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  • Technology and Innovation Powering Levi Strauss Growth Strategy, Says CEO

    Technology and Innovation Powering Levi Strauss Growth Strategy, Says CEO

    Levi Strauss began trading on the New York Stock Exchange this morning under the ticker symbol ‘LEVI.’ By mid-afternoon, the stock was at $22.66, substantially higher than the price offered to institutional investors. It’s clear that investors believe that Levi’s can leverage technology and innovation to successfully compete online and in brick and mortar stores.

    Levi Strauss Soars in NYSE Debut

    Charles Bergh, CEO of Levi Strauss, discusses how technology and innovation are driving increased sales and market share in an interview with CNBC coinciding with their IPO:

    We Are Denim and We’re the Market Leader Globally

    We are denim and we’re the market leader globally. A lot of people as we were doing the (IPO) roadshow said aren’t you guys just riding the denim wave? We’re creating the denim wave. We’ve been driving the category with innovation across our men’s business and our women’s business. We’ve expanded to other categories. Last year we finished with 14 percent growth coming off of 8 percent growth the prior year. The business is really humming right now.

    I believe this is sustainable for the long term. Maybe not double digits forever. But we’ve got clear runway for growth across the categories that we’re competing in. We’re building share in our core categories and expanding to new categories. Last fiscal year, when we finished the year our growth was really broad-based. If you looked at it in the categories where we competed we grew every single category. If you looked at it by geography we grew every single geography. If you look at it by channel we grew across wholesale, including US wholesale, which is a little bit of a melting iceberg right now. We grew in our own brick-and-mortar and ecommerce. It was very broad-based growth last year and we’re confident we can continue that.

    We Have Built a Very Big Platform for Big Data

    First of all, to be successful it does come down to strong brands. Consumers at the end of the day love an emotional attachment with their brand. We’ve recreated that that love for Levi’s. We have built a very big platform for big data. In fact just a couple of weeks ago we announced that we’ve hired a head of advanced analytics and machine learning who will sit on the executive team and report directly to me. We are mining the data that we do collect and really turning it into revenue.

    Our strategies are working and one of the key strategic choices that we made seven years ago, shortly after I joined, was to become a leading world-class omnichannel retailer and it is working. The mix has shifted to omnichannel. When I joined the company it was about 20 percent of our business. Today, it’s almost a third. It is faster growing than our wholesale business and we’re continuing to invest in it. Most of our capital investment is going into retail and ecommerce and knitting that seamless consumer experience together.

    Implemented New Instance of SAP and Investing in RFID

    It (IPO funds) is going to go into continued investment in building out our omnichannel. So both brick-and-mortar retail as well as our ecommerce business and then knitting it together with technology. For example, we’re implementing a new instance of SAP and investing in RFID (radio frequency identification). We’ve implemented RFID across our business in the US and UK and that’s actually really turning into money. Every one of the products in our store is tagged with RFID.

    I’ve actually had this experience happen to me myself in our new Times Square store. There was an item I wanted to buy and they didn’t have it in my size. A stylist came over and scanned the tag and she could see that my size was available in the back room. Just two minutes later I was in the dressing room trying it on. A year ago before our RFID that would have been a lost sale. That just wouldn’t have happened. It gives us instant clear visibility to the inventory in our store, both in front of house as well as back of house.

    Levi’s Driving Market Share Through Product Innovation

    Back in 2013 and 2014, the headlines were the death of denim. It was all about athletic tights and Lululemon tights. It became a throwdown moment for us as a company. We have an innovation center a couple of blocks from our office. We brought our suppliers, the mills that make denim for us, into that innovation center. We understood what women were really telling us by wearing tights. That used to be a denim occasion. They wanted soft stretchy comfortable material that made them look great and gave them confidence. That was what was driving that conversion. So we innovated around soft stretchy comfortable denim which we can now do. We developed proprietary four-way stretch so that women don’t get baggy knees, which is their biggest dissatisfier.

    We relaunched our business in the middle of 2015 and we’ve grown 14 quarters in a row and in the last eight quarters at double-digit rates. It has been a huge part of our growth. We were under $800 million just on women’s bottoms about three years ago. We’re over a billion dollars today. We are number one globally with a nine percent market share, but we’re not number one in a number of markets including right here in the US. So I really do believe we can continue to grow at an accelerated rate on our women’s business. There are lots of what I like to call share donors out there for us to build share while we’re building the category.

    We haven’t seen any (backlash to being an American brand). This brand stands for everything good about America. Freedom, democracy, and allowing people to express themselves. Authentic self-expression is what the Levi’s brand is all about. We’ve not seen any backlash. None. We think there are lots of opportunities still for us. I am not worried at all about denim. We are denim and we’ll continue to drive this category through great innovation and marketing that connects with consumers and sends them into our stores.

    Technology and Innovation Powering Levi Strauss Growth Strategy


  • How Palo Alto Networks Blocks 30,000 New Pieces of Malware Daily Via AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data

    How Palo Alto Networks Blocks 30,000 New Pieces of Malware Daily Via AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data

    “The platform we have uses big data analytics and machine learning in the cloud to process and find all of the unknown malware, make it known and be able to block it,” says Scott Stevens, SVP, Global  Systems Engineering at Palo Alto Networks. “We find 20-30 thousand brand new pieces of malware every day. We’re analyzing millions and millions of files every day to figure out which ones are malicious. Once we know, within five minutes we’re updating the security posture for all of our connected security devices globally.”

    Scott Stevens, SVP, Global  Systems Engineering at Palo Alto Networks, discusses how the company uses AI, machine learning, and big data to find and block malware for its customers in an interview with Jeff Frick of theCUBE which is covering RSA Conference 2019 in San Francisco:

    We Find 20-30 Thousand New Pieces of Malware Every Day

    There are two ways to think about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics. The first is if we’re looking at how are we dealing with malware and finding unknown malware and blocking it, we’ve been doing that for years. The platform we have uses big data analytics and machine learning in the cloud to process and find all of the unknown malware, make it known and be able to block it.

    We find 20-30 thousand brand new pieces of malware every day. We’re analyzing millions and millions of files every day to figure out which ones are malicious. Once we know, within five minutes we’re updating the security posture for all of our connected security devices globally.

    Whether it’s endpoint software or it’s our inline next gen firewalls we’re updating all of our signatures so that the unknown is now known and the known can be blocked. That’s whether we’re watching to block the malware coming in or the command-and-control that’s using via DNS and URL to communicate and start whatever it’s going to do. You mentioned crypto lockers and there are all kinds of things that can happen. That’s one vector of using AI NML to prevent the ability for these attacks to succeed.

    Machine Learning Uses Data Lake to Discover Malware

    The other side of it is how do we then take some of the knowledge and the lessons we’ve learned for what we’ve been doing now for many years in discovering malware and apply that same AI NML locally to that customer so that they can detect very creative attacks very and evasive attacks or that insider threat that employee who’s behaving inappropriately but quietly.

    We’ve announced over the last week what we call the cortex XDR set of offerings. That involves allowing the customer to build an aggregated data lake which uses the Zero Trust framework which tells us how to segment and also puts sensors in all the places of the network. This includes both network sensors an endpoint as we look at security the endpoint as well as the network links. Using those together we’re able to stitch those logs together in a data lake that machine learning can now be applied to on a customer by customer basis.

    Maybe somebody was able to evade because they’re very creative or that insider threat again who isn’t breaking security rules but they’re being evasive. We can now find them through machine learning. The cool thing about Zero Trust is the prevention architecture that we needed for Zero Trust becomes the sensor architecture for this machine learning engine. You get dual purpose use out of the architecture of Zero Trust to solve both the in-line prevention and the response architecture that you need.

    How Palo Alto Networks Blocks 30,000 New Pieces of Malware Daily

    >> Read a companion piece to this article here:

    Zero Trust Focuses On the Data That’s Key to Your Business

  • AWS CEO: Cloud is Still Really Early Days

    AWS CEO: Cloud is Still Really Early Days

    “It’s still really early days,” says Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy speaking about the cloud. “Sometimes we remind ourselves that even though it’s a $30 billion revenue run rate business growing 45 percent year-over-year, it’s the early stages of enterprise and public sector adoption in the US. Outside the US they’re 12 to 36 months behind depending on the country and industry.”

    Jassy says that although price is the conversation starter, speed and agility are the primary reasons that enterprises are moving to the cloud. He says that most startups have built their businesses from scratch on top of AWS. Some of the big examples, he notes, are Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Tomo, and Robinhood.

    Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), discusses how the cloud is still really in the early days in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Cloud is Still Really Early Days

    Sometimes we remind ourselves that even though it’s a $30 billion revenue run rate business growing 45 percent year-over-year, it’s the early stages of enterprise and public sector adoption in the US. Outside the US they’re 12 to 36 months behind depending on the country and industry. It’s still really early days. The conversation starter when people move to the cloud is always cost. Instead of laying out all that capital for data centers and servers and instead only spend what you consume that’s usually very advantageous.

    Capital expense turns to variable expense and variable expense is much lower than what most companies can do on their own because we have such a large scale that we pass on to customers in the form of lower prices. We’ve lowered our prices on 70 different occasions in the last ten years. You get real elasticity. You provision what you need and if it turns out you need more, you provision more. If you don’t need anymore because you’re at the peak you just give it back and stop paying for it.

    Primary Reason Enterprises Move to Cloud is Speed and Agility

    Price always is the conversation starter but the number one reason that enterprises are moving is speed and agility. Usually, if you want to try an experiment in your company it takes 10 to 12 weeks to get a server and then you have got to build all the infrastructure software around it. In the cloud, you can provision thousands of servers and minutes. Then because we have 165 services that you can use in whatever combination you want you can get from an idea to implementation in several orders of magnitude faster. You can innovate much quicker.

    As an example, what Lyft is doing in the space is pretty amazing and the piece that they’re growing at is really amazing. To be able to scale the way they have, first as a start-up and then a fast growing business, and then what they would tell you is that they’re able to invent and change the customer experience so quickly, several orders of magnitude faster than they could if they were doing on premise that it’s really helped build their business.

    The Cloud Encourages Innovation

    The vast majority of applications in the next five to ten years will be infused with some sort of machine learning. We are in kind of a golden age of computing. Almost every company that we speak with is interested most importantly in being able to take their own data. Most companies have gobs of data. Even startups today have gobs of data. But it’s so hard to know what’s in there and it’s so hard to know what the gems are and it’s so hard to know what’s going to be the predictive pieces that change the customer experience. Our machine learning capabilities are going to solve that for a lot of customers.

    If you are building technology applications and trying to build consumer experiences, you want to do as much as you can for as little money as possible. Then when you have ideas you want to be able to move fast. One of the things that happen at companies that build on the cloud is it used to be so hard to get anything done that none of your employees spent any time outside of work thinking about new ideas, because why bother. It was so demoralizing that you never get to try it.

    With the cloud, you can provision instances and servers in minutes so people spend their free time thinking about new customer experiences. They know that if they come up with something over the weekend they can come in Monday and try it for a dollar. It changes how many people in your company think about innovation and where you get new ideas from throughout the company.

    Most Startups Have Built Their Businesses on Top of AWS

    Most startups have built their businesses from scratch on top of AWS. Some of the big examples are companies like Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Tomo, and Robinhood. There is a very large number of them. But there are a lot of businesses that either haven’t gotten big yet or are just trying to build a business. One of the interesting things that happened I remember in 2007-2008 when we had the recession. There were all these very gloomy emails sent from a lot of venture capitalists saying don’t expect to get funded, but the number of startups kept growing.

    As opposed to having to go raise money to pay for data centers and servers people can try several instantiations of their idea on top of AWS and if it isn’t getting traction you paid something like 80 cents a month or a $1.50 a month, whatever your usage is. We have loads of companies that are trying to build businesses on top of us that really only pay anything meaningful when they have traction.

    Amazon More Focused on Long Term Than Most Companies

    It’s always hard for me to measure the impact we have on the overall world. The way we think about it at Amazon is that in every single one of our businesses we have never met customers who don’t want prices to go down. If the center of your gravity is customers, which it is in every single one of Amazon’s businesses, you’re always working relentlessly to find ways to take cost out of your structure so you can give it back to customers in the form of lower prices. It’s actually really easy to lower prices. It’s much harder to be able to afford to lower prices.

    We’re much more focused on the long term than most companies. We are trying to build a business and a set of customer relationships that outlasts all of us. As such, we think if we help our customers get more done and are successful on their own, even if it means lower margin percentages, over time we’ll drive more absolute margin dollars. They’ll be more successful and we will ultimately be more relevant.

    It Takes Work to Actually Move Away From Oracle

    I think Larry (Ellison of Oracle) has a certain view of the world that isn’t always steeped in what the facts are. If you look at Amazon, we started the company at a very early stage and we had Oracle. It takes work to actually move away from Oracle. Lots of customers are learning this as so many people are trying to move away from the commercial-grade legacy database providers like Oracle or SQL server to newer engines like Aurora.

    We now are 88 percent of the way through moving all of our Oracle databases and will be at 100 percent by mid this year. We turned off our Oracle data warehouse in November of last year and moved it to Redshift. We learned some very interesting patterns that customers are very excited about copying. We don’t really meet a lot of customers who aren’t looking to move away from those databases to Aurora.

    AWS CEO: Cloud is Still Really Early Days


  • Zero Trust Focuses On the Data That’s Key to Your Business

    Zero Trust Focuses On the Data That’s Key to Your Business

    “The fundamental way you look at Zero Trust is it’s an architectural approach to how do you secure your network focused on what’s most important,” says Scott Stevens, SVP, Global  Systems Engineering at Palo Alto Networks. “You focus on the data that’s key to your business. You build your security framework from the data out.”

    Scott Stevens, SVP, Global  Systems Engineering at Palo Alto Networks, discusses Zero Trust in an interview with Jeff Frick of theCUBE which is covering RSA Conference 2019 in San Francisco:

    Zero Trust Focuses On the Data That’s Key to Your Business

    We’ve been working with Forrester for about six years now looking at Zero Trust architecture. The fundamental way you look at Zero Trust is it’s a an architectural approach to how do you secure your network focused on what’s most important. You focus on the data that’s key to your business. You build your security framework from the data out. There are all kinds of buzzword bingo we can play about what Zero Trust means, but what it allows us to do is to create the right segmentation strategy starting in the data center of the cloud and moving back towards those accessing the data and how you segment and control that traffic.

    Fundamentally what we’re dealing with in security are two big problems that we have. First are credential based attacks. Do we have somebody with stolen credentials in the network stealing our data? Or do we have an insider who has credentials but they’re malicious where they’re actually stealing content from the company? The second big problem is software based attacks, malware exploits scripts. How do we segment the network where we can enforce user behavior and we can watch for malicious software so we can prevent both of those occurrences through one architectural framework? I think Zero Trust gives us that template building block on how we build out those networks because everybody’s enterprise network is a little bit different.

    You Need To Start With What’s Most Important.

    We have to build those things together. On the Palo Alto Networks side what we do is Layer 7 enforcement based on identity. Based on who the user is and what their rights are we are able to control what they are allowed access to or what they’re not allowed access to. Of course, if you’ve got a malicious insider or somebody that’s logged in with stolen credentials we can prevent them from doing what they’re not allowed to do. Working here with Forescout, we’ve done a lot of really good integration with them on that identity mapping construct. They help us understand all the identities and all the devices in the network so we can then map that to that user posture and control at Layer 7 what they’re allowed to do or not allowed to do.

    You need to start with what’s most important. Clouds and data centers as a starting point are generally the same. How we segment is actually the same. Sometimes we think that clouds are are more difficult to secure than data centers, but they are the same basically. We’ve got north-south traffic, we have east-west traffic. How do we inspect and how do we segment that? How do we focus on what’s the most important critical data to their business? If we stratify their data sets and their applications that access that data and then move down we may have 50 percent of the applications in their cloud or data center that we don’t micro segment at all because they’re not critical to the business. They’re useful to the employees, but if something goes wrong they’re, no big deal and no impact to the business.

    Micro segmentation isn’t just a conversation of where we have to do things but it’s a conversation contextually in terms of what’s relevant and where is it important to do that and then where do you do a much less robust job? You always have to have inspection and visibility, but there are parts of your network where you’re going to be somewhat passive about it and there are parts of your network that you are going to be very aggressive. These include multi-factor authentication, tight user identity mapping, how do we watch for malware, how do we watch for exploits, all of the different aspects.

    Zero Trust Focuses On the Data That’s Key to Your Business

    >> Read a companion piece to this article here:

    How Palo Alto Networks Blocks 30,000 New Pieces of Malware Daily Via AI, Machine Learning, and Big Data

  • VMware CEO: Why Can’t We Build the Telco Network Like the Clouds?

    VMware CEO: Why Can’t We Build the Telco Network Like the Clouds?

    VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger suggests that with the advent of 5G the telco network should be built like the clouds. “Why can’t we build the telco network like the clouds have been built for with scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and agility?” says Gelsinger. “That’s really the idea of the telco cloud. As people go to what’s called NFV, network function virtualization, and as they’re looking ahead to 5G services, can’t we have a new architecture for building the telco cloud? But it also is flexible and scalable and helps them do services between 4G and 5G.”

    Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, discusses 5G and building the telco network like the clouds in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with CNBC:

    Building the Telco Network Like the Clouds

    What it really is about it’s saying that over the last decade and a half we’ve gotten pretty good at building clouds. Why can’t we build the telco network like the clouds have been built for with scalability, flexibility, efficiency, and agility? That’s really the idea of the telco cloud. As people go to what’s called NFV, network function virtualization, and as they’re looking ahead to 5G services, can’t we have a new architecture for building the telco cloud? But it also is flexible and scalable and helps them do services between 4G and 5G. It also helps them bridge so as they build these new services they can run them on the old as well as prepare services for the new.

    The telco market is like 80 percent the size of the data center and cloud market. This is big. It’s a huge adjacent market that largely we’ve never touched before. We’re really excited about that. If you think about what we’ve done, it’s about building this rock-hard infrastructure that never goes down. Data centers, businesses, and banks running it told the telco networks that they need rock-hard never-goes-down infrastructure. We really find a huge opportunity there.

    2020 is the Year for 5G

    I’ve said for a few years that I think 2020 is the year (for 5G implementation). I think when you when you see a show like this everybody’s starting to really gear up. The trials are underway. I really see 2020 as really where it’s going to happen. Right now the national anthem is playing and next year the game gets started. If you’re going to be a cloud you’ve got to be efficient. That helps the bottom line by building more cost efficiency and operational efficiency. You have to do that. But ultimately, it’s about the new services that 5G is going to introduce.

    It’s hard to say how much Huawei (potentially being banned in Europe) is going to impact. Obviously, people who have large positions with Huawei today, it becomes easy to add 5G onto it. It is somewhat dependent on carrier and market. Our view of what we’re trying to do with virtualization is to minimize unique dependencies on any particular hardware market. Part of our value proposition exactly helps customers navigate through the 4G to 5G transition as well as picking different key hardware vendors. That’s what that virtualization layer does so we think we actually help customers.


  • Next Frontier: Edge Centric, Cloud-Enabled, Data-Driven, Says HPE CEO

    Next Frontier: Edge Centric, Cloud-Enabled, Data-Driven, Says HPE CEO

    We believe the Edge is the next frontier, says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “When we talk about the enterprise of the future, we see an edge-centric, cloud-enabled, data-driven, enterprise,” notes Neri. “What that means is the cloud is moving closer to where the data is created. That’s driven by the use cases we see around us.”

    Neri adds: “Whether it is healthcare, manufacturing, or transportation, everything is being connected. It started with connectivity and then soon after that is the security aspect. One thing is connecting devices and apps and one thing is connecting things to the network. That’s why our Aruba platform is such a unique asset because it provides connectivity and security with AI built-in at the core.”

    Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), discusses the acceleration of the digital transformation in an interview on CNBC:

    Driving the Acceleration of the Digital Transformation

    I would like to characterize that we had another strong quarter for the company. That’s further evidence that our strategy is working to accelerate the Intelligent Edge and to drive profitable growth in the core segment of the market called Hybrid IT.  Because we are continuing to build our portfolio and we see the demand steady, we’re actually very confident to raise our guidance that we obviously beat in Q1. We see the rest of fiscal year 2019 as strong for us and give us the confidence to raise the guidance driven by the portfolio and the innovation we have and in the feedback we get from customers.

    We see the demand steady. We have not seen any evidence of a downturn (due to tariffs, shutdown, etc.). Obviously, we are continuing to monitor the uncertainties around the globe, but the reality is that customers are making critical investment to drive that acceleration of the digital transformation. That’s all driven by the fact that the data around us has continued to grow. They need to extract the value of that data much faster than ever before. That’s why we see growth in segments like high performance compute, which for us grew 50 percent. Software around infrastructure grew 70 percent. Also, the connectivity in the Edge grew 20 percent in the wireless business. We see that as a continued trend.

    When people ask me what’s going on around the globe with Brexit, for example, our UK business actually grew double digits. When you think about the government shutdown, actually one of the key products we sell in the government is high-performance compute, and it actually grew triple digits. So it has not had the impact, but obviously, we continue to monitor what’s going on around the globe.

    Next Frontier: Edge Centric, Cloud-Enabled, Data-Driven

    We believe the Edge is the next frontier. When we talk about the enterprise of the future, we see an Edge centric cloud-enabled data-driven enterprise. What that means is the cloud is moving closer to where the data is created. That’s driven by the use cases we see around us. Whether it is healthcare, manufacturing, or transportation, everything is being connected. It started with connectivity and then soon after that is the security aspect. One thing is connecting devices and apps and one thing is connecting things to the network. That’s why our Aruba platform is such a unique asset because it provides connectivity and security with AI built-in at the core.

    3 Cs of the Intelligent Edge

    Ultimately, it brings that cloud computing closer to actually where the data is created. We think about it as an integrated solution. Obviously, we need to provide customers the tools to be able to protect themselves and be compliant with the new regulatory policies being put in place, like for example, GPI in Europe. We are really focused on that and we actually believe we have one of the best solutions at the Edge today. The data continues to outpace the compute capacity and actually, 75 percent of that data is created at the Edge. That’s very exciting and that’s why I’m bullish about these Edge compute capabilities that the customers need going forward. It’s just physics.

    AI is a Big Opportunity for Us

    Two years from now we’re going to create twice the amount of data that we created in our entire human history. That data needs to be stored, it needs to be managed, it needs to be compliant, and most importantly, business outcome has to be derived. That’s why we see the need to bring that cloud compute closer to where the data is in a different form factor. We see AI as a big opportunity for us and all integrated with connectivity and security.

    Customers are telling us that they are accelerating the digital transformation. We have a saying that the future belongs to the fast. People who can extract insights from the data faster are going to continue to win. We are very bullish about it because we have one of the best portfolios we ever had and our innovation is second to none.

    The US is Ahead with 5G

    5G is going to be an exciting opportunity for us. The US is ahead and is going to be one of the first countries, if not the first country together with Japan and others, to roll out 5G. We already see evidence of that. Our opportunity with 5G is to provide customers an integrated experience. 5G is a type of connectivity, but it is not the only type of connectivity. You are talking about 5G, talking about wire connectivity, you talk about wired network connectivity or wireless connectivity.

    What customers are asking us is give me one integrated experience with one security control play. That’s where Aruba fits perfectly in that we’re going to provide a cloud-based solution that integrates 5G into that experience.


  • When It’s Game Time for Retail New Relic is There, Says CEO

    When It’s Game Time for Retail New Relic is There, Says CEO

    New Relic provides deep performance analytics for every part of a business software environment. It enables companies to easily view and analyze massive amounts of data, and gain actionable insights in real-time. Whether it’s for a popular mobile app, an online video game with millions of users, or a huge ecommerce platform, they all rely on critical New Relic insights to keep revenue flowing.

    Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, talks about how critical real-time insights from New Relic are to a companies revenue stream in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    When It’s Game Time for Retail New Relic is There

    For retail obviously, so much of their business, particularly their web business depends on a very small number of days; Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc. That’s game time. That’s the moment of truth. That’s when we’re working our hardest to make sure our software is there to make sure our customers can see what’s going on in real-time. Our customers were thrilled with the performance and availability that they delivered which turns into business results.

    If your site is slower or down on Cyber Monday, forget it, you’re going to miss your quarter. You may never recover from that because you also have a brand hit. So it’s so vital. This is not nice to have software. Anybody who is competing on their software needs New Relic’s platform in order to succeed.

    We’re a Massive Cloud Operation

    We’re a massive cloud operation. We’re collecting millions of data points every second from mobile applications and from cloud infrastructure every time somebody’s pressing a button to buy something and every time someone’s watching this video on the CNBC app. We’re measuring the health of that and we do that on a massive scale. That’s one of the things our customers love.

    When Fortnite said, “Hey we’ve got this huge app. It’s the biggest in the world and we want to monitor on New Relic.” We’re like great. Your biggest day is just another day for us. We collect so much data and we can do it for you.

    New Relic Monitors Fortnite to Keep it Running for Millions of People

    Epic Games is the company that created Fortnite and if you have kids or you’re into games this game has taken the world by storm. It’s the most popular game in the world. If that game is not working millions of people know about it and the company is affected.

    So they rely on the New Relic platform to see everything in real-time on how that game is performing. It’s a very complex piece of software that has to work flawlessly in real-time. We measure everything going on in that game so that the builders of Fortnite can keep it running for millions of people 24/7.

    There are different companies that do different things around observing what’s going on in this space but were the applications-centric company. What does that mean? It means that when you’re playing Fortnite what you’re doing is you’re using software.

    We’re measuring the software in real-time. We do it in a cloud platform that integrates what’s going on in the software with the infrastructure and with the end-user experience, like the mobile app. We see all that together and do it in one unified platform and our customers love us for that.

    New Relic Helps CNBC Scale Mobile App in Real-Time

    At CNBC, you just launched an incredible new revenue app in the fall and it’s amazing. I use it a lot and I love it and again this is an app that’s getting a lot of uptake. I was talking to the team and they said customers love what the app is doing for them and they want to use it more and more. That means they have to scale.

    When more and more people are using that app how are you able to handle the scale when people want to see the news in real time and want to see the stock quotes in real time? We provide them the visibility that gives them the confidence to move faster and scale to this amazing demand that the CNBC app is generating.

    New Relic Helps Companies Move Fast in a Multi-Cloud World

    This is so important to our customers. It’s clear that we’re entering a multi-cloud world. Obviously, Microsoft’s doing well and Amazon doing very well. We had a great show at re:INVENT. And there’s some hybrid cloud as well. What our customers are saying no matter where my software is running I want to see it all in one place. I’m sick of moving from one tool to another to see a complete picture. They turn to the New Relic platform to see it all in one place. That enables them to move fast with confidence.

    Anywhere there are systems that need to perform well and scale well, those are systems that need New Relic. What we say to our customers is building great software is not easy, but it is the foundation upon which companies can build great competitive advantage. We want to partner with our customers to deliver amazing software that delights our customers and grows their business.


  • Problem Solving is ‘Full of Massive Innovation,’ Says Label Insight Co-founder

    Problem Solving is ‘Full of Massive Innovation,’ Says Label Insight Co-founder

    Label Insight says that it is powering transparency at the intersection of retailers, brands, and consumers with an industry-leading platform for CPG product attribute data covering more than 80 percent of top-selling food, pet, and personal care items in the U.S. They started out in the pre-cell era by literally going into grocery stores and manually copying the product labels and entering the information into a spreadsheet. That has changed, but what hasn’t changed is their value-driven innovative company culture.

    Dagan Xavier, Co-founder and SVP of Data and Nutrition Sciences at Label Insight, recently talked about how the company started and how the company continues to innovate, in a feature on Entrepreneur:

    At the Intersection of Brands, Retailers, and Consumers

    Label Insight sits at the intersection of brands, retailers, and consumers. Our data and analytics essentially allow those brands and retailers to increase sales by empowering the consumer to make better-educated decisions around the products that they buy. Why did I start this business? This was a pure family need. When someone in your family is sick and they need help, the first thing you do is you go and help them.

    I can remember the call that I got when I was at University, second year. I got a call from my Dad and he asked me to come home because he needed some help to determine what brand of noodles he could eat based on his new diet. Ultimately, it came down to what brand of ramen noodles he could consume that were low in fat, low in sodium, didn’t have any artificial ingredients, and no trans fat.

    About Label Insight

    Problem Solving is ‘Full of Massive Innovation

    If anyone out there can answer those four questions on all the ramen products out there I would love them to come work for us. Essentially, that’s what started this. Innovative problem solving is the most innovative and most useful when it’s created from a real need. I think back to when we started this company. This was pre-cell phone days. We would walk down the aisles of supermarkets and use our dictaphones to collect information on the back of packages and dictate it out to Excel to create our database. That’s an incredibly manual process.

    In over two years of work, we collected 8,000 products. Not very much, but in those days it was a feat. Having those problems and going through that manual workload, that’s when innovation really happens and starts to occur. I would say that our whole data-ingestion process is symptomatic of that manual history and is full of massive innovation.

    Our Key Value is Intellectual Honesty

    When I’m seeing Label Insight succeed it’s based on a shared set of values. It’s based on having multiple people moving in the same direction. The way that you can do that is by being mission-driven and value-based. Our mission is clear, we’re out to help people make educated choices around the products that they make. As a way to keep everyone going and moving in the right direction, it has to be about values as well.

    We have a number of values that we hold true to ourselves. Obviously transparency, it’s not a trend it’s a right. Other values we hold are collaboration, intellectual honesty, iteration and Innovation, and quality driven. These are all really important values that allow us to get on the same page as each other and be paddling in the right direction.

