, it is not the first time that Google’s extension has been used for cyber attacks. On July and August of 2017, still-unidentified hackers managed to compromise the accounts of Chrome extension developers which were then used to automatically install extension updates capable of placing ads to sites visited by users.
