WebProNews

Category: CTOUpdate

CTOUpdate

  • Cloud Taking Over the World, Says Okta CEO

    Cloud Taking Over the World, Says Okta CEO

    Cloud is just getting started says Okta CEO, Todd McKinnon. He says that everyone talks about the how cloud has come of age, but it’s really at only 20 percent of $1 trillion in IT spend. “We’re still in the early days of cloud adoption,” says McKinnon. “We’re very excited about the runway ahead and the value we can provide, in that context of really… cloud taking over the world.”

    Todd McKinnon, CEO & Co-Founder of Okta, recently talked to Jim Cramer on CNBC about the massive future still ahead for cloud computing and Okta:

    We’re the Plumbing, We’re the Infrastructure

    We’re changing their world. We’re making it incredibly easy for them to connect to all their technology. Whether they’re logging into their business applications at work or they’re a customer of one of our customers, logging into a website, making their customer experience more enjoyable and more secure. They’re big fans of Okta.

    We help our customers both directly, where their end users can see what we do in some cases. But in many cases, we’re behind the scenes, we’re the plumbing, we’re the infrastructure, that’s making their technology secure and making the end user experience super enjoyable. We’re happy to place to play both roles because at the end of the day it’s about making customers successful with any technology they want to use. Whatever they choose to use we will fit in with it and will make their lives productive.

    Cloud is Taking Over the World

    This is our ten-year anniversary. We’re incredibly excited about ten years. and during those 10 years, we’ve benefited from several trends that are really lifting us to these new heights. The main one is cloud computing. Cloud has progressed tremendously over the last ten years, but the most exciting thing is it’s really just getting started.

    If you look at the overall IT spending market, it’s over a trillion dollars of IT spend. Everyone talks about the how cloud they think the cloud has come of age, but it’s still only 20 percent of that. It’s about $200 billion. We’re still in the early days of cloud adoption. We’re very excited about the runway ahead and the value we can provide in that context of really… cloud taking over the world.

    Adobe Has Done Something Amazing

    We help Adobe in a couple of really important ways. They’ve been a longtime customer of ours. The first way is that we help their business customers connect into the Creative Cloud. The second way we help them is we help their 20,000 employees connect into all the applications they need to do their job at Adobe.

    Adobe is an interesting story, not just because it’s an Okta customer, but they’ve done something very amazing. They’ve transitioned their business from a package software business to a cloud business. You’ve seen the results in their business and in their strategic position in the market. We were lucky enough to play a helping role as we helped that login securely to that new Creative Cloud product they’ve had in the market for the last four or five years.

    We Are Focused on What Customers Need

    We help enterprises get rid of those passwords. Our customers that use Okta for their employees, they have one single login credential that takes them into all their applications. It greatly simplifies the end-user experience and as a result, makes it way more secure and way more productive.  At the end of the day, it’s about how productive you can make your people and how great you can make the experience and how attractive you are as an employer and the kind of people you can attract.

    There are companies that have similar solutions. We at Okta are trying to be focused on what our customers need and not get too caught up in a platform player that’s trying to do what we’re doing or a niche upstart that’s trying to copy some of our features. We are really focused on what do the customers need? Do they need help connecting to their customers? Do they need help with certain kinds of security architectures that are emerging as they move to more of a cloud central model?

    From the beginning of the company over the last ten years, we’ve been incredibly customer-centric, listening to what customers needed and having that be our North Star. That’s worked incredibly well. It’s not a coincidence (that I sound like Marc Benioff). I worked at Salesforce for six years. I basically learned the ropes of cloud computing from Marc and the entire team at Salesforce. So it’s not it’s not a shock that there are a lot of similarities there.


  • Cisco CEO: Last Year We Blocked 7 Trillion Cybersecurity Threats

    Cisco CEO: Last Year We Blocked 7 Trillion Cybersecurity Threats

    The CEO of Cisco says that last year they blocked seven trillion cybersecurity threats or about 20 billion per day. He says that by and large cybersecurity organizations inside of their customers are very good. But they only have to be right once, so it’s a constant ongoing battle.

    Chuck Robbins, Cisco CEO, discusses cybersecurity, technology, and trade issues with China on Bloomberg:

    Last Year We Blocked 7 Trillion Cybersecurity Threats

    Last year we blocked seven trillion threats on behalf of our customers. That’s 20 billion a day. The problem is the adversary only has to be right once. We have to be right all the time. It’s the only part of our business where we have to think about an active adversary. That’s not how we think about other parts of our business.

    By and large, when you look at the cybersecurity organizations inside of our customers they’re very good. But again, they only have to be right once, so it’s just a constant ongoing battle.

    Solving Security Issues Deep Within Network Infrastructure

    Our growth is primarily driven by organic growth. We are in a unique position as a company that’s been around for 34 years. Our core franchises are actually growth engines for the company. Whereas a lot of companies of our age they would be looking at their core franchises as the profit pools that you would invest in other businesses.

    We have done some of that but we are seeing strong growth in the core franchises that we build. This is because in order to solve the security issues you have to do it deep within the network infrastructure. We are rebuilding and rearchitecting networks for customers all around the world in order to do this.

    Technology is at the Heart of What Every Entity is Doing

    The things that we do are the digital nervous system for the economy. Companies today realize that technology is actually defining their future strategies. Technology is not an optional cost center anymore. It really is at the heart of what every entity is doing around the world.

    Technology is at a different place today relative to the strategic value to our customers. It’s been strategic, but it literally is at the heart of everything they are trying to drive now.

    Technology That We’ve Build Has Created a Flat World

    What we do is create this flat world that we live in. Fundamentally the technology that we’ve built over the last 30 years has created a flat world. Now we find ourselves with lots of conflicts around the world. The geopolitical dynamics are clearly complicated for all of us. Countries are just trying to find out how to deal with this technology change that is occurring so rapidly.

    Frankly, it’s very difficult because governments around the world don’t have the expertise necessarily inside the government to even be able to regulate or determine what they should do. What that leads us to are very binary decisions. It’s difficult to understand how to do it surgically so I have to do it with brute force.

    5G Buildout is Critical to Every Countries Future

    Regarding the China trade issue, there are aspects of intellectual property. There are aspects of trade deficits. There are aspects of the view that this 5G buildout is critical to every countries future and there is this competitive race going on around the world. I this it is a bit of all of that.

    My hope is we can get to a place where we can all move forward in a way that lifts the global economy again and actually allows us to begin to take advantage of some of the technology. What it can do, not only for business but candidly we are at a point in time where technology can help solve some of the biggest problems in the world. That’s what we need to be focused on.  

    Educating Governments on How to Regulate Technology

    Our business in China is a relatively small percentage of our business still. The impact (from tariffs) has been quite minimal. What we do is just be a part of the discussion. We try to bring some logic as to what needs to be done.

    We are trying to help educate governments around the world as to how should they think about regulating this technology. How should they think about data privacy? What can we do to help alleviate some of the concerns and help them achieve what they are trying to achieve while not destroying the global benefit of connectivity?

    https://youtu.be/n-jE6kA7aqM


  • BeyondCorp – Google’s New Zero Trust Security Approach Explained

    BeyondCorp – Google’s New Zero Trust Security Approach Explained

    If you are a network person you have probably heard of BeyondCorp, but maybe you have had difficulty explaining it to others in your organization. Fortunately, Google’s Max Saltonstall does it for you in his latest video. Saltonstall says that Google has shifted to a security model without an inside or an outside, where each access request is reevaluated as it is made.

    Max Saltonstall, Google Cloud Developer Advocate, explains what BeyondCorp is in a new video posted by Google Cloud Platform:

    Most Companies Look at Security as a Binary

    Most companies look at security as a binary, with the good folks on the inside and the bad folks kept outside. Security teams install various firewalls and VPN tools to create a strong perimeter. They are always looking for taller thicker walls to respond to the last type of attack or compromise. But this model breaks down as soon as things get more complicated.

    Employees have to work outside. Contractors need access to just one or two internal systems, not all of them. Mobile devices aren’t compatible with your VPN client and attackers are sneaking into your network on previously trusted devices, hiding inside like a Trojan horse. We’ve seen the reinforced perimeter model break down in many ways exposing the highly vulnerable interior.

    We Shifted to a Model Without an Inside or an Outside

    At Google, we shifted to a model without an inside or an outside. We reevaluate the trust of each request as it is made and test to see if we should grant access. All access to company resources gets decided based on the context of the request. Who is it and should they see this thing? What device are they on and do I consider that safe? If the identity plus device plus access policy all check out, then they get in. If not, it’s an express bus to 403 town. Permission denied.

    All access to company resources gets decided based on the context of the request.

    In this model, there’s no trust inherent to any network or location. We don’t care if you’re sitting at home at a coffee shop or at the office, you get exactly the same level of access. It’s easy to start down this path on Google Cloud Platform with Identity-Aware Proxy. All you need is an app that’s using Compute Engine, App Engine or Kubernetes plus Google identities for your employees and you can start securing your apps with identity control.


  • Cloud is Really the New Normal for Financial Services

    Cloud is Really the New Normal for Financial Services

    “Cloud is really the new normal,” says Scott Mullins, Head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development at AWS. “If you look across enterprise companies and financial services today, the vast majority are considering cloud as a major part of their IT strategy going forward. It’s just picked up that much momentum. I think we’re just scratching the surface in cloud for the industry.”

    Scott Mullins, Head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development at Amazon Web Services recently discussed how cloud has become a major part of every financial organization’s IT strategy:

    Financial Organizations Are Moving to the Cloud

    I get to actually lead a team of financial services experts whose sole function is to help our customers both from the standpoint of FinTech startups, all the way up to the largest banks, broker-dealers, exchange companies, and insurers use our tools. That’s what we do on a daily basis and we’re having a lot of fun doing it. It’s really fun to watch.

    I think the big stories in 2019 are going to probably be a couple things. The first thing is if we look historically back at the last several re:INVENT’s we’ve seen more financial institutions coming forward and talking about what they’re doing in the cloud. I think the reason for that is because we’re getting more muscle memory from these organizations.

    2019 Will Bring an Accelerated Transformation

    They’ve had experimentation, they’ve had some foundations they’ve been laying over the course of the last couple of years, and now they have confidence. They have confidence to do two things. Number one to move much more quickly to embrace these tools and to move more workloads over and to build net new things, but also to talk about it. Most financial institutions don’t want to talk about something until they know it well and they know it works for them and that they’ve really de-risked it for themselves.

    We saw Goldman Sachs last year. This year we saw Guardian Life Insurance talking about how they’ve changed the 158-year-old company and how they made it nimble and agile. They’ve actually been able to close data centers. I think we are going to see more of that. What that means is we’re going to see a much more accelerated transformation of the industry itself. I think we’re going to see more and more of those organizations coming out and talking about how cloud is a major part of their IT strategy going forward.

    Going to See a Much Richer Ecosystem of ISVs

    The second thing I think we’re going to see is a much richer ecosystem of ISVs. Just look across what we have today and what’s been announced this week. Bloomberg came out talking about B-Pipe on AWS. Refinitiv a couple of weeks ago was talking about the fact that Elektron runs on AWS. We’re working very closely with Broadridge. We’re working closely with Finical and Temenos and a lot of different vendors in the industry and that’s going to continue to happen at a rapid pace.

    Financial Industry Undergoing Massive Transformation

    The reason for that is twofold. Number one, you’ve got a lot of those customers who are going through massive transformations and they’re saying to their ISPs, I love the relationship that we have but I’m moving to the cloud. If we’re going to continue to have a relationship you’ve got to move to the cloud with me and those vendors are responding very positively.

    Or you’ve got some vendors like IHS Markit who several years ago said, you know what, the future of financial services is in the cloud and I need to start moving before even my customers are telling me so that I can be ahead of the game. Those are two things you’re going to see be very key themes in 2019.

    Cloud is Really the New Normal

    Cloud is really the new normal. If you look across enterprise companies and financial services today, the vast majority are considering cloud as a major part of their IT strategy going forward. It’s just picked up that much momentum. I think we’re just scratching the surface in cloud for the industry. There’s going to be a room for not just one cloud provider, but multiple cloud providers and opportunities for everyone.


  • Indigo Focused on Using Technology to Improve Farming

    Indigo Focused on Using Technology to Improve Farming

    Indigo CEO David Perry has been very successful in raising money and running startups, but he is now facing a new kind of challenge; persuading farmers to adopt the latest technologies. Perry’s goal with Indigo is to help farmers improve environmental sustainability, create more nutritious food, and improve profitability.

    David Perry, Indigo CEO, recently was profiled on CNBC’s Make It:

    Indigo Focused on Using Technology to Improve Farming

    Indigo is focused on solving three problems, improving the environmental sustainability of farming, improving the consumer health and nutrition of the food that we produce, and improving the profitability of farmers. We do that using two technologies, microbiology that can replace a lot of the fertilizer and chemicals used today and then data sciences which help farmers make better farming decisions.

    I had sold my previous company and was taking some time off to think about what did I want to do next and concluded that the problems of food and agriculture are some of the biggest that we face in the world today. One of the challenging things about building a company in agriculture is that there haven’t been a lot of technology successes in agriculture.

    New Technology Hasn’t Been Adopted by Agriculture

    If you look at all of the technology that’s driving the software industry or the medical industry all of those technologies theoretically apply to agriculture, but in fact, haven’t really been adopted by agriculture for various reasons. So there’s a huge uphill climb to figure out how to create the infrastructure to be able to overcome that industry inertia.

    When Raising Money the No’s Don’t Matter

    I’ve been running venture-funded startups for the last 20 years and therefore I’ve spent a lot of time talking to potential investors. Overall I’ve been successful. I’ve raised well over a billion dollars but I fail much more often than I’m successful.

    At one point I did the math and I talked to 53 investors for every single one that I got to say yes and it still surprises me every time when somebody says no. What I’ve learned over time is that the no’s don’t matter and you just keep going until you find someone with whom your idea and story resonates.


  • SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    SAP Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World, Says CTO

    “We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world,” says Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President of the SAP Cloud Platform. “We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.”

    Björn Goerke, SAP CTO & President SAP Cloud Platform, recently discussed the future of the SAP Cloud Platform in an interview with Ray Wang, the Founder & Chairman of Constellation Research:

    Massively Going for Expansion Into Multi-Cloud World

    We’re massively going for the expansion into this multi-cloud world. We strongly believe that hybrid clouds will play a major role in the coming years. If you also follow what the hyper scalars are doing, Amazon was the last one to announce an on-premises hybrid support model. We strongly believe that the world will remain hybrid for a number of years and we’re going in that same direction with the SAP Cloud Platform.

    We announced partnerships with IBM and ANSYS already and there will be more coming. We’re totally committed to the multi-cloud strategy driving the kind of choice for customers that they demand. But then what we’re more and more focusing on is business services and business capabilities. It’s about micro services as well. It’s really about business functionality that customers expect from SAP. We are an enterprise solutions company.

    It’s Really About No Code and Low Code Environments

    With our broad spectrum of 25 industries we support all the lines of business within a corporation from core finance to HR to procurement, you name it. We are focused on a high level of functionality that we can expose via APIs and micro services on a cloud platform to allow customers to quickly reassemble and orchestrate customer specific differentiating solutions.

    There is no other company out there in the market that has the opportunity to really deliver that on a broad scale worldwide to our corporate customers.

    That’s where we’re heading and that’s where we’re investing. We’re working on simplifying the consumption of all of this. It’s really about no code and low code environments. You need to be able to plug and play and not always force people to really go down into the trenches and start heavy coding.

    SAP Embedding Machine Learning Into Applications

    Beyond that machine learning is all over and on everybody’s mind. What we’re doing is making sure that we can embed machine learning capabilities deep into the application solutions. It can’t be that every customer needs to hire dozens and even hundreds of data scientists to figure these things out.

    The very unique opportunity that SAP has is to take our knowledge in business processes, take the large data sets we have with our customers, and bring machine learning right into the application for customers to consume out of the box.

    RPA is a big topic as well of course. We believe that 50 percent of ERP processes you can potentially automate to the largest part within the next few years. We are heavily investing in those areas as well.

    Focused on Security, Data Protection, and Privacy

    Especially if you think about the level of connectivity and companies opening up their corporate environments more and more, clouds being on everybody’s mind, and the whole idea to make access to information processes available to everybody in the company and in the larger ecosystem at any point in time from anywhere, of course, that raises the bar that security has to deliver. So it’s a top of mind topic for everybody.

    There are a lot of new challenges also from an architectural perspective with how these things are built and how you communicate, We have a long-standing history as an enterprise solution provider to know exactly what’s going on there. There’s security, there are data protection and privacy that companies have to comply with these days. I think we’re well positioned to serve our customers needs there.

    https://youtu.be/JwXU89MrdaA


  • What Are the Security Risks of the Internet of Things?

    What Are the Security Risks of the Internet of Things?

    IBM Resilient CTO and security guru Bruce Schneier takes a look at the security risks of the Internet of Things in his latest video. He brings up an interesting and rather disconcerting point, IoT devices tend to do critical things like turn on and off power or drive your car, so preventing hacking is even more critical with IoT than typical computers.

    During the writing of this article, I noticed that Bruce Schneier and other cybersecurity experts at IBM are offering a free webinar today on the overall subject of cyber security that you might also be interested in:

    December 6, 2018, at 12:00 PM: The Resilient End of Year Review: The Top Cyber Security Trends in 2018 and Predictions for the Year Ahead

    Bruce Schneier, CTO at IBM Resilient and Special Advisor at IBM Security, provided an overview of the IoT security threat in a recent IBM video:

    What Are the Security Risks of the Internet of Things?

    IoT devices are just computers so all the threats that we’re used to from the computer world get transferred into any IoT device. In addition, they tend to be low cost, not well designed, built offshore, so they have more vulnerabilities. They tend to be deeply embedded in networks and organizations so they have a lot of access. They often control physical processes.

    They turn on and off the power, they drive your car, they’re medical devices, which means the effects of a hack can be much more dangerous. On the one hand, they’re exactly the same as computers. On the other hand, because of how they’re made and what they can do, they’re very different than computers.

    How Will IoT Security Evolve in the Coming Years?

    These are low-cost consumer devices in many cases and there’s not a lot of money or even market demand for security. I think two things will happen. I think there will be more security in some of the more expensive devices.

    Of the cheaper devices, there will be other things that you could purchase to go on your network that will monitor them. We don’t really have them yet but I think that’s where the future is going. We have to assume there’ll be lots of cheaply made insecure IoT devices in every network. How do we get security on top of that? 

    Click Here to Kill Everybody

    Schneier has a brand new book out that goes into the security risks of IoT in depth called, Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World.

    Here’s how Bruce Schneier describes the IoT threat: 

    Everything is a computer. Ovens are computers that make things hot; refrigerators are computers that keep things cold. These computers—from home thermostats to chemical plants—are all online. The Internet, once a virtual abstraction, can now sense and touch the physical world.

    As we open our lives to this future, often called the Internet of Things, we are beginning to see its enormous potential in ideas like driverless cars, smart cities, and personal agents equipped with their own behavioral algorithms. But every knife cuts two ways.

    All computers can be hacked. And Internet-connected computers are the most vulnerable. Forget data theft: cutting-edge digital attackers can now crash your car, your pacemaker, and the nation’s power grid.

  • Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

    Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

    We are still in the very early days of cloud adoption in the enterprise says ServiceNow CEO, John Donahoe. Also, something that is often overlooked is that governments are finally embracing the cloud which presents a huge opportunity to all of the big cloud players.

    “Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world,” noted Donahoe. “Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government.”

    John Donahoe, ServiceNow CEO, recently talked about cloud adoption by the enterprise and government in a conversation on CNBC:

    Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

    We’re still in the very early days of adoption of cloud in the enterprise. You see it in companies and you see it in governments. Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world. Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government. They need to deliver better experiences for their customers and their employees and they need productivity and cloud can deliver all three. If it were a baseball game I would say we’re in the second or third inning.

    What I hear from customers is that they want to adopt four to six core strategic platforms, sort of modern tech stack of the future. Typically that includes a Salesforce, a Workday, a ServiceNow, maybe an Office 365, an Adobe, and SAP. They want to put as much as they can on those core platforms and take all that data together and deliver better experiences for their customers and better experiences for their employees. What ServiceNow does, sort of unique among that, is we help build some of the connective tissue across the different platforms.

    Very Large Government Entities Embracing Cloud

    I see a shift with governments and the cloud. Two to three years ago government’s were suspicious of cloud, they were worried about security and that has changed and that has changed in a powerful way. Governments are under pressure to deliver better services to their citizens, whether it’s the IRS or any other sector, and drive efficiency in productivity.

    You see very large government entities embracing cloud. You saw the contract yesterday with Microsoft. We’re seeing it both in the federal government in the US, federal government’s around the world, and many state and local governments, because cloud platforms like ServiceNow enable them to drive tremendous productivity and provide better experiences.

    There is Enormous Growth Left with Cloud

    It’s the early innings. There is enormous growth left with cloud at the infrastructure level and at the software level. At the infrastructure level where AWS and Azure and Google Cloud play you see that cloud adoption happening around the world. I think there’s going to be a lot of growth for both organizations.

    If you talk to customers, customers don’t want to be sole source on this, customers want to have choice. Even in the public cloud, they’re often embracing one or two or three different public cloud providers to make sure that they’re they’re mitigating the risk and they’re getting the best of what each of those platforms has.

  • Microsoft AI CTO: A Cloud AI Service Behind Every Device

    Microsoft AI CTO: A Cloud AI Service Behind Every Device

    What could change us from having to wrestle with physical devices? That was the question posed by Microsoft AI CTO Joseph Sirosh at the 2018 AI Summit in San Francisco. He was specifically referring to a prosthetic, but that is only an example of how Cloud AI Services could impact the usefulness of all devices.

    Joseph Sirosh, AI CTO at Microsoft, talks about how a Cloud AI Service will eventually be driving every device:

    Top Macro Trend: A Cloud AI Service Behind Every Device

    The most important macro trend is a cloud AI service behind every device. It might be a prosthetic, it might be any device that you use in your house. Of course, your apps on your phone have AI services behind them eventually, some of them already have AI, but others well. Everything in the world that is connected with Wi-Fi or Internet connectivity can now be backed up by an AI service. That’s very powerful and profound when you think about it.

    Now, think about this one, the grip classification (on a prosthetic). How it works is there’s a muscle sensor that I’ve attached to my arm here, there’s a camera in the hand. So, through the electronics, it goes to an Azure Custom Vision Service, where our classification model has been set up, a deep-learned model that recognizes objects and classifies it to the right action and then that triggers the appropriate grip classification in the Servo motors connected to an Arduino board in the arm.

    The Magic Provided by a Cloud AI Service

    Two undergraduates built this. Hamayal Choudhry from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Samin Khan from the University of Toronto. They did this for the Microsoft Imagine Cup. They were the winners in 2018. Building this took them a few weeks. Of course, then the magic was provided by a cloud AI service to be able to make this device intelligent. That’s a power. Even an undergraduate can build something as powerful as this today.

    Why is this Revolutionary?

    So, why is this revolutionary? Step back and think about this device. Look, there are over a million amputations per year. That’s an amputation every 30 seconds. WHO estimates that 30-100 million people in the world live with limb loss. Only 5 to 15 percent of these have access to prosthetics, even though prosthetic devices have been around since the Egyptian times. Even though these devices have been there, they have been purely physical devices and very severely limited. Limited by cost.

    The bionic arms that you have heard about today, they cost tens of thousands of dollars and it takes a lot of effort to fit them on you. They’re limited by availability, very few people have access to it, and they’re limited by the interface you can attach to the body.

    Breaking Physical Limits via Cloud AI Service

    Above all, they’re limited by the nervous system that we have because we’ve got to train ourselves to use that device. In fact, literally, we had to force our will into these devices to be able to use them effectively. How could we change all of that? What could change us from having to wrestle with physical devices? How could we break these limits? The answer is an AI or a cloud AI service backing it up.

    Think about this, what if you had low-cost electronics to build with it? What if we could change the game of availability with 3D printing? So, you can print these things anywhere in the world. What if you had a Cloud AI service behind it that provided the ability to recognize things and make the movements? What if it could be personalized? What if it could be adapted? What if other people, your friends could train your arm to make the right kind of movements, in the right kind of environments? How could you have customizability of all types? What if you could tap into the knowledge of the world beyond our senses through the cloud service so that you can keep improving it? What if all of these things came together for a very low cost like the $100 it took for this arm to be built?

    That would be revolutionary, right? Imagine, now every prosthetic in the world or orthosis in the world which is, let’s say you break your arm and [inaudible] sling and you need assistance? What if you could get something very cheap that you could move around but it’s controlled by a Cloud AI service and all you have to do is express your intent to that Cloud AI service somehow and it does the more complex task of actually doing the grasp?

    Affordable, Intelligent, Cloud-Powered and Personalized

    See, this is the difference that the services can make. What you do is you express your intents and your constraints, and the service generates the behavior you need. So, it’s a generative service. The behavior is generated but from high-level intention that you communicate. So, the future is affordable, intelligent, cloud-powered, personalized, prosthetic devices and really devices of every type. That’s hugely revolutionary.

  • Renault Investing Heavily in the Mobility Revolution

    Renault Investing Heavily in the Mobility Revolution

    The world’s leading automotive alliance, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, is spending a billion dollars over the next five years investing in technology-focused mobility startups.  François Dossa, Head of Alliance Ventures, a strategic venture capital fund of the company, says that they want to invest money in the new technologies that will make the mobility of the future and the car of the future.

    The head of Alliance Ventures, François Dossa, was interviewed at the Web Summit:

    Our Sector is Suffering Not an Evolution, But a Revolution

    We want to invest money in the new technologies that will make the mobility of the future and the car of the future. We take this very seriously because our sector is suffering not an evolution, but a revolution. We’ve been for years using a car always the same way, your two hands on the wheel and your view on the road, and this is going to change. Many new technologies that we will not develop internally because it would be too long and too expensive and this is why we have to rely on startups.

    We are excited with everything related to mobility. In mobility, I can also think of my legs that will be a part of the mobility, so it will be multimodal, not only a car. If I want to go from A to B, I have to be able to use my legs, a bike, a scooter, a car, a train, a van, a bus, and all this together is going to be the new journey that our customer will have. Customers in the future will consider that we are a service company and this is the big change that we have to do. We are good at manufacturing cars and we have to be good at offering a service to our customers.

    Should we have our own platform or should we use someone else’s platform? We decided to have our platform, so we’re going to build our platform and I’m in charge of that. On a platform are all the tech bricks that you need to have to offer, ride-hailing, ride pooling, ride sharing, and goods delivery to your customers.

    My activity is not to acquire companies, it is to acquire shares in companies. I don’t want to be the owner. If I think of a start-up, if I acquire the startup I kill the startup. We are a company of 475,000 people, that’s a very big company, very kind of heavy company, and we need to keep the fact that in the startup they grow very fast. All these technologies they’re moving very fast. This is why I don’t want to acquire but I want to be part of the shareholder of the company.

    What’s Happening in China is Just Amazing

    China is the most amazing area in terms of innovation. Number one in the world. What’s happening in China is just amazing. We have been investing in a company called WeRide, it’s a level 4 autonomous startup in China. With level 4 I can tell you, I had a demo with their car in normal traffic conditions and the car goes on the highway and nobody is driving the car. My first reaction I was really dying. I was oh my god and we had 30 minutes and it worked extremely well.

    That’s very clear and it’s something that I’d like to say. About 40 years ago the Japanese companies went to the States and to Europe, they copied what we were doing. Then ten years ago, the Chinese did this also. Now I think it’s our time to go to China to look at what they are doing and to copy, because if not they’re going to kill us. We have to be very cautious about China and there are a lot of opportunities especially in deep tech new technologies. With AI, the Chinese know exactly where they are going. They tell you well we have a plan, it’s the central government plan where they want to be in 5, 10, and 15 years.

    AI is everywhere, so we have four main activities for investment. First one is the new mobility and this is the decision that we made about the platform. Then we have all related to autonomy, autonomous cars connectivity, and services. and EV, electric vehicles. We are the leader in EV and we want to keep this position, and we need to make a lot of investment and startups are very good at this.

    The Key Driver is Really the Technology

    Even though I’m not American, I think that money is very important. For me, money is important and it’s also a way to be sure that we invested in the right startups because they will grow and then we’ll make money out of this investment. But this is not the key driver. The key driver is really the technology. We are a strategic fund and so we are here to bring into the Alliance companies and the new technologies that will make this new mobility and this car of the future. That’s really really clear in our mind but we’ll make money also out of it.

    About Alliance Ventures:

    Alliance Ventures is a strategic venture capital fund of up to $1 billion over the next five years, operated by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, the world’s leading automotive alliance.

    The fund, launched in 2018, with a $200 million initial investment is co-located in Amsterdam, Silicon-Valley, Paris, Yokohama, Beijing and Tel Aviv from where it targets technology and business model innovation in New Mobility, Autonomous Driving, Connected Services, EV & Energy and Enterprise 2.0.

    Alliance Ventures is the main interface with the Alliance and its member companies for start-ups, incubators, accelerators, investors and the venture capital eco-system. By drawing on expertise and business opportunities from across the world’s leading automotive alliance, we pursue strategic investments at all maturity stages in startups developing disruptive technologies or businesses, focusing mainly on Series A and B, plus follow-on investments to support the start-up’s growth.

  • Box CEO: Digital Transformation Driving Global Growth

    Box CEO: Digital Transformation Driving Global Growth

    The digital transformation which has been powering the growth of many technology companies in the US is now starting to drive growth globally according to Box CEO Aaron Levie. He says that Box has a global opportunity where multi-national enterprises want to drive the same digital transformation that has been happening in the US.

    Aaron Levie, Box CEO, discussed on CNBC how the digital transformation is key to driving Box’s growth globally.

    Digital Transformation Driving Global Growth

    As our business gets more seasonally loaded toward the back end of the year as we sell to larger and larger enterprises. That’s what ultimately drives a much higher billings growth outcome in Q4. We continue to move up-market serving larger enterprises like major top ten banks, pharmaceuticals, life sciences companies, as well as the federal government and global manufacturers. That’s what’s driving that surge in Q4 billings and growth rate.

    We have a global opportunity where large enterprises, especially multi-national enterprises, want to drive the same digital transformation that we’ve seen in the US. That means everything from changing their business processes to collaborating and working in new ways which leads them to need platforms like Box and other technologies. We are seeing incredible growth in markets like Japan, Canada, Australia, and throughout Europe.

    Our Partner Model is Critical to Our Success

    We are working with major partners like IBM and other system integrators to be able to reach and enable customers. We are working with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, as well as a much broader ecosystem including companies like Slack, Okta, and others, to ensure that when customers want to modernize their IT environment Box is the system of record for the data and content that they work with.

    Partners are core to our strategy both from a technology standpoint to ensure that customers have an integrated experience with their information technology investment as well as helping us actually reach those customers from a distribution and sales standpoint. Our partner model is critical to our success.

    We Are Building a Fundamentally Open Platform

    Our fundamental belief is that in the digital age enterprises are going to need a platform to help them secure, manage, govern, and drive the workflows around their core business information. That is what the platform is that we’re building. Whether it’s financial documents, digital assets, a pharmaceutical company with their drug trial information, or an ad company with their ad campaigns, we want to be the platform that helps them manage and secure that data.

    We will have to work with technology partners like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others to ensure that the technology that they’re investing in can link to the data that customers store within Box. We are building a fundamentally open platform and whether that is linking up to the artificial intelligence or machine learning technology that IBM, Microsoft, Google, and others are building or the common applications that we use every day we want to ensure that Box can connect to all of those applications so that you can have one source of truth for your data but integrated everywhere.

  • Salesforce co-CEO: Who’s Not Going Through a Customer Transformation?

    Salesforce co-CEO: Who’s Not Going Through a Customer Transformation?

    Salesforce is booming and the reason is that virtually every company in the world is going through a huge digital transformation, according to Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. “The reason why is every company that we’re dealing with is going through a huge digital transformation and every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer,” says Benioff.

    Marc Benioff, co-Founder, Chairman, and co-CEO of Salesforce, recently discussed the companies latest financial results and explained how the digital transformation is powering their continued massive growth in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Fastest Growing Enterprise Software Company of All Time

    We see hitting our big goal which is $22 to $23 billion in revenue within two fiscal years. By fiscal year 2022. Now here we are we’re giving fiscal year 2020 guidance for the first time at $16 billion. Salesforce remains the fastest growing enterprise software company of all time and that’s incredible. I don’t think the company has ever been stronger or been in a better position.

    These revenue numbers are incredible and way beyond our expectations for the quarter It’s awesome. We had a great quarter, the third quarter was phenomenal. We’re giving phenomenal guidance for the fourth quarter and certainly, we’re all praying and hoping to improve on that by the way and now we can see a strong fiscal year ahead in fiscal year 2020 as well.

    Every Digital Transformation Begins and Ends with the Customer

    I don’t think the company has ever been stronger or been in a better position. The reason why is every company that we’re dealing with is going through a huge digital transformation and every digital transformation begins and ends with the customer.

    Just look at one of the largest deals we did this quarter, it’s a nine-figure deal with one of the largest banks in the world and they’re just rebuilding how they deal with their customers. That’s an amazing story for us just to see everybody go through this transformation. It’s everything that is customer facing for one of the top five financial institutions in the world.

    Another one that I can give you the actual name for that is doing something just as exciting is Citibank. Michael Corbat has done a fantastic job as CEO of Citibank. We’ve been working on the retail transformation there and this quarter they opened the door for us and now we’re doing the wealth transformation as well. We couldn’t be more excited about everything that Citibank is doing.

    Every Company is Transforming Their Customer Relationship

    Every company is transforming their relationship with their customer. We’re going from a world where if you don’t have a digital one-on-one relationship with your customer you’re just not going to be that successful. You can look at some of the huge successes that we’ve had in the quarter. One of the stories that I love is Uber. Uber has a tremendous need to have a relationship not only with you the consumer but also with the driver and their own internal operations. As we’ve been able to improve our relationship with Dara Khosrowshahi and other executives in the company, we’ve seen them really transform their relationships with their customers.

    Apple has been a great opportunity for us, we’ve worked on that for so long. Of course, we all use our Apple products all the time at Salesforce. Now we have a strategic alliance with Apple and we’re encouraging our customers to do what we do which is take their information on the road. All of our products work natively now on iOS. We have the ability to automate every enterprise around that incredible platform and we see customers doing that.

    ServiceMaster Building a 360-Degree View of the Customer

    Another great story during the quarter was ServiceMaster. This is a company that has a lot of brands such as Terminix and many others. This is a huge field service operation but it’s also the integration of their call center, their contact center. They’re trying to build a 360-degree view of the customer, so of course, you’re working with their technicians in the field and they need to have a strong institutional memory of you back in headquarters. That’s a digital transformation that is so exciting for so many companies where they protect their homes.

    Who’s Not Going Through a Customer Transformation?

    We’re the largest and most important CRM company in the world. We’re number one in CRM by market share and revenue and by revenue growth. It’s a big industry and all the players are doing well because every company is going through this customer transformation. Who’s not going through a customer transformation? Everywhere I go in the world this is happening and it’s been going on and it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

    It’s about sales, it’s about service, it’s about marketing, it’s about commerce, it’s about analytics, it’s about applications, it’s about good building community, or in the case of one of the great customers that we have, DuPont, it’s about integration. We had this fantastic acquisition this year, MuleSoft, the ability to integrate everything together. This is so important for us and so many of our customers.

  • Reddit Co-Founder: Every Businesses is Going to Have to Be a Software Business

    Reddit Co-Founder: Every Businesses is Going to Have to Be a Software Business

    The co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, says that every business is going to have to be a software business. “Our beliefs still remains that every business is going to have to be a software business in some way, shape, or form,” Ohanian told CNBC. “For us to be able to make these investments on bright engineers building software solutions still feels like the right long-term play. We noticed the turning point in the last couple of years where the C-Suite all got on Instagram.”

    “What I mean by that is they got exposed to it and there’s now a broad use of world-class software for really trivial stuff,” said Ohanian. “Once enough execs have spent time looking at selfies on Instagram, of their kids or their grandkids, they come back to work they sit at their desk and they look at the software that they’re using and that their companies are using and they can’t believe how antiquated is by comparison.”

    “So we’re seeing this new trend in startups that are selling direct to the enterprise level from jump,” explained the Reddit co-founder. “They’re people who left that world, see the problems, and are saying I can build a better solution and I’m just going to sell it back to my old buddies and then hopefully the rest of the industry. Whereas ten years ago, if you were starting Dropbox as Drew was, you’d be trying to sell the basic $10 a month package to some little startup.”

    Ohanian says that today, companies realize this existential need and startups are now able to sell to enterprise direct.

    About Alexis Ohanian:

    Alexis Ohanian was the co-founder of Reddit, one of the first social media companies in the world. He is also a bestselling author and he is currently co-founder & managing partner of Initialized Capital that focuses on very early stage VC ($22B in market value so far).

  • SAP CEO on Qualtrics Deal: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    SAP CEO on Qualtrics Deal: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott says that buying Qualtrics creates a “global growth juggernaut in the cloud, the number one business software growing in the cloud in the world.” McDermott says that he’s here to build a company for the generations, not just for a few days and that this is a fundamentally transformational deal, one that will reshape the entire industry.

    Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith says that combining forces with SAP will change the experience economy forever. “This is by far a once in a generational opportunity and it’s going to change how everyone thinks about cloud and SAAS and CRM and ERP and HCM forever,” said Smith. “Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that?”

    Both SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith talked about the acquisition on CNBC Squawk Box this morning (Watch Video Below):

    SAP CEO: If You Can Combine X-Data and O-Data You Can Change the World

    We’re reshaping the enterprise application software industry. What led us to this deal is that all CEOs you talk to want to run their companies on an end-to-end basis. They want to deal with their customers in every channel, they want to fulfill, and that requires operational data. SAP touches 77 percent of the world’s transactions, but the operational data doesn’t ask the right question. It doesn’t say, why does the customer feel a certain way about your brand, about your products, and about their experience. This new category called experience management is all about x-data and if you can combine o-data and x-data you can change the world.

    Ryan I have known each other about three months. We spent a lot of time together, a lot of text, a lot of phone calls, and we fundamentally wanted a transformational deal, one that would reshape the entire industry and here we are.

    SAP CEO: If You Want to Survey Somebody You Hire Survey Monkey…

    Have you looked at acquiring SurveyMonkey? No, they do surveys we reinvent customer experiences in a whole new category called experience management. If you want to survey somebody you hire Survey Monkey, if you want to fundamentally change the way an enterprise thinks about its culture, its brand, its products, and its people, now you’re talking Qualtrics, the leader in the marketplace by a factor of 10x. We’ve always bought the biggest and the best one and thankfully with the high trust that Ryan and I developed and our companies developed we’re ready to go.

    SAP CEO: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    When you’re talking about this particular company, Qualtrics, they’re growing at 40 percent on a year-over-year basis in the cloud. They have a very serious go-to-market strategy, but it’s modest in size. We’re growing at 41 percent year-over-year in the cloud and we have a very large go-to-market machine, more than 15,000 people touching the customer every day. If you combine that rate of growth you have a global growth juggernaut in the cloud, the number one business software growing in the cloud in the world. So digest that dear shareholders.

    We’re saying and we’re very clear on this, we’re going to grow total revenue in double-digit, operating income in double-digit, not to mention being the fastest growing cloud company in the world. So today this will be digested. Now they’ll know, why did he do a big one when he said he was more likely gonna do tuck-ins? Because I never thought I would get Qualtrics and it takes some skill to pull deals like this off and convince a great entrepreneur like Ryan that he’s better off with SAP than going it alone when he’s 13x oversubscribed in his IPO.

    SAP CEO: I’m Here to Build a Company for the Generations

    So that’s what took a little bit of time and when we pulled it off together this weekend we were literally crossing each other in the air at 39,000 feet, so this was high-stakes. Now that we’re here, we’re doing all-hands meetings, we’re talking to the media, we’re talking to the bankers, and I expect the stock to do extremely well as the day progresses, and more importantly in the mid and the long term. I’m here to build a company for the generations, not just for a few days.

    Qualtrics CEO: We Created the Experience Management Category

    We were planning on ringing the bell on Thursday. I was home this weekend just to kind of take a little break after a week on the road it was going really well. We were 13 times oversubscribed with the best still ahead of us and then we had an opportunity to combine forces with SAP and change the experience economy forever. I think in my conversations with Bill it’s something that we only dreamed of that we could make this happen. It’s pretty special.

    We’ve been doing this for 16 years. We transformed the entire experience management category, we’ve created it. We’re powering the feedback for 14 different airlines, 200 financial institutions, and we’ve really created this category to go do something big, that was the goal. We never had a financial reason to go public, we bootstrapped our company longer than anyone and we had no investor pressure. We’re one of the only companies that has been cashflow positive and high growth since its inception. The reason why we were going public was to create this massive new category.

    Qualtrics CEO: A Once in a Generational Opportunity

    When Bill approached us with a once in a generational opportunity that we could take all the power of Qualtrics and our 9,000 brands and have that sit alongside SAP and have every ounce of customer feedback go into the entire product process with an ERP system, reshape how the world thinks about CRM, and everything that we’re doing to power all the employee experience of the whole world that’s all available overnight. That’s something that we couldn’t turn down and we chose to be here.

    Our IPO was already way oversubscribed, it was gonna take off and everyone was looking at us saying, hey this is the next $20 or $30 billion dollar standalone company. But we want to win and this is what winning looks like and we’re going to reshape the entire industry and Bill’s on board and we’re excited.

    We were pretty set on going public and so it wasn’t till this opportunity came through this weekend where we said, hey look, this is by far a once in a generational opportunity and it’s going to change how everyone thinks about cloud and SAAS and CRM and ERP and HCM forever. Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that? We couldn’t be more excited and like I said this is a pretty special team with Bill and me.

  • SAP: Imagine if We Can Work Together and Make Inclusion a Fact

    SAP: Imagine if We Can Work Together and Make Inclusion a Fact

    SAP Chief Strategy Officer Deepak Krishnamurthy said at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, “Imagine if we can work together and make inclusion a fact.” Additionally, Alexa Gorman, who is SVP, Head of SAP.iO Foundries Europe announced the creation of a dedicated accelerator program for women and diverse-led enterprises in Berlin, Germany.

    SAP Chief Strategy Officer Deepak Krishnamurthy discussed enterprise inclusion strategies at the Web Summit:

    Inclusive Entrepreneurship Across Everything We Do

    Over the last 20 months, SAP.IO has worked with nearly a hundred companies across the spectrum of both the fund and the foundry. That’s a big number given that we have been around only for 20 months. But what I’m really proud of is the fact that over 40 percent of these companies were either founded or have a CEO who’s a diverse entrepreneur or women entrepreneur. That is something that you probably don’t see in the industry much where the average number of startups that are either women or diverse entrepreneur founded is probably around 20-25 percent.

    Why is this important for us? It’s important because we want to be able to have an inclusive entrepreneurship across everything that we do. The statistics are there, so you know that less than 10 percent of venture capital funding goes to women, less than 2 percent goes to black and Latino founders, and less than 0.2 percent goes to black and Latino women founders. The statistics are pretty horrible and we need to make a difference and the difference needs to be made at three levels. It’s got to be at the financing level, it’s got to be about creating the right community, and it’s got to also be in terms of how you set up your team.

    Women and Diverse Entrepreneurs Driving Impact

    What SAP.IO decided to do was the first foundry cohort that we ran in San Francisco we said it’s going to be a women cohort. We had seven amazing startups founded by women, that is the first thing that we did in the US. This was so successful that we said why run just a cohort? Why don’t we just go and run a whole location focused on women and diverse entrepreneurs? So in the summer of 2018, we had ten great startups with women-led founders that came in and worked on B2B SAAS products and solutions jointly with us. That’s what New York is all about. New York is going to be about women and diverse entrepreneurs driving impact with our customers.

    This is making a huge difference. You cannot go and say that I’m just going to run a women-only program or a minority program for startups. You have to rethink how you do this fundamentally as a company. One of the things that we did was that our entire management of SAP.IO that’s running the foundry, over 80 percent, five out of the six accelerators are run by women. That means that you take the cognitive bias out of the equation.

    Imagine if We Can Work Together and Make Inclusion a Fact

    So you’re starting to invest in women and minority entrepreneurs in a much more proactive way. The industry average is more like 25 percent. Having 80 percent of the accelerators led by them makes an enormous difference, not just in terms of recruiting and attracting the right level of women entrepreneurs but also in terms of how you work with them, how you support them. and how you help them scale. If you look at the entire team more than 60 percent of a team is diverse. Again, this makes a huge difference in terms of how you take diversity not just as an afterthought, but keep it front and center.

    We all know that diverse teams have better outcomes in terms of startup exits. Typically startups with diverse teams have a 10-15 percent higher exits and higher returns and the idea of having a diverse team that’s managing both investment and acceleration enables a culture of diversity that goes from the top down. That’s the idea of enabling inclusiveness and diversity from the get-go.

    We all know that diversity is a fact. We also probably know that inclusion is a choice, but imagine if we can work together and make inclusion a fact, where It’s no longer a choice. Every company comes together and makes inclusion in terms of how we work with startups a priority and make this a real thing rather than doing something as a one-off basis.

    Alexa Gorman – SVP, Head of SAP.iO Foundries Europe at SAP, announced accelerator program in Berlin at the Web Summit:

    Launching the First Accelerator Program in Berlin

    We started the foundry journey in Europe just over a year and a half ago with the foundry in Berlin that we opened. I’m really proud to say by the end of this year we will have accelerated just over 30 startups in areas such as machine learning, AI, but also industry 4.0 and the manufacturing space. What we offer the startups that come to us is to really be able to accelerate through integrating into SAP’s product portfolio, but then also access to the 400,000 plus customers that we bring. We started in Berlin last year where we’ve run three programs and are currently in our third program there. We just opened Paris in October and are accelerating six French startups. In general, we like to call the startups that we accelerate the rising stars.

    I’m thrilled to be here today, of the 30 startups that we have accelerated I think we have about eight that are actually at Web Summit and are seeing phenomenal interest both from investors and from B2B companies that are interested in using their solutions. I’m also thrilled to be here today because we have an announcement. In line with what Deepak was mentioning, we’re actually launching the first accelerator program in Berlin, kicking off in March and running until June for the underrepresented minority. We will have a cohort there that will get the access and the mentorship that Deepak mentioned in the B2B SAAS spaces. It’s something that hasn’t been done or one of the first of its kind anyway in Europe and we’re basically opening applications today here at Web Summit. If there are startups here who are in that space we’d love to hear from you. Please go to SAP.IO and you’ll see all the details and the opportunity to apply.

    Deepak Krishnamurthy: We Would Love to Hear Your Dreams

    This is something that’s very important for us and we are confident that it’s going to make a big impact on the European ecosystem. If you are a startup we would love to hear your dreams, we’d love to understand how we can work with you and help you. If you’re a women or a diverse founder applications are open for Berlin, so please let us know how you can work with us. If you’re in the B2B space we can do things together that are going to be magical.

  • Nick Tzitzon of SAP on the Changing Role of the CIO

    Nick Tzitzon of SAP on the Changing Role of the CIO

    Nick Tzitzon, EVP of Marketing and Communications for SAP, recently was interviewed on CXOTalk where he talked about the changing role of the CIO:

    Every CXO Became a Technology Buyer

    If you think about how enterprise technology has evolved… if you think 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you had the Chief Information Officer which was the single dominant point of contact inside most businesses for how a business uses technology. And then what happened? Every CXO became a technology buyer and the CXO technology buyer was interested in very specific business outcomes.

    If you’re a Chief Human Resources Officer you buy human capital management software because you want to inspire and retain and train your workforce. If you’re a Chief Marketing or Sales Officer you want to grow your business, you want to attract customers, you want to deliver new customer experiences.

    The CIO and CXO Conversations Must Be the Same

    The CIO in many cases, because of their long-term relationships was stuck in one conversation while the CXOs went into a different conversation. We want to push them together because that’s where they belong. The CIO is an incredible resource in companies to be able to tell you here’s a business problem and a technology that can help. As technology is maturing so quickly with AI and all the other breakthroughs you need the CIO to be a leader in these companies. But the CIO conversation and the CXO conversation have got to be the same conversation.

    What opportunity are we trying to seize? What problem are we trying to solve? It can’t be technology for technology sake because if it’s that then a technology vendor like SAP is not relevant. What are we trying to do for the business? That’s the question and a conversation that we need to be part of and that our peers want to be part of as well.

  • Larry Ellison: Amazon uses Oracle, not Amazon to Run Their Business… Because AWS is Not Good Enough

    Larry Ellison: Amazon uses Oracle, not Amazon to Run Their Business… Because AWS is Not Good Enough

    Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison says that Amazon does not even use their own database to run their business. “Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle Database,” Ellison said. “They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it is not good enough.”

    Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, discussed why Oracle is still the best database in the world and why it’s significantly better than Amazon and SAP databases in an interview this morning:

    Amazon Does Not Use AWS to Run Their Business

    Sometimes I liken the computer industry to the fashion industry. Certain brands get popular, certain brands get unpopular. IBM when I first came into the industry was the ultimate brand. It was not a company against whom you would compete, it was the environment which you would compete. Amazon now is the number one brand in infrastructure cloud computing.

    Let me tell you an interesting fact. Amazon does not use AWS to run their business. Amazon runs their entire business on top of Oracle, on top of the Oracle Database. They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it is not good enough. I keep saying this because they just spent another 50 million dollars last year buying still more Oracle Database. I keep saying this because well maybe our database is better than Amazon’s databases. Why else would Amazon keep buying our database?

    Last year they bravely said that they are sick of these comments of mine and they are going to move off of Oracle. They said they are going to move off of Oracle by 2020. Well guess what, they took their first step, they just moved a bunch of their warehouses off of Oracle and guess what happened. I will send you a copy of Amazon’s internal memo. It went down. It failed. They had a huge outage. They said that if they would have stayed with the Oracle Database this wouldn’t have happened.

    All of the World’s Most Valuable Data Runs on Oracle, Not Amazon

    The Oracle Database manages most of the world’s data, today and ten years ago. Nothing has changed. All of the world’s important valuable data is in an Oracle Database. They’re not in Amazon’s database. Amazon won’t use its own database to run its business.

    So if our database is so great what have we done wrong? We didn’t get our database to the cloud quickly enough. If you wanted a cloud database, you had to go to Amazon for a database. Then you were able to go to Microsoft for a database. It took a while for us to build a secure cloud. It’s really hard to build a secure cloud. We think we are there now.

    We have by far and away the best database in the world. Nothing is close. We show a series of benchmarks where we are ten times faster than Amazon. More importantly, we are ten times cheaper to run the same exact thing on Amazon on our database. So if you want all that security and want all that reliability, you have to be able to spend less. That’s what we’ve shown in a series of benchmarks. Even Amazon can’t move.

    People say that Oracle has no chance in database and Amazon’s going to dominate everything, well you would think that one of the early customers that Amazon would move, how about Amazon. No, Amazon picked Oracle.

    We Have a 10-20 Year Lead on Amazon

    We think we have a 10-20 year lead on Amazon on databases. Let me prove it. Another thing, Amazon uses Oracle not Amazon. Amazon’s transaction processing database that they have is called Aurora. Aurora is an open source database. They just it picked up and made it closed source on Amazon. They didn’t write any of that. They picked up Aurora, put it on Amazon and made it available on their cloud. Well, so who owns Aurora? Who develops Aurora? That would be Oracle. It’s called MySQL. That’s our small open source database which they claim is their big transaction processing database that’s going to replace Oracle. It’s just preposterous that Amazon didn’t even develop the Amazon database. It’s just a chunk of open source that we are responsible for called MySQL. MySQL does not compare to the Oracle Database. There is a reason Amazon uses Oracle.

    SAP Also Uses Oracle Everywhere

    You know who else uses Oracle? Another company that hates us, SAP uses Oracle everywhere. SAP ten years ago said I hate Oracle, I’m getting off of Oracle, I can’t stand these guys, especially this guy that goes on TV and makes fun of us. They say we have this great new database called Hanna. It’s awesome. Well, they have all of these cloud services such as SuccessFactors. Does it run on Hanna? But oh no, it runs on Oracle. Actually, 98 percent of everything SAP does runs on Oracle. A decade later, they still use Oracle, can’t get to Hanna.

    The Oracle Database beat IBM in the database business and beat Microsoft in the database business. We’ve been in this business for 20 years constantly making our database better. Now it’s the world’s first autonomous system.

    The Oracle Database is Much Better Than Anyone Else Has

    The EU actually did a study, of the top hundred SAP customers in Europe how many of them run the Oracle Database? Only 99 percent. One actually ran IBM DB2. All of their cloud services, whether it’s SuccessFactors, Ariba, all of these things which they’ve been trying to get off of Oracle and onto Hanna for a decade still all run Oracle. The reason is that Oracle is just a much better database than anyone else has.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked if I can have any other piece of software in the world what would it be? Everyone thought he was going to say Google Search. He said the Oracle Database because it’s the information age and all of the world’s most valuable information is stored in an Oracle Database.

  • Domino’s CEO Talks Tech – Watch Autonomous Car Deliver Pizza

    Domino’s CEO Talks Tech – Watch Autonomous Car Deliver Pizza

    Domino’s Pizza continues to implement innovative technology to maintain it’s competitive edge in the pizza business. Domino’s ran ads over the summer promoting Hotspots where you could have pizza delivered to over 150,000 locations.

    The company has also been on the cutting edge of technology in its use of autonomous vehicles that are actually delivering pizza in Las Vegas. You can watch a video from a customer of a Domino’s driverless car delivering a pizza below. Domino’s is also testing AI natural voice systems in some of its corporate stores and just recently rolled out a voice inventory app.

    Ritch Allison, CEO of Domino’s, recently discussed their strategy of innovation and technology with CNBC’s Jim Cramer:

    Pizza is a really fragmented category. We’re the market share leader in pizza but we still only sell about one out of every six pizzas in the US. We’re staying focused on our strategy, and our execution and not really on the short-term up and downs of any one particular competitor (such as Papa John’s). If we stay focused on the things that we’ve been doing then we’re going to continue to take share from competitors small and large across the industry.

    The Hotspot ads we ran this summer were terrific. It’s just another great way that we’re engaging our customers. A lot of restaurant players and a lot of players in pizza our constant members in the product of the month club and we got out of that club a long time ago and started focusing on things that were interesting and innovative that we could do to engage our customers.

    Hotspots is another one of those because it shows our customers we’re so crazy about pizza that we’re going to take their pizza to them any time, any place, they want to get it.

    We’re working on a lot of things, autonomous vehicles are certainly one thing that we’ve been working on. We’ve talked about DOM, our artificial intelligence natural voice system. We’re still piloting that in some of our corporate stores. It’s learning, it’s growing, it’s getting better.

    We just recently rolled out within our stores a voice inventory app that our team members can use for one of the most unpleasant tasks they have which are at the end of a shift they’ve got to go count the food that we have in the walk-in cooler and this makes that job easier and faster for them well.

  • Veeva CEO: Reinvention Makes a Great Company

    Veeva CEO: Reinvention Makes a Great Company

    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.

  • Microsoft VP on How Microsoft Competes with Amazon for Cloud Business

    Microsoft VP on How Microsoft Competes with Amazon for Cloud Business

    Microsoft is competing with Amazon for the enterprise cloud by focusing on being more than just a technology provider. Julia White, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Azure Marketing, says that they are “helping companies with their transformation and not just being a technology vendor or a cloud vendor for them.”

    Microsoft Corporate VP of Azure Marketing, Julia White, discussed Microsoft’s approach to the cloud and how they compare to Amazon in a recent interview which you can view below:

    Microsoft Helping Companies in their Transformation to the Cloud

    Azure works for companies because of our understanding of the enterprise and things like building hybrid, understanding that technology running across data centers, across the Edge, and in the public cloud and building that from the very beginning.

    It’s also about our partnerships, these aren’t just customers, like Volkswagen, Coca-Cola, and Chevron. We are really partnering deeply with them with them helping them with their transformation and not just being a technology vendor or a cloud vendor for them. I think that those are some of the important reasons customers are choosing Azure.

    How Can Microsoft Compete with Amazon?

    Certainly, Amazon has been around longer but they have much more of a technology provider approach. We go in and talk to customers and engage with them in a long-term strategy. This isn’t just about selling them technology or using our cloud. How are you changing your business? What does it look like to have a connected car platform? What does it mean using AI for shell and finding better drilling processes?

    It’s much more of a partnership on the business side and not just the technology. We have so much history in working with enterprise customers for over 40 years so we have a different point of view that we can bring to those customer engagements.

    The Cloud is a $4 Trillion Market

    I don’t see Google a lot in our customer engagements. I think Amazon certainly had the first come market leadership position, but I don’t see the other vendors coming up very much. The cloud pie is so big, it’s almost unlimited total opportunity.

    The cloud is about a $4 trillion market if you took what is being run on-premise today and where it’s going to the cloud. I’m not so worried about the other competition, rather what are we doing with customers to take advantage of that and really help them embrace that? It is an interesting time at this moment when there is effectively no threshold for growth.

    AI is an Enablement of Humans

    We spend a lot of time around AI ethics and AI for good and the approach we have had from the beginning is that AI is an enablement of humans and we should be using it in those ways. That is our investment, that is our focus, and that is how we are engaged with that technology.

    It’s also important in playing our part in this industry as to how we shape this moving forward. It’s super important we do our part, but also bring the industry together on this.

    Microsoft Cloud Security is World Class

    One of the reasons I’m passionate about the cloud with our customers is because we are best set up to deal with this type of adversary (Russian election interference). We spend a billion dollars a year on cybersecurity across our cloud. We have 3,500 security engineers and that’s all they do. That is their lifeblood. Compared to any organization, even a large commercial well-funded organization, doesn’t have that kind of resource to be able to keep up with the threats.

    It’s not people in basements trying to embarrass executives anymore, it is these nation-state threats. That’s why we invest at the level we do and that’s why I’m so passionate about getting our customers to take advantage of cloud-based security because it’s just better. Ultimately, security is a data game of who has better data and who has better insight.

    Across all of Microsoft, we have signal coming from our billion Windows endpoints, or email system, the largest commercial email system, and the largest directory system. That gives us unique insight to understand what is good and bad intent.

  • Aeva Takes Autonomous Driving Sensors to a New Level

    Aeva Takes Autonomous Driving Sensors to a New Level

    Aeva is a new startup founded in the backyard of Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Co-founders Soroush Salehian and Mina Rezk, who both previously worked on the super secret self-driving car project at Apple called Titan, have announced their first product.

    The product is a data collecting box that car manufacturers or third parties such as Uber can attach to cars to capture data to inform autonomous driving systems to make them safer. They say that the Aeva box is “part of the autonomous stack” that can easily be dropped into vehicles.

    Soroush Salehian, co-founder of Aeva discussed his companies Aeva box with CNBC:

    Aeva is for automobile car manufacturers or companies that are developing ride share autonomous taxis. We are providing this as part of the autonomous stack so that these customers can actually integrate this just like a drop in a placement into their vehicles as they develop their mass production vehicles.

    The beauty of this system is that we directly measure the velocity map. We do not take multiple frames to infer each measurement.

    When you typically see these kinds of sensors around the vehicles you typically see them with different kinds of boxes. You see maybe one box that is maybe the sensor head or the just a sensing system and then others that is the compute system. They’re usually connected together and typically these boxes are hidden away in a trunk or something like this.

    One of the unique things about technologies and the work that we’ve done in the past couple of years is that we have been able to integrate this system into this single compact package while it provides still all the capabilities of these different sensors and outputs into one box.

    Mina Rezk, Aeva’s other co-founder describes how the system takes data:

    We have our depth map in which the color represents the depth of objects of every of pixel on here. Then we have our reflectivity map in which every pixel represents the reflectivity of each object. We also have our own unique velocity map in which every pixel represents the velocity of these objects.

    There is a lot of motion that can easily be picked up whether it’s moving away or coming towards us. It is much harder to pick that up in a depth map because you have to infer multiple frames to understand what is going. However, in the velocity map within one single frame, we can easily know what is moving away and what’s coming towards us.