“We’re seeing right now continued strength across our business because people are prioritizing digital transformation as a way to gain competitive advantage,” says Equinix CEO Charles Meyers. “The reality is people who are responding well to that are thriving and people that are not are being left behind. What companies (like Walmart) are doing essentially is using a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. They have private infrastructure that they may house in a significant caged environment at Equinix but they interface it then with the public clouds.”
Charles Meyers, CEO of Equinix, discusses their huge under the radar role in facilitating the massive digital transformation in progress with companies worldwide. Meyers was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:
There’s A Very Deep Demand Pool For Data Centers
We continue to see a really strong set of underlying secular demand drivers for the business. We’re seeing real strength in the business globally right now. Broadly, we’ve seen the sector respond very well. We think there’s a very deep demand pool for data centers. I do think that Equinix plays a very unique role in the market and our differentiated position is allowing us to even outperform relative to our peers. Public cloud adoption is a major catalyst for our business. As enterprises are adopting public cloud and looking at hybrid and multi-cloud as their architecture of choice we’re seeing really strong demand.
We may not be a household name but I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re probably impacting the lives of millions of consumers on a day to day basis working with (many big-name companies such as Salesforce and Netflix). We play a very important role in terms of interconnecting our customers sometimes to public cloud providers, sometimes to SAAS providers like Salesforce, sometimes to other members of their supply chain, and sometimes to networks. A really big part of our legacy and history has been interconnecting people to networks. The interconnection story is a really central piece of the Equinix story.
Equinix Is The Best Representation Of The Digital Edge
Equinix is in fact the best representation of the digital edge today. That is the point at which people are interconnecting their private infrastructure with public cloud infrastructure, with networks, and with other members of their supply chain. When you hear about edge, oftentimes that edge is in fact within an Equinix facility and being interconnected over private interconnection facilities that are facilitated by Equinix.
Typically, when inside one of our facilities, we’re unlike some wholesalers which might have one or a very small number of customers, we tend to have a larger number of customers in any individual facility. They are distributed across the site typically in private cages or sometimes in shared caged environments or shared rack environments and they have their equipment. They’re all obviously very secured and something that’s available just for them to access. But they’re all across the facility. You typically wouldn’t be able to see who the customer is because they are very sensitive about that from a security standpoint.
Firms Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage
We’re seeing right now continued strength across our business because people are prioritizing digital transformation as a way to gain competitive advantage. The reality is people who are responding well to that are thriving and people that are not are being left behind. So we’re seeing strong demand. I think the trade tensions, etc. probably affects some level of sentiment but we have not seen that impact the demand profile for our business.
What companies (like Walmart) are doing essentially is using a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy. They have private infrastructure that they may house in a significant caged environment at Equinix but they interface it then with the public clouds. They’re using a variety of public clouds to house some of their workloads. So that hybrid multi-cloud environment is really the architecture of choice for enterprise customers of all sorts. Retail is actually an incredibly strong segment for us. That architecture of choice, hybrid and multi-cloud, is a major driver for Equinix’s business.
Business Prioritizing Digital Transformation For Competitive Advantage – Equinix CEO Charles Meyers
Google has announced that its Data Search tool is out of beta and ready for prime time.
Data Search is a tool designed to provide an easy way to search the countless datasets that exist on the web. As Google explains in their post, “across the web, there are millions of datasets about nearly any subject that interests you. If you’re looking to buy a puppy, you could find datasets compiling complaints of puppy buyers or studies on puppy cognition. Or if you like skiing, you could find data on revenue of ski resorts or injury rates and participation numbers. Dataset Search has indexed almost 25 million of these datasets, giving you a single place to search for datasets and find links to where the data is.”
Based on feedback the company has received from the beta period, Google has added a number of new features, including the ability to filter datasets, see maps of a region associated with a dataset, whether a dataset is available for free, better dataset descriptions and mobile support.
Organizations who have a dataset they want included in Data Search can ensure it’s added via an open standard.
“The number of datasets that you can find in Dataset Search continues to grow. If you have a dataset on your site and you describe it using schema.org, an open standard, others can find it in Dataset Search. If you know that a dataset exists, but you can’t find it in Dataset Search, ask the provider to add the schema.org descriptions and others will be able to learn about their dataset as well.”
Now that the tool is publicly available, Google is committed to continuing to improve it. The tool should be a valuable addition to a wide range of companies, researchers and consumers.
“My view is that cars are becoming the most relevant units on the internet, says Volkswagen CEO Herber Diess. “Cars are becoming devices. They are fully connected. Data streams into the car and out of the car will be much higher than with smartphones. So the car gets a new role in the internet ecosystem. We have to adapt to that.”
Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen, discusses how cars will be the most relevant devices on the internet in an interview with CNBC International at Davos 2020:
Cars Are Becoming Internet Devices
My view is that cars are becoming the most relevant units on the internet. Cars are becoming devices. They are fully connected. Data streams into the car and out of the car will be much higher than with smartphones. So the car gets a new role in the internet ecosystem. We have to adapt to that. From a traditional car manufacturer to become a tech company, it’s quite a long way to go but we are on the way. It will be a huge transition.
I think it’s great to have a good competition (regarding Tesla building a plant in Germany). We think that Tesla plays a very important role in the transition because they are paving the way. They’re probably running higher risks than we can from the traditional industry but they’re paving the way. They show that electric vehicles are working and that the fully connected car is the right solution. So we appreciate Tesla’s success.
Cars Will Be The Most Relevant Internet Devices, Says Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess
Microsoft has announced in a blog post that a database containing 250 million service records was left exposed due to a configuration error.
According to security firm Comparitech, a “security research team led by Bob Diachenko uncovered five Elasticsearch servers, each of which contained an apparently identical set of the 250 million records. Diachenko immediately notified Microsoft upon discovering the exposed data, and Microsoft took swift action to secure it.”
Diachenko is a well-known cybersecurity professional Comparitech collaborates with. Diachenko praised Microsoft’s quick response to his findings.
“I immediately reported this to Microsoft and within 24 hours all servers were secured. I applaud the MS support team for responsiveness and quick turnaround on this despite New Year’s Eve.”
Microsoft’s own investigation continued, leading to the blog post today detailing what went wrong.
“Our investigation has determined that a change made to the database’s network security group on December 5, 2019 contained misconfigured security rules that enabled exposure of the data.”
The company said that the vast majority of data had already been cleared of any identifiable personal information, although there was some data meeting specific criteria that may not have been redacted.
“As part of Microsoft’s standard operating procedures, data stored in the support case analytics database is redacted using automated tools to remove personal information. Our investigation confirmed that the vast majority of records were cleared of personal information in accordance with our standard practices. In some scenarios, the data may have remained unredacted if it met specific conditions.”
Most importantly, the company says it has found no evidence of any malicious use of the exposed database.
“The acquisition today of Fiix is a really exciting one,” says Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret. “It spans the gap that’s traditionally existed between manually entered keystroke data and real-time data that’s coming from the equipment itself. This helps take maintenance and automation really to a whole new level.”
Fiix Inc. is a privately-held, AI-enabled computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) company. Fiix, founded in 2008, is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
“We’re really taking manufacturing to a whole new level,” added Moret. “We’re taking the traditional operational technology and know-how that’s existed on the plant floor for so many years and we’re marrying that with IT technology and bringing those together. It’s really unlocking a whole new level of productivity across all the industries that we serve.”
Fiix’s cloud-native CMMS creates workflows for the scheduling, organizing, and tracking of equipment maintenance. It connects seamlessly to business systems and drives data-driven decisions. The company’s revenue grew 70% in 2019 with more than 85% recurring revenue.
“We believe that the future of industrial asset management is performance-based,” said Tessa Myers, vice president, product management, Software & Control, for Rockwell Automation. “With the addition of the Fiix platform and expertise, our customers will benefit from a 360-degree view of integrated data across automation, production, and maintenance, helping them to monitor and improve the performance of their assets and optimize how maintenance work is done.”
James Novak, Fiix CEO, said, “From the beginning, Fiix has been on a mission to connect maintenance and operations teams to the tools, resources, and technology they need to modernize and join the future of maintenance. Joining Rockwell Automation will allow us to help even more companies modernize maintenance and increase asset performance by connecting to industry-leading data, automation, and production systems.”
The company says that the addition of Fiix directly aligns with Rockwell Automation’s software strategy.
Rockwell Automation CEO Blake Moret also discussed their involvement with COVID treatments and the vaccine:
“We’re involved with virtually all of the manufacturers who are working on the treatments and the tests and the vaccines around the world for the COVID virus. We’re really helping them and helping the world to recover. So we’re involved in the formulation, the packaging, the tracing, and you obviously have to do this at unbelievable scale to be able to meet the need.”
Rockwell Automation Taking Manufacturing To Whole New Level
According to researchers at privacy firm vpnMentor, millions of Americans’ data is at risk following the discovery of a breached database belonging to TrueDialog. TrueDialog is “the leading SMS provider for mass text messaging, SMS marketing and personalized 2-way SMS texting at scale.”
vpnMentor’s research team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, discovered the database, which was linked to “many aspects” of TrueDialog’s business. The database had “millions of account usernames and passwords, PII data of TrueDialog users and their customers, and much more.”
The researchers found the database as part of a web mapping project, using port scanning “to examine particular IP blocks and test open holes in systems for weaknesses.” As ethical hackers, the company tries to identify breaches in an effort to make the web safer. Once a breach is found, they verify the database’s identity and alert the company who owns it.
In the case of TrueDialog’s database, vpnMentor was able to access it because it was left “completely unsecured and unencrypted.” The database was 604 GB in size and “included nearly 1 billion entries of highly sensitive data.” The entries included account login details, full names, TrueDialog account holders and users, message contents, email addresses, time stamps of sent messages and more.
vpnMentor says the type of data could make it possible for bad actors to take over TrueDialog customer accounts, engage in corporate espionage, steal identities, run phishing scams and blackmail users.
Once the researchers verified the threat level, they reached out to TrueDialog to notify them and offer assistance in securing the database. Shortly after, access to the database was shut down, although TrueDialog never contacted vpnMentor.
The Takeaway
There are several lessons to be learned from TrueDialog’s data breach.
First and foremost, it is beyond shocking and inexcusable for a company of TrueDialog’s size and resources to be so irresponsible with customer data. There is simply no justification for leaving data—let alone highly sensitive data—unencrypted and exposed for the world to see.
As a general rule, when privacy researchers alert a company of a data breach, it’s never a good idea to ignore them. Even if steps are taken to fix the issue, ignoring the researchers who found it gives the impression the company doesn’t care or has something to hide.
Going silent is never a good response. TechCrunch was just one outlet that reached out to TrueDialog’s chief executive, John Wright, for comment. At the time of writing, John Wright and TrueDialog had not returned requests for comment or even acknowledged the breach. Wright also did not answer any of TechCrunch’s questions about what steps would be taken to alert impacted users, or notify regulators.
In short, if there’s a single point to take away from TrueDialog’s experience, it’s this: Don’t do anything TrueDialog has done in this case.
“People are going to really give a hard look at cloud security,” says Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan. “At the end of the day, it also says when you have something of this scale why not use some artificial intelligence or something that could have spotted this. Actually what was done was pretty blatant. It was 30 gigabytes of data moving to unusual storage locations. So there were a lot of ways that something like an AI system could have detected this and also prevented it from becoming an issue.”
People Are Going To Really Give a Hard Look At Cloud Security
There is so much positive momentum around cloud and so many benefits that I don’t anticipate seeing a pendulum swing back to on-prem data centers (because of the Capital One cyber hack). What I do think it means is people are going to really give a hard look at cloud security. This attack was a result of a vulnerability known as a configuration error in a Web Application Firewall that was specific to Capital One. What it does show is these configuration errors are actually really very commonplace. They’re commonplace in on-prem data centers and in cloud.
This does highlight a few things. It does highlight insider threats, someone who had some insider knowledge. It also highlights supply chain level security. At the end of the day, it also says when you have something of this scale why not use some artificial intelligence or something that could have spotted this. Actually what was done was pretty blatant. It was 30 gigabytes of data moving to unusual storage locations. So there were a lot of ways that something like an AI system could have detected this and also prevented it from becoming an issue.
Capital One Attack Was Human Error
Configuration errors are basically a human error. Somebody somewhere made a human error, a mistake. We have to expect that humans are fallible and we’re going to see those type of errors. What’s so strange about this one is how public the disclosure was by the attacker on Twitter and GitHub and other places. That was what made it so unusual but also meant that the investigation moved very quickly. It seems like there’s been quite a bit of transparency as well.
It’s interesting timing because we’re actually going into Back Hat and DEF CON, which is often known as a summer camp for hackers. There will be literally tens of thousands of people in Las Vegas next week. All of this is going to change the conversation. We’re going to see a lot about cloud security, about 5G security, about encryption and decrypting data, and of course, the evolution towards AI-based attacks.
What’s interesting is that people want to kind of say let’s make sure we prevent the kind of attacks we saw in 2016 (regarding the election). The reality is the way the cybersecurity industry works the attackers keep moving on. They keep changing what’s called threat vectors. I do think we’ll see plenty of threats for 2020 but they may not look anything like the ones we saw in 2016.
People Are Going To Give a Hard Look At Cloud Security – Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan
Oracle’s October 2019 Critical Patch update contains 219 security patches across virtually all of Oracle’s product families.
The company strongly recommends all customers apply the Critical Patch Update immediately, as many breaches are a direct result of not applying security updates when they become available.
“Oracle continues to periodically receive reports of attempts to maliciously exploit vulnerabilities for which Oracle has already released security patches. In some instances, it has been reported that attackers have been successful because targeted customers had failed to apply available Oracle patches. Oracle therefore strongly recommends that customers remain on actively-supported versions and apply Critical Patch Update security patches without delay.
“This Critical Patch Update contains 219 new security patches across the product families listed below. Please note that an MOS note summarizing the content of this Critical Patch Update and other Oracle Software Security Assurance activities is located at October 2019 Critical Patch Update: Executive Summary and Analysis.”
For customers who have skipped previous updates and are concerned that the October 2019 update may not include a needed patch, Oracle recommends reviewing previous Critical Patch Update advisories to determine the best update path.
More information, including the specific products impacted, can be found here.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says that Salesforce is now entering the fourth stage of computing, the pursuit of Single Source of Truth. The official name is Customer 360 Truth and it is a new set of capabilities that allow companies to connect, authenticate and govern customer data and identity across Salesforce. The goal is to provide a complete view and deeper understanding of every customer so that companies can deliver extremely personalized customer experiences.
Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses Customer 360 Truth at their annual Dreamforce conference with Jim Cramer of CNBC:
Single Source of Truth – A Computer Science Holy Grail
360 Truth is another amazing thing that we’re introducing here (at Dreamforce 2019) that has been the holy grail of computing. It’s what we call SSOT, the single source of truth. We’ve had three amazing waves of computing. They are stems of record, systems of engagement, and systems of intelligence including AI. We’re now entering the fourth stage of computing. It’s the pursuit of Single Source of Truth, and we’ve built that into our platform.
This is a computer science holy grail that we’ve been trying to put together for a long time. Now because we acquired MuleSoft and because we acquired Tableau we are closer to providing for our customers the Single Source of Truth for their customer information.
Enables Companies To Build a Single Source of Truth
The company describes Customer 360 Truth as a new set of data and identity services that enable companies to build a single source of truth across all of their customer relationships. They say it connects data from across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more to create a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer.
All of a customer’s previous interactions and shared preferences are brought together to create a complete view so companies can better serve and even predict their needs, whether addressing a customer service problem, creating a personalized marketing journey, predicting the best sales opportunities or surfacing product recommendations.
Salesforce Launches Single Souce of Truth | Benioff: A Computer Science Holy Grail
From the Salesforce Press Release:
The Holy Grail of CRM: A Single Source of Truth
Nearly 70 percent of customers say they expect connected experiences in which their preferences are known across touchpoints. However, organizational and technical complexity often gets in the way of meeting these expectations. Companies have legacy infrastructure and data silos, leading to fragmented data and fragile integrations between systems. Inconsistent methods for accessing, reconciling and activating customer data make it challenging for companies to deliver connected experiences across these systems. As a result, companies often have multiple usernames, email addresses, or purchase histories for the very same customer across different systems, and managing a customer’s consent and contact preferences across the business becomes harder as new data regulations come into play.
Having a source of truth—a single, trusted place that brings together all the customer data needed to deliver amazing experiences—has been the holy grail of CRM. Today Salesforce is delivering it.
Deliver a Trusted, Personalized Customer Relationship With Customer 360 Truth
Customer 360 Truth enhances data management across Salesforce apps and other systems, and provides instant access to consistent, reconciled customer data. Services include:
Customer 360 Data Manager: Delivers the ability to access, connect and resolve a customer’s data across Salesforce and other systems, using a canonical data model and a universal Salesforce ID that represents each customer. With a click-based user interface for app and data management, admins can easily establish trusted connections between data sources to prepare, match, reconcile and update the customer profile. The reconciled profile across apps enables employees to pull up relevant data at the time of need from any connected system, such as when a service agent may need to pull a list of past purchases from an order system to better assist in solving a problem.
Salesforce Identity for Customers: Removes friction from the login experience and enables a single, authenticated and secure relationship between a customer and all of a company’s websites, e-commerce stores, mobile apps and connected products. Instead of having separate logins and profiles that lead to disconnected experiences, customers now have one login across all of a company’s digital properties. Identity for Customers also elevates trust and compliance with a simple to use two-factor authentication. And it allows companies to obtain valuable customer insights with the ability to analyze engagement and usage with identity reporting and analytics.
Customer 360 Audiences: Builds unified customer profiles across known data such as email addresses and first party IDs and unknown data such as website visits and device IDs. It then creates customer segments and marketing engagement journeys from those profiles and delivers AI-powered insights, like lifetime value and likelihood to churn. Customer 360 Audiences goes beyond traditional customer data platform (CDP) capabilities and extends the power of CRM to connect customer interactions across various touchpoints — for example, a customer who was redirected from an email campaign onto the website through a service interaction — and make the profile data available in real-time to optimize the experience.
Privacy and Data Governance: Enables companies to collect and respect customer data use and privacy preferences, as well as apply data classification labels to all data in Salesforce. Companies can easily understand what types of data they have, what uses of data customers have approved and how best to interact with them. These capabilities can help customers address obligations from regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), with respect to data governance and customer consent.
Introducing the Cloud Information Model
Salesforce Customer 360 Truth is powered by the Cloud Information Model (CIM), an open source data model that standardizes data interoperability across cloud applications. The publication of CIM is enabled by MuleSoft’s open source modeling technology, providing multiple file formats to make it easy to adopt CIM with varying applications. By easily integrating data in the cloud, developers can build new products that deliver connected and personalized customer experiences. CIM reduces the complexities of integrating data across cloud applications by providing standardized data interoperability guidelines to connect point-of-sale systems, digital marketing platforms, contact centers, CRM systems and more. Developers no longer need to spend months creating custom code. Instead, they can adopt and extend the CIM within days to create data lakes, generate analytics, train machine learning models, build a single view of the customer and more.
Unleash the Power of Customer 360 Truth with MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
Customer 360 Truth allows companies to connect siloed customer data sources to a single source of truth, across Salesforce apps or third-party data using MuleSoft. With MuleSoft Anypoint Platform™, organizations can easily build APIs that connect any application, data, or device to Customer 360 in an application network, creating a truly complete customer view.
At Dreamforce, MuleSoft also announced new innovations and learning modules, empowering anyone to become an Integration Trailblazer and create connected customer experiences.
Comments on the News
“Having a complete view of the customer is not a new idea, but it has been difficult to achieve. Companies have siloed data; disconnected apps; a complex, patchwork of sometimes incompatible services; and no way to connect it all,” said Patrick Stokes, EVP, Platform Shared Services, Salesforce. “Customer 360 Truth overcomes those challenges, creating a single source of truth that is the foundation for delivering smart, personalized customer experiences across every touchpoint.”
“In order to truly succeed with delivering a great customer experience, you have to adopt an agile platform that fosters growth and supports constant innovation,” said Rick Fuson, President and Chief Operating Officer, Pacers Sports & Entertainment. “With the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, Pacers Sports & Entertainment has real-time visibility into all aspects of our business and can operate more efficiently across channels, increase per customer loyalty and drive innovation across the organization.”
“Connecting customer data and managing consent is more important than ever in light of changing customer expectations and increasing regulations,” said Alan Webber, Program Vice President for Digital Strategy and Customer Experience, IDC. “As a result, companies are prioritizing data unification in ways that will lead to more loyal and valuable customer relationships. Salesforce Customer 360 Truth will help companies break down data silos and deliver the experiences customers expect.”
Salesforce Customer 360
Customer 360 Truth is part of the Salesforce Customer 360, which includes industry-leading apps spanning sales, service, marketing and commerce, and across every customer touchpoint. The Customer 360 Platform is an underlying set of services and APIs including AI, blockchain, mobile, security, voice and other capabilities that allow companies to connect every customer, empower every employee, and deliver continuous innovation. Salesforce will power more than two trillion B2B and B2C transactions this year for more than 150,000 companies and millions of Trailblazers—those individuals and their organizations who are using Salesforce to drive innovation, grow their careers and transform their businesses.
“VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud,” says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen. “It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.”
Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMWare, discusses the incredible growth of VMWare which is driven by their ability to connect companies to any and every cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Software Is Defining Everything
We had a great quarter. You have to put the bigger picture in perspective. We’re in the golden age of software where software is defining everything. Software companies, in general, are doing well. What we have done as a company is focus on making the datacenter software-driven and we think there is a bright future there. We showed some examples of that in hyperconverged (HCI) and in software-defined networking (SDN).
We also showed some incredible momentum with our partnerships in the hybrid-cloud. Amazon is obviously first and preferred there. We announced a partnership with Azure. There is also the digital workspace which is all of the devices. We think our future is bright and we just have to keep executing. Our view is always the long-run.
In This Software Future We Are Not Tethered To One Company
I think there is a little bit of a misperception that we should nip in the bud (regarding correlating Dell’s earnings with VMWare). First off, VMWare’s business with Dell in these areas like hyperconverged, we’ve now surpassed companies like Nutanix who are number one in hyper-converged infrastructure, and in the digital workspace where we are partnering with Dell Laptops, those are going very well. We want Dell and VMWare to do well together. In the datacenter we work with Dell, HPE, Cisco, Lenovo, etc. There is no one hardware player that is the majority of our business.
In cloud we work with AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and IBM. You won’t find another company that has got as many hybrid-cloud partners. In the digital workspace, we work with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In this software future, we are not tethered to one company. We are optimized to Dell, we are not tethered to them. You need a software-based solution for any of these areas, the datacenter, the cloud, or the digital workspace during tough times and in good times.
It Is a Multi-Cloud World
You should think about applications like mobile homes. They’re going to move from the datacenter to the cloud on this freeway called VMWare. The mobile home could go to one cloud and may come back. VMWare allows the datacenter to act like a public cloud. We make the hardware datacenter look like Amazon. Now if you are an Amazon customer, and they have 30-35 percent market share, number one in the market for cloud, they are our preferred cloud partner, we can help customers. We have many customers who are adopting VMWare cloud in AWS.
For those customers who said we are not an Amazon shop, for example, we quoted Walmart in our earnings announcement, they are using Azure. They have an option now because we announced a partnership with Azure. There are some customers that are going to have some other clouds. It is a multicloud world. While AWS will be first and preferred for us, we want every customer that has VMWare in the private cloud but AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and Alibaba, those are the top five hyperscalers, and all of them have embraced VMWare.
IBM is a great partner of VMWare. We love their services business. IBM Cloud has 2,000+ customers. We are going to partner really well with Ginni Rometty and the team. We compete with a small part of Red Hat’s business in containers. Over 80 percent of Red Hat’s business is Linux, a good part of their business which is OpenShift and JBoss, is not doing so well. The future of containers is a small part of the business. We can walk and chew gum. We can partner with IBM and compete with that small part of Red Hat and that’s our focus. We want a big tent at VMWare. We want to partner with as many people as possible and compete with as few people as possible.
Make Your Story Sesame Street Simple
First off, if you want to serve your customers well start by serving your employees. One of my professors at the Harvard Business School, Len Schlesinger, wrote an article and book on service profit chain. What he talked about is if you want to create shareholder value focus not just on customer satisfaction but satisfied employees. Hug your start. Take care of the best and brightest who come in there.
The second one is something that all of us can do which is make your story Sesame Street simple. All too often, I see product managers and account executives blabbering on with PowerPoints. Let’s tell the story just like you are telling the story to your mother or to your kids. Ironically, when you make things simple you’re going back to the basic principals of Steven Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People. It’s not that complicated. Have customer empathy.
It Is a Multi-Cloud World, Says VMWare COO Sanjay Poonen
Oracle is boosting its cloud efforts with an announcement that it is hiring some 2,000 new employees. While Amazon, Microsoft and, to some extent, Google have dominated the cloud market, Oracle sees ongoing opportunity to expand.
Oracle has been making moves to take on the leaders, including opening offices in Microsoft’s back yard. Even more surprising, earlier this year Oracle announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft, working to ensure their products work seamlessly across each other’s cloud platforms.
As Oracle continues its cloud expansion, the company is counting on the relative infancy of the market, along with the overall lack of penetration. In addition, Oracle is uniquely positioned to deliver the entire range of cloud service.
“Cloud is still in its early days with less than 20 percent penetration today, and enterprises are just beginning to use cloud for mission-critical workloads,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Our aggressive hiring and growth plans are mapped to meet the needs of our customers, providing them reliability, high performance, and robust security as they continue to move to the cloud.”
Oracle currently operates 16 cloud regions globally, with 12 of those being added in the past year. The company plans to add an additional 20 regions by the end of 2020, no doubt with the help of the 2,000 additional hires. By focusing on adding more regions, Oracle stands to gain strong footholds in regional and niche markets that the Big Three haven’t wrapped up.
“Eleven countries or jurisdictions will have region pairs that facilitate enterprise-class, multi-region, disaster-recovery strategies to better support those customers who want to store their data in-country or in-region.
“Today, Oracle is the only company delivering a complete and integrated set of cloud services and building intelligence into every layer of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s growing talent base will ensure customers continue to benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently.
“In addition to rapid hiring, Oracle will make additional real estate investments to support the expanded Oracle Cloud Infrastructure workforce.”
“DataWallet is basically a digital wallet that holds all of your personal data,” says DataWallet CEO Serafin Lion Engel. “If Twitter was to give you a DataWallet you would see exactly all of the data that you create on Twitter. At the end of the day what DataWallet does is put you in control of your data. What it cannot do is protect you from anything that may happen illegally. So if Twitter really tried to cover up the fact that they were collecting their two-factor authentication data in order to advertise to you it wouldn’t show up but it would be all the more of a scandal.”
Serafin Lion Engel, founder and CEO of DataWallet, discusses his mission of putting consumers in control of their data in an interview on CNBC:
DataWallet Puts You In Charge of Your Data
DataWallet is basically a digital wallet that holds all of your personal data. If Twitter was to give you a DataWallet you would see exactly all of the data that you create on Twitter. You would see all of the data you created yourself that they have collected about you through third-party vendors. Then you can see all of the use cases that they use that data for and you can actually set permissions for how exactly your data can be used. You can download your data and you can delete data. It puts you in full control of the data that you have created on the Twitter platform.
At the end of the day what DataWallet does is put you in control of your data. What it cannot do is protect you from anything that may happen illegally. So if Twitter really tried to cover up the fact that they were collecting their two-factor authentication data in order to advertise to you it wouldn’t show up but it would be all the more of a scandal.
Data includes anything that you post, your IP address, your email address, what device you are on, etc. It’s all-encompassing. Twitter also buys a lot of data about you in order to enrich their targeting capabilities. They may buy data from Acxiom about, for instance, your financial situation, whether you have applied for credit or not all in order to more accurately show advertising to you.
Corporate Trust Is Rooted In How They Use Your Data
We work with a lot of companies in the advertising industry because a lot of companies do want to do things differently. In ad tech, they are pretty upset about the fact that a lot of companies are doing things that are unethical and they do want things to change. We work with companies in CPG, in consulting, and in a variety of different industries.
It definitely is a tough sell to companies that try to do things with your data that they would rather not have you know about. There are a lot of companies that in the past have been good data custodians and have not gotten any credit for that. They have not gone out on a limb in order to monetize their users’ data even though they could have. Up until about two years ago, it was not a hot topic, nobody was really paying attention and companies were making a lot of money selling their consumers’ data.
However, the companies who have been good data custodians and who have said we do not want to do anything that our consumers wouldn’t give us expressive consent to do with their data are jumping on board with what we’re doing right now. They’re the ones reaping the benefits because consumers will switch to companies that are putting them in charge of their data. Over 87 percent of customers say that the amount of business they do with a company depends on how much they trust it. That trust is rooted in how they’ve used their data.
New Regulations Don’t Cover Data Usage
The regulations in California and Nevada are very much focused on the sale of data, which is still a good thing. You can now issue an opt-out request for companies to not sell your data. However, it doesn’t cover usage. If, for instance, you wanted to direct the company to stop using your data for internal marketing purposes you wouldn’t be able to do that. Any data privacy regulation that is intended to put consumers in control of their data is a good thing. However, we also have to take into consideration that a lot of companies like Facebook and Amazon are really profiting from this because they are not a third party vendor. They have their own data and that really benefits them.
DataWallet Puts You In Charge of Your Data, Says DataWallet CEO Serafin Lion Engel.
Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd has died from an undisclosed illness. He was only 62 years old. Hurd had stepped down from his CEO role at Oracle on September 11, just prior to Oracle’s annual Open World conference. Hurd was previously CEO of HP prior to going to Oracle.
Hurd was a key proponent and driver of Oracle’s move to the cloud. He was passionate in how this is a key transformational time for Oracle and for business:
We have a big existing on-premise user base and I believe all of them will move (to the cloud). In fact, I was with a large group of our users just last night and they’re all going to move on their time frame. We don’t put a time frame on it, but this thing is moving at a pretty good speed. It will not move linearly, it will move geometrically. When we get to a certain point you will start to see a geometric move in the market and it will be significant.
The applications market is about $125 billion per year. That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud.
”There is a couple of phenomena going on at the same time. The applications market is about $125 billion per year. That is spent primarily on applications and most of it today is spent on on-premise applications. That market changes pretty significantly as it moves to cloud. As it moves to cloud, the subscription that you pay for the cloud includes not only the application but includes all of the hardware, the servers, and storage. It becomes a bigger market just by the very nature of the migration of the application to SAAS.
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.
“Fundamentally, we have a bigger plan for security,” says VMware COO Sanjay Poonen. “We felt it was the perfect time for us to come up with a disruptive play that was based on big data, was AI, and was cloud-based. There were only two companies doing it, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. We felt Carbon Black was better integrated to us, had as good a product or better. We have a plan to integrate Carbon Black and make it intrinsic in a way that nobody else will do. We think this will transform the security industry that’s been broken today.”
Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, elaborates on how they plan to transform security and lead the containers movement currently going on in digital transformation. Poonen was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Containers Are A Movement Going On In Digital Transformation
When you look at these types of transformational moments going on in digital transformation, these happen once every 10 to 20 years. VMware is the company that invented the virtual machine and for the last 20 years, we’ve created a million jobs in that part of infrastructure. There is a movement going on in digital transformation right now called containers. We believe it’s our birthright to own that movement. There will be potentially tens of millions of jobs among developers created on top of this virtual machine.
Think of the virtual machine sort of like the ship and containers like the things on top of it. In the 1950s containers completely transformed ships and VMware created the ship. These containers are going to allow apps to be fundamentally transformed. We found as we thought about this that this was the right time to do it and it was our birthright to do it better than anybody else. Why not take those three thousand people in Pivotal and $750 million in revenue and turbocharge the next ten years of VMware, not just in virtual machines and virtualization in the path to the cloud, which is the first C, but the other C is containers. We think that’s a big part.
We’re A Go-To-Market Machine
Pivotal (is more valuable than the market initially believed) for two reasons. They’ve refactored their product which now sits completely on Kubernetes. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a sort of the big open-source container movement. And their go-to-market engine probably stuttered a little bit. But that’s what VMware does well. We’re a go-to-market machine. We’ll bring them in and accelerate this to our 500,000 customers. We feel good when we get a good product in the hands of our good go-to-market machine. I think we can accelerate it.
At VMware, no one person does it, it takes a village but also our partners like Dell and the ecosystem also. VMware has 75,000 partners who love us. We’re going to take this to those ecosystem partners. We have a big tent of system integrators and they’re excited about this. We branded the entire thing, that’s the other thing we’ve done pretty well. Tenzo, which is the Japanese word for containers, we’re doing big ads in New York, San Francisco, and London Airports. This is a play on the word VMware that says ContainerWare. We’re not changing the name of the company but we’re going big in containers and that’s the key message.
We Have a Bigger Plan For Security
Fundamentally, we have a bigger plan for security. Let me just walk you through a quick understanding of the strategy. There are a lot of parallels with security and healthcare. My mom’s a doctor. Imagine you went to a doctor and you asked her how do you get well and she said you have to eat 5,000 tablets. Eating one every 30 seconds would take you a couple of weeks to do. That’s what the security industry is today. It’s 5,000 vendors, broken, with lots of different agents bloated on people’s laptops, lots of alerts showing up, and manual labor.
We look at this and say there’s a fundamentally new way to do it, which is to make security intrinsic to your diet. You eat your vegetables, your fruit, you drink your water, brush your teeth, and that’s what we’re doing with security. We are making it part of our platform.
A Disruptive Play Based On Big Data, AI, and Cloud-Based
We’ve been doing very well in network security around the NSX product but endpoint security and workload security we didn’t have much there. We had Workspace ONE, our AirWatch related product, and we found that many of these endpoint security players were kind of in a little internal turmoil. Symantec got bought by Broadcom. McAfee got bought by Intel and then was spun out again. We felt it was the perfect time for us to come up with a disruptive play that was based on big data, was AI, and was cloud-based.
There were only two companies doing it, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. We felt Carbon Black was better integrated to us, had as good a product or better, and we intend to acquire them. The acquisition hasn’t yet closed. We have a plan to integrate this and make it intrinsic in a way that nobody else will do. We laid that out at VMworld. We think this will transform the security industry that’s been broken today.
VMware COO Sanjay Poonen: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security
“Customers continue to affirm the need to accelerate the digital transformation and take advantage of the explosion of data we see around us,” says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “This ultimately is the core aspect of how they derive an improved business outcome. We have a very complete portfolio from the edge to the cloud. Digital transformation starts with secure connectivity. We have a phenomenal platform called Aruba that provides a mobile-first cloud-first approach.”
Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses on CNBC the companies latest earnings driven by customers continuing to accelerate their digital transformation:
Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation
Customers continue to affirm the need to accelerate the digital transformation and take advantage of the explosion of data we see around us. This ultimately is the core aspect of how they derive (an improved) business outcome. Obviously, the uncertainty (do to the China trade war) can create a little bit of a pause. It takes a little bit longer for them to make decisions, particularly with larger deals. That’s what we saw (this quarter), elongated sell cycles.
We executed with incredible discipline both on the cost side and on the pricing side. We actually have done a remarkable job in the last seven quarters to continue to make our cost structure more competitive and to streamline everything across the company. When I became the CEO I established three key priorities for ourselves. One of them, at the core, was to start with our HP Next next program which was to rearchitect the company from the ground up. That included a cost-benefit but at the same time, a portfolio shift. We are seeing the benefit of the portfolio shift today in our margin profile. That gives us the ability to expand margins significantly. I believe we will deliver record levels of year-to-date free cash flow which gives us the confidence to raise the guidance again for seven consecutive quarters.
Digital Transformation Starts With Secure Connectivity
It (the Huawei issue) is an opportunity for us. We have a very complete portfolio from the edge to the cloud. Digital transformation starts with secure connectivity. We have a phenomenal platform called Aruba that provides a mobile-first cloud-first approach. At the same time, we are here to serve our customers in the countries where they participate. We have a very diverse global supply chain that allows us to navigate through these challenges. I take this as an opportunity for us to serve our customers better and continue to provide the value they’re looking for. Obviously, we need to navigate through this uncertainty, whether it is Huawei or others. At the end, we are really focused on our business and our customers.
As our CFO Tarek Robbiati said we are focusing this year on stabilizing our business. We continue to shift our portfolio to higher value, higher margin and deliver everything we can as a service to our customers. You see the results of that in a portfolio mix in key strategic growth areas like high performance compute, which is the backbone for how analytics and AI will be run going forward. We are extremely excited about the completion almost of the acquisition of Craig which will be completed by the end of Q4. At the same time, in the core business, we have to continue to deliver what I call world load optimized hybrid cloud solutions delivered as a service. We are on that journey. We have made tremendous progress. We have a truly differentiated offer called HPE GreenLake, which is to deliver everything as a service.
Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation, Says HPE CEO Antonio Neri
“We think that AI is really going to change everything,” says BeyondMinds co-founder Or Kramer. “We consider it the fourth revolution. It feels like AI is a huge buzzword right now and everything is AI and actually, it’s true. In the last five years, there has been incredible academic revelations and advancements that are now allowing anyone that has data to do so much more with it than what they could just a couple of years ago. Every week there’s a new like state-of-the-art article that is being published and it’s changing completely how we do things.”
Or Kramer, co-founder of BeyondMinds, discusses how AI is going to change everything and how his startup is helping companies like Microsoft incorporate AI into products. Kramer was interviewed by Lidar Grave Lazi on ILTV ISRAEL DAILY:
It Feels Lik Everything Is AI and Actually, It’s True
It feels like AI is a huge buzzword right now and everything is AI and actually, it’s true. In the last five years, there has been incredible academic revelations and advancements that are now allowing anyone that has data to do so much more with it than what they could just a couple of years ago. It really affects all industries together. Around 75 percent of CEOs now believe they want to incorporate AI, although they don’t necessarily know how to. That’s where we come to play. But in general, AI really has the power to automate and make processes much more efficient.
I think that in this particular industry still, academia is where most research is being done. Also, some private sector companies like Google and Facebook have a huge amount of AI research going on. However, most companies currently don’t have the capability to have this type of research in-house. It’s still a very difficult thing to do. The math is great but it’s still not very easily applicable. There is new stuff coming from academia every day. Every week there’s a new like state-of-the-art article that is being published and it’s changing completely how we do things. The connection between the research side of it to the practice side of it or the application side of it is still challenging to many organizations.
There Are So Many Advances Going On With AI
We basically act as the expert in the room for everything deep learning or everything AI in general. That means that we, across different use cases, mostly computer vision, natural language processing, signal processing, reinforcement learning, and speech, are basically the fields. Every one of them is like its own world. We provide this multidisciplinary approach where we have a bunch of experts that can really break through those particular instances that are really hard to solve. We’re working with companies on a variety of products that they have across the organizations where deep learning can be implemented.
The field of natural language processing is a particular area we have been focusing on and has been really evolving over the last few years. In general, what you’re trying to do with AI is make better decisions. So a lot of the decision support systems or decision-making systems are now available in much higher accuracy than even a year ago because there are so many advances going on right now. So really anything that is allowing employees to go and do something else that they’re probably more efficient in and any type of procedure that is currently done either not very accurately or is very manual intensive could be resolved with the deep learning much better than it was it used to be.
AI Is Really Going To Change Everything
We think that AI is really going to change everything. We consider it the fourth revolution. However, a lot of times it seems to be a little bit scary (to people). When you picture AI you think of general disruptions, that it’s going to replace organizations, we’re going to do everything by robots, and it’s not necessarily the case. I think the good thing about AI is that it really empowers the organizations that have data. Pretty much every organization has data that is useful to really improve the product and to really improve what they’re offering is.
It is not necessarily as scary as some people think. There are processes that are going to be automated. For instance, the autonomous cars industry is going to be completely disrupted probably. But I think in general it will make the world better in the sense that we will do more of the things that we really need to have a human in the loop and less of what is currently very very technical.
AI Is Really Going To Change Everything, says BeyondMinds co-founder Or Kramer
“Bitcoin as its implemented and implementation of blockchain and distributed ledger I assert is bad,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “Its purpose is almost all illicit and it’s an environmental crisis. This is a terrible implementation of blockchain. I’m not saying that blockchain is bad. I think it is revolutionizing. This is breakthrough innovative technology and how you do distributed secured trust. That’s powerful. We are huge believers strongly committed to blockchain and distributed leverage technology.”
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, says that Bitcoin is bad, but blockchain, when done right, is revolutionizing in an interview with theCUBE at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco.
Bitcoin is Bad, Blockchain Is Revolutionizing
The idea of distributed ledger technology, immutable distributed trust, I’ve said I think of that, and blockchain is the underlying technology, as almost like public-private key encryption. If we go back 40 years before RSA it’s that important. This is breakthrough innovative technology and how you do distributed secured trust. That’s powerful. We are huge believers strongly committed to blockchain and distributed leverage technology. Why do I make my comments like I do on Bitcoin? Bitcoin as its implemented and implementation of blockchain and distributed ledger I assert is bad. It’s bad for two reasons.
One is it’s an environmental crisis. A single ledger if you and I transacted a penny I would consume enough energy to power your house for half a day. It’s incredible. This is a terrible implementation of blockchain. Secondly, the way it’s also done as well in this totally unregulated environment, almost all of its uses are for illicit and criminal purposes. That’s who’s trading in Bitcoin. So its purpose is almost all illicit and it’s an environmental crisis. I say bad. I’m not saying that blockchain is bad. I think it is revolutionizing. Studies have shown that over 95 percent of the uses of Bitcoin is criminal. Let’s go make it good. Do good engineering and engineer for good.
Partnership With Australian Stock Exchange and Digital Asset
We just announced on Sunday a partnership with the Australian Stock Exchange and Digital Asset. They’re leveraging the VMWare distributed ledger technology as part of their go-forward strategy for the stock exchange in Australia. That’s good. We’re making it suitable for enterprises meeting the regulatory requirements and we’re order plus magnitude better in terms of performance and energy consumption and we’re just getting started.
Bitcoin is Bad, Blockchain Is Revolutionizing, Says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger
“We’ve learned this past year that the tracking system we have with the NFL is actually considered to be the best by the broadcasters, coaches, and the fans,” says Zebra Technologies CEO Anders Gustafsson. “Our type of technology works particularly well with football but it would also work for basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. With ice hockey, the challenge is the puck. How do you track the puck and put the tag inside the puck? We can do it but it’s more costly. With basketball, they have been more focused on the ball than the players.”
Anders Gustafsson, CEO of Zebra Technologies, discusses how their tracking technology is being integrated deeply within sports and business in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Our Tracking Technology Works Particularly Well With Football
We’ve learned now this past year that the tracking system we have with the NFL is actually considered to be the best by the broadcasters, coaches, and the fans. The NFL owns the data so we can’t give (fantasy players) access to the data. I think they give access to some of the data but not all the data. Then you would have all the information you could possibly want to have about every player on all of the teams.
Our type of technology works particularly well with football but it would also work for basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. With ice hockey, the challenge is the puck. How do you track the puck and put the tag inside the puck? We can do it but it’s more costly. With basketball, they have been more focused on the ball than the players.
Zebra Tracking Technology Works Particularly Well With Football
We Are Becoming An Essential Part of Retailers’ Strategies
Savannah is our data platform. We can connect all sorts of devices or sensors on the south side and on the north side we can have APIs to all sorts of other applications. We can provide a lot of analytics around what’s happening there. We integrate with a lot of independent software vendors. If you look at large companies like Oracle, SAP, Manhattan, and JDA, they’re all partners of ours. We exchange data with them and we provide data that they use for their operations. We also have our own software capabilities. We bought a company called Profitect. It does any predictive analytics. This is a good example of this but we have other software capabilities also.
We are now becoming an essential part of retailers’ strategies for building omnichannel and ecommerce capabilities. Historically, we were probably viewed a bit more as a tactical device supplier. Today we’re much more of an integral part of enabling them to execute on their strategy. We moved ourselves up the solution stack to be able to deliver more value to them.
Companies are now tracking employees, patients, assets
Today, more and more things are being tracked and there are more and more efficiencies out of this. Companies are now tracking employees, patients, assets, all of these things. We said we provide the performance edge to the front line of business by having every employee, device, and technical thing being connected and optimally utilized and visible to the network.
Tableau (a company recently bought by Salesforce) would more than likely integrate our data. We could be a source for data insight analytics for them. We aspire to get those kinds of valuations (and the higher multiples that Tableau got when they sold to Salesforce). We also overlap (with Honeywell) in a number of areas but we do quite a few different things also. We have our own strengths and we compete with them but not everywhere.
Zebra Tech Tracking Technology Integrating Deep Into Sports and Business – CEO Anders Gustafsson
“You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten,” says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen. “We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.”
John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, discusses the impact of 50 years of datacenter that will shift to the cloud over the next ten years, in an interview on CNBC:
Software Is Now Eating the World
Software is now eating the world as a lot of folks know. It’s how we bank, how we shop, how we do just about everything. These applications have gotten much more complex over the last five years as they have moved to cloud platforms. The spend in the traditional datacenter is declining quickly and the move is over to the cloud. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.
For example, Carribean Cruise, one of our customers, is reinventing the travel experience for Millenials. They’re doing it all through software on their ships. They provide a little wrist band that interacts with software on ship and on shore to transform the experience. What we’re seeing is really still a continued focus on growth. New revenue streams, new opportunities, and taking in existing core application environments and rebuilding it to be cloud-native. That’s the shift that we see. Still growth, still attack market, still competitive advantage for most companies that are pushing forward aggressively.
50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud
We’ve always built the company around a direct sales approach. Our products are used by enterprises. Enterprises want to connect directly with the company that builds these products. We’ve really always gone to market that way and it has served us very well. It makes it a very predictable business and a very strategic platform for these enterprises. We run across all of the cloud platforms and then some. We target the global 15,000 enterprise companies. We expect to talk to the CIO, CTO, and sort of the executive level that are driving this shift within their organizations’ digital transformation projects. That’s our focus.
What’s happening now is that the cloud is moving from the early days where people would put applications in the cloud to where they really are taking their entire datacenter and shifting it to the cloud. That’s what’s driving these webscale multi-cloud environments that we do so well in. It’s still early days. There’s a lot of room to go in this marketplace. You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten. We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast.
Cloud Is So Much More Efficient and Economical For Companies
This market is very large. We estimate it’s about $18 billion. Others have the estimates in the $20 billions. It’s plenty of room for a company like us to grow and actually probably multiple companies to grow in this space. We feel very secure and happy with our organic innovation. We’ve been able to reinvent the business several times now. It’s a very dynamic space, this application world. Organic innovation is our thrust going forward.
The cloud is so much more efficient and economical for companies that as there is any kind of disruption anywhere in their markets they’re going to lean toward applications. The things that really drive connective tissue with their customers and their marketplaces that create more automation and more information that they gather when they go through digital channels.
50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen
“What we’ve done at Scale is built the data platform for AI,” says Scale AI’s 22-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang. “AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe or reliable way. What we’ve done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way. Then they use the data to build their self-driving cars.”
Alexandr Wang, Scale AI co-founder and CEO, discusses how his company has built the data platform for AI that enables safe and reliable autonomous vehicles. Wang was interviewed on Bloomberg Technology.
We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Autonomous Vehicles
What we’ve done at Scale is built the data platform for AI. AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe or reliable way. What we’ve done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way. Then they use the data to build their self-driving cars. I think it’s very exciting that all these companies have really incredible technology and it’s getting better and better every single year. We’re really getting closer and closer to solving the problem.
One of the big problems in machine learning is perception, being able to fully understand the environment around you using machine learning. So we process a lot of image data, LIDAR data, radar data, map data, etc. for some of these companies. Then for other companies, we process tax data or tabular data or speech data. The work we do is critical to building safe autonomous vehicles, for example, because without the data that we’re able to provide to these companies they actually wouldn’t even be able to build algorithms that could perform in any manner that is safe and reliable.
AI Is Really About Augmenting Humans With Technology
AI is really about augmenting humans with technology and making them more effective and more efficient using technology. In particular, I think for a lot of the problems that we work on where AI plays a really critical role in self-driving or medical imagery, etc., you really want to make sure that humans are a part of the process to ensure that these systems are performing very safely and reliably.
One view that we really take in is, how do we solve this in the most tech-enabled way as possible? How do we use as much machine learning and technology on our side to make the process as efficient and high quality as possible? That’s a very differentiated view actually. Many of these other efforts are much more human-powered than technology powered.
You Don’t Need a Degree To Be Able To Accomplish Your Goals
I was really lucky I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, but after high school, I was lucky to be able to come out here to the Valley to work as a software engineer. That really exposed me to a lot of these problems where AI and machine learning are really core. I went back to school for a year and then after that year at school, I dropped out and started this company.
I think if you know what you want to do, more and more these days, you don’t need a degree to be able to accomplish what you need to do. I think people care a lot more about what can you accomplish and what are your skills.
We Built the Data Platform For AI To Enable Safe Self-Driving Cars, Says Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang
“We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience,” says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch. “Instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.”
Leslie Stretch, President and CEO of Medallia, discusses the company’s IPO and how the company uses machine learning to react to customer signals in real-time rather than after they leave an experience in an interview on CNBC:
Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers
We’re a Silicon Valley tech company. We’re a platform that helps some of the biggest brands in the world really understand their customers in live time and communicate with them while they’re in an experience. So instead of a survey after they’ve left a hotel, they communicate them while they’re there, check in on the experience and improve it. This helps them retain their customer and perhaps sell them another experience. It’s this machine learning platform that does that.
Anything is a signal to us, a survey, an IOT signal, a transaction, somebody buys something, they have a bad experience at the pool, or they’re on an airline and they don’t quite like the service that they’re getting, they can feed that back immediately instead of waiting until the experience is finished. We’re all about platform and signal. We’re very different from the survey companies, the feedback companies, which are the old experience economy companies. It’s the application of deep Silicon Valley technology to the problem.
The Customer Is At the Center of Every Digital Transformation
Customer experience has become really a major theme for every big brand in the world today. I also think that our technology is innovative and very different. The application of machine learning and the platform and just the operationalization of a private Silicon Valley company are really what I’ve done in the past. Just bringing basic blocking and tackling to go to market and marketing and building up the salesforce. So very simple and taking the story out to a bigger market.
We actually just signed a revenue share partnership with Salesforce. We have a partnership for Marketing Cloud with Adobe. They’re great alliances for us. We can present our machine learning, our unstructured data, into their Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Service Cloud. That’s brand new for us this year. It’s great to go to market with leaders like that. Both Adobe and Salesforce completely understand the customer is at the center of every digital transformation and we are at the center of that.
It’s Not For the Faint-Hearted, But We Invested a Ton In It
We spent more than a half a billion dollars building this plot platform. That sets us apart from the traditional simple survey vendor. We’ve spent a ton of money on the privacy layer and on the security layer. We’ve worked already for a decade with some of the biggest brands in the world whose customer information is precious. We’re HIPAA certified for healthcare as well. So we take that very seriously. It’s not for the faint-hearted, but we invested a ton in it and it’s worth it.
Our Machine Learning Platform Helps Brands Retain Their Customers, Says Medallia CEO Leslie Stretch