    When I think about a particular value that stands out to me, it’s intellectual honesty. I believe that whenever we are looking at hiring folks and bringing people into the team, that’s the key value that I’m looking for. That ability to admit when you are wrong and to be brutally honest at times that’s the backbone, that’s the base that you need to be able to perform. We are not looking to just perform here. We are looking to change an industry. So we need folks who are able to get us there. That’s why I find that value particularly important.

    Problem Solving is ‘Full of Massive Innovation,’ Says Label Insight Co-founder


  • Starbucks Dramatically Increased Used of AI-Powered Customer Insights to Drive Growth, Says CEO

    Starbucks Dramatically Increased Used of AI-Powered Customer Insights to Drive Growth, Says CEO

    Starbucks has dramatically increased the use of AI-powered customer insights to drive growth, says Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. During the most recent holiday season, Starbucks made data-driven decisions on a variety of items from the type of holiday cups they were offering to how they promoted gift cards, all designed to increase sales. Johnson credits these new customer insights for improving gift card sales by four percent over last years holiday period.

    Kevin Johnson, CEO of Starbucks, discussed in an interview on CNBC how analytics, artificial intelligence, personalization, and technology are now driving marketing, sales, and business decisions:

    AI is Making Us a Better Company

    We have dramatically stepped up the focus on customer insight. We are using technology to help inform us of what customers want, what they need, and what they think of Starbucks. That informed our entire holiday plan this year, and we had a fantastic holiday.

    We are driving much more use of analytics, artificial intelligence, personalization, and technology to help us be more informed and more connected to our customers. That is making us a better company.

    Customer Insights Driving Starbucks Growth

    I’ll frame it around customer insights. Coming out of last year’s holiday we used a number of tools and research to give us customer insights on what customers really appreciated and loved about Starbucks at the holiday. That informed everything from the design of our cups to utilizing the reusable red cup promotion that we launched. We saw gift card sales grow four percent year-on-year in the quarter.

    That was a function of customer insight and research that we did. This holiday, in many ways, was informed by that insight. That’s just an example of what we’re doing. We’re using all kinds of data, customer focus groups, and things to help us be more informed and more front-footed on the trends and the things that customers really want to see from Starbucks.


  • Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO

    Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO

    Every business has been disrupted by the digital transformation, says Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO Antonio Neri. With that disruption is an explosion of valuable data. “That data has value,” says Neri. “Enterprises are looking to extract that value much faster than ever before because people who can get inside faster will win. We see that as a massive opportunity.”

    Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discussed how the explosion of data, especially with the advent of 5G, is causing companies to invest in new technologies like AI and machine learning in order to extract maximum value from their data. Neri was interviewed by Fox Business at Davos 2019:

    Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity

    We live in an incredible time. Every business has been disrupted by the digital transformation. Occuring with that disruption is the explosion of the data we are creating. You just made a comment that data is the new oil. We say that data is the new currency. That data has value. Enterprises are looking to extract that value much faster than ever before because people who can get inside faster will win. We see that as a massive opportunity.

    We are coming out of 2018 which was very strong. We saw an increase in spend in IT which was driven by security, more compute capacity, as well as storage capacity around this data. Also, we see the spend moving in a different direction. For example, new technologies like AI and machine learning to extract the value of the data. We see good momentum. Obviously, we see some signals for a little bit of slowdown. However, a little bit of slowdown doesn’t mean everything is going to stop. It’s actually still very strong.

    Companies Are Digitizing Their Enterprises

    I see companies putting more money into deploying new architectures like cloud and mobility. We live in a mobile-first approach. Companies are digitizing their enterprises making their enterprises much more efficient with this new technology.

    Basically, they are moving faster than ever before. So we are actually very optimistic about the future. That data will continue to outpace the compute power which means that money will be spent in catching up with that need to process all of that data in real-time.

    5G Accelerating the Digital Transformation of Every Industry

    There’s obviously going to be a big investment in the telecommunications space to lay all this infrastructure. 5G actually favors the movement of data which means it is going to accelerate this transition and digital transformation of every industry. Last year at this event we talked about the Industrial Revolution 4.0. 5G will enable that because everything will be connected, everything will ingest data, and everything will process data.

    We are very optimistic about the future of spending and the transformation of the business using this new technology. We think we are well positioned for the future and I think we have the portfolio to compete and win.

    Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says HPE President


  • How Lime Monitors Data From 26,000,000 Trips in Real-Time

    How Lime Monitors Data From 26,000,000 Trips in Real-Time

    Lime monitors data from their scooters and bikes in real-time in order to ensure that all bikes are charged and available to riders. In fact, in 2018 Lime monitored 26 million scooter and bike trips worldwide according to their year-end report. The average ride was just over one mile totaling 28 million miles for the year.

    Not only does Lime monitor data from their scooters they also remotely slow them down depending on where they are in a city, all in real-time.

    Xiuming Chen, Engineering Manager of Infrastructure at Lime, discussed how Lime uses AWS and Amazon Kinesis to ingest all of this real-time data:

    Lime Sends Commands to Scooters in Real-Time

    Lime is a company about urban transportation and we provide a green and affordable transportation option for the users. Our scooter is connected to our servers to ensure a higher quality of service. We need to send commands to scooters in almost real-time. Maintaining hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections is a huge engineering challenge and that number is only growing.

    Lime Slows Scooters Down Depending on Geolocation

    We collect all kinds of information between these vehicles. For example, GPS, location, velocity battery level, and motor information. Safety is a top priority for Lime. As an example, we have a feature that requires us to slow down vehicles when they enter certain areas of the city. To achieve that we have had to increase the frequency of data collection drastically. We have a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers. The team analyzes this data to help us understand how people use our service.

    On-Demand “Juicers” Use App to Collect Scooters

    Normally we see spikes from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., depending on where you are, but sometimes we also notice a very interesting spike at 9:00 p.m. So we have a network of on-demand workers that charge our scooters. We call them Juicers. Every night at 9:00 p.m. we start to allow Juicers to collect scooters. All of them open the app at the same time which causes the traffic to flatten our servers and causes a traffic spike. In the past, the traffic came directly into a relational database and our service become slower and unusable.

    Amazon Kinesis Ingests Real-Times Scooter Data

    We started to use Amazon Kinesis to ingest real-time data coming from our vehicles. The speed of the growth of this industry is incredible. Scalability is one critical issue we have to deal with and we can let Kinesis do the heavy lifting behind the scene. We can spend the time to work on some more important features that users really need.


  • How Pandora Uses AI To Power Music Discovery

    How Pandora Uses AI To Power Music Discovery

    Pandora is considered the world’s most powerful music discovery platform, using its proprietory algorithm to determine which music to play to a subscriber at any given time. The question is how do they do it so successfully?

    Pandora’s Data Science Manager says that it’s not about AI and machine learning replacing humans. He says it’s about those two working together.

    Andreas Ehmann, Manager of Research and Data Science at Pandora, recently discussed how Pandora uses AI and machine learning via its Music Genome Project to power Pandora:

    Using Data to Teach Computers How to Listen to Music

    Music is an art form and behind it are certain objective properties, what instruments went into making it, the overall sound style, and artistic expressions of intent. It’s not just about objectively understanding music itself. We’re using that data to teach computers how to listen to music.

    There are about 450 traits that we’re looking at for every song. Is it a breathy voice like Bjork or perhaps a smooth vocal like Shaday? Is there a swing or a shuffle feel to the beat or is there a lot of syncopation? There’s always this talk about AI and machine learning replacing humans when in reality it’s a loop. I think really a lot of the future is those two working together.

    Challenge is Determining When to Introduce a New Song

    The machine can tell you pretty well that someone’s singing in a piece of music. A machine might have a little harder time telling you what language that person is singing. The type of music we listen to and how we behave when we listen to it can really tell us a lot about ourselves. What do you do the first time you’ve ever heard a song? Are you open to it do you follow the mainstream or do you have very niche interest? Underlying all of those core behaviors are some really fundamental personality traits.

    The challenge with music discovery is when is the right moment to hear a new song. That’s where you have to start learning about people. If you’re working and very concentrated you want to be listening to something familiar and hearing something you’ve never heard before is oftentimes a bit jarring.

    Biggest Misconception About Music Streaming and Data

    The biggest misconception about music streaming and data is that everything behind it is an algorithm. When we fundamentally think about how the algorithms work we have to think back to how we used to discover music before we had streaming services. We would listen to the radio or we would learn from our friends.

    What’s at the heart of a lot of these algorithms is actually connecting you to all of the other people out there that you’re never ever going to meet. The trick then becomes how do you combine all of those sources of recommendations with your past listening behavior and with your current circumstance to pick the best song for you right now?

    More Pandora News:

    SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer: Audio is Thriving Like Never BeforeSiriusXM

    SiriusXM CEO: Pandora to Make Sirius Subscribers More Sticky

    Pandora Co-Founder: Apple, Amazon, Google is Going to Rue the Day They Let Pandora Get Away

  • How LinkedIn is Using Machine Learning to Determine Skills

    How LinkedIn is Using Machine Learning to Determine Skills

    One of the more interesting reveals that Dan Francis, Senior Product Manager for LinkedIn Talent Insights, provided in a recent talk about the Talent Insights tool is how LinkedIn is using machine learning to determine skills of people. He says that there are now over 575 million members in the LinkedIn database and there are 35,000 standardized skills in LinkedIn’s skills taxonomy. The way LinkedIn is figuring out what skills a member has is via machine learning technology.

    Dan Francis, Senior Product Manager, LinkedIn Talent Insights, discussed Talent Insights in a recent LinkedIn video embedded below:

    LinkedIn Using Machine Learning to Determine Skills

    The skills data in Talent Insights comes from a variety of sources, mainly from a member’s profile. There are over 35,000 standardized skills that we have in LinkedIn’s skills taxonomy, and the way we’re figuring out what skills a member has is using machine learning. We can identify skills that a member has that’s based on things that they explicitly added to their profile.

    The other thing that we’ll do is look at the text of the profile. There’s a field of machine learning called natural language processing and we’re basically using that. It’s scanning through all the words that are on a member’s profile, and when we can determine that it’s pertaining to the member, as oppose the company or another subject, we’ll say okay, we think that this member has this skill. We also look at other attributes, like their title or the company, to make sure they actually are very likely to have that skill.

    The last thing that we’ll do is look at the skills a member has and figure out what are skill relationships. So as an example, let’s say that a member has Ember, which is a type of JavaScript framework, since we know that they know Ember, they also know JavaScript. So if somebody’s running a search like that, we’ll surface them in the results. I think that the most important reason why this is helpful and the real benefit to users of the platform is when you’re searching, you want to get as accurate a view of the population as possible. What we’re trying to do is look at all the different signals that we possibly have to represent that view.  

    575 Million People on LinkedIn Globally and Adding 2 Per Second

    Today, LinkedIn has over 575 million members that are on the platform globally. This is actually growing at a pretty rapid clip, so we’re adding about two members per second. One of the great things about LinkedIn is that we’re actually very well represented in terms of the professional workforce globally. If you look at the top 30 economies around the world, we actually have the majority of professionals in all of those economies.

    LinkedIn is the World’s Largest Aggregator of Jobs

    I think there’s often a perception that most of the data’s directly from LinkedIn, stuff that’s posted on LinkedIn and job status is one notable exception to that. Plenty of companies and people will post jobs on LinkedIn, and that’s information that does get surfaced. However, we’re also the world’s largest aggregator of jobs. At this point there are over 20 million jobs that are on LinkedIn.

    The way that we’re getting that information is we’re working with over 40,000 partners. These are job boards, ATS’s, and direct customer relationships. We’re collecting all of those jobs, standardizing them, and showing them on our platform. The benefit is not just for displaying the data in Talent Insights, the benefit is also when members are searching on LinkedIn.com, we’re giving them as representative a view of the job market as possible.

  • 50 Million Google+ Accounts Compromised in Latest Data Breach, Platform to Shut Down Earlier Than Planned

    50 Million Google+ Accounts Compromised in Latest Data Breach, Platform to Shut Down Earlier Than Planned

    The discovery of another privacy flaw has pushed Google to shut down Google+ much earlier than expected.

    Google announced on December 10 that it had discovered a security issue that potentially left more than 50 million accounts vulnerable in November. The revelation came shortly on the heels of a previous admission that a security lapse in March also affected thousands of users. Because of this, the company says Google+ will be shut down by April 2019.

    Google initially planned to sunset the platform by August 2019. The company made the announcement to close its Google+ network in October, after it admitted that an earlier breach affected 500,000 users.

    The latest bug was said to have been inadvertently created by a software patch that Google developed last month. It reportedly gave third-party apps access to account users’ profile data and exposed even information that wasn’t made public. It took the company six days to notice it and find a solution.

    In a blog post, Google’s Vice President of Product Management, David Thacker, shared that “No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.”

    However, the bug made it possible for apps where users willingly shared their Google+ data to also access their friends’ profile or those of people who shared data with them. Google gave assurances though that it did not expose any passwords, financial data, or other sensitive details that could be used in identity theft.

    The Alphabet-owned company had also suffered a security breach in March. That particular bug placed tens of thousands of users’ personal information at risk. The company waited half a year before it admitted to regulators and the public that there was a problem. The breach happened around the time Facebook was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Reports stated that Google delayed revealing the problem partly to avoid regulators from scrutinizing the company.

    The admission that there was another security issue couldn’t have come at a worse time for the company. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was set to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on December 11 to be grilled about the company’s data practices.

    Google+ will be shutting down all its APIs for developers within three months. However, the platform’s enterprise version will remain functional. Google also acknowledged on Monday that Google+ had a low number of users and that there were major obstacles to turning it into a successful product.

    [Featured image via Google]

  • AWS CEO Announces Textract to Extract Data Without Machine Learning Skills

    AWS CEO Announces Textract to Extract Data Without Machine Learning Skills

    AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced Amazon Textract at the AWS re:Invent 2018 conference. Textract allows AWS customers to automatically extract formatted data from documents without losing the structure of the data. Best of all, there are no machine learning skills required to use Textract. It’s something that many data-intensive enterprises have been requesting for many years.

    Amazon Launches Textract to Easily Extract Usable Data

    Our customers are frustrated that they can’t get more of all those text and data that are in documents into the cloud, so they can actually do machine learning on top of it. So we worked with our customers, we thought about what might solve these problems and I’m excited to announce the launch of Amazon Textract. This is an OCR plus plus service to easily extract text and data from virtually any document and there is no machine learning experience required.

    This is important, you don’t need to have any machine learning experience to be able to use Textract. Here’s how it generally works. Below is a pretty typical document, it’s got a couple of columns and it’s got a table in the middle of the left column.

    When you use OCR it just basically captures all that information in a row and so what you end up with is the gobbledygook you see in the box below which is completely useless. That’s typically what happens.

    Let’s go through what Textract does. Textract is intelligent. Textract is able to tell that there are two columns here so actually when you get the data and the language it reads like it’s supposed to be read. Textract is able to identify that there’s a table there and is able to lay out for you what that table should look like so you can actually read and use that data in whatever you’re trying to do on the analytics and machine learning side. That’s a very different equation.

    Textract Works Great with Forms

    What happens with most of these forms is that the OCR can’t really read the forms or actually make them coherent at all. Sometimes these templates will kind of effectively memorize in this box is this piece of data. Textract is going to work across legal forms and financial forms and tax forms and healthcare forms, and we will keep adding more and more of these.

    But also these forms will change every few years and when they do something that you thought was a Social Security number in this box turns out now not to be a date of birth. What we have built Textract to do is to recognize what certain data items or objects are so it’s able to tell this set of characters is a Social Security number, this set of characters is a date of birth, this set of characters is an address.

    Not only can we apply it to many more forms but also if those forms change Textract doesn’t miss a beat. That is a pretty significant change in your capability in being able to extract and digitally use data that are in documents.

  • 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.

  • Microsoft Rolls Out Tool for Brands to Build Their Own AI-Powered Virtual Assistant

    Microsoft Rolls Out Tool for Brands to Build Their Own AI-Powered Virtual Assistant

    It’s been a busy week for Microsoft. The company launched an open source system for designing virtual assistants and also revealed several updates to its conversational AI solutions.

    Microsoft showed several realistic ways that customers can use artificial intelligence in a just-concluded event in San Francisco. The company also spoke about how brands should integrate AI into their business processes and touched on the obstacles that come with adopting AI technology. Citing a Gartner report, the Redmond-based company pointed out that only four percent of CIOs are using AI technology while 70 percent of businesses lack the skills and support to do so.

    In order to make AI accessible and easier to use, Microsoft has launched its virtual assistant accelerator on Github. This is basically a template with integrated pre-made skills that can be utilized to answer basic questions or locate local services by using conversational AI and the Microsoft Bot framework. The solutions accelerator also comes with a calendar, linked accounts, a to-do skill, and points of interest feature.

    In a blog post, Lili Cheng, Corporate VP of AI, explained that the company believes that their “virtual assistant solution accelerator simplifies the creation of your own assistant enabling you to get started in minutes.” Cheng also emphasized the control their customers will have and how even the VA’s “name, voice, and personality can be changed to suit the organization’s needs.”

    Cheng also admitted in an interview that the company has “reworked a lot of the tooling” to provide companies with better solutions and support. To that end, Microsoft has upgraded the Translator API and Azure Cognitive Services‘ text-to-speech synthesis. It has also rolled out container support for the latter, which will enable developers to add capabilities like object detection and language understanding in their applications even without having any data science skills.

    Microsoft also announced its acquisition of Botkit creator XOXCO and an Azure Machine Learning Integration for the Power BI software.

    [Featured image via Pixabay]

  • How Tech Startup Raycatch is Revolutionizing Solar Efficiency

    How Tech Startup Raycatch is Revolutionizing Solar Efficiency

    Raycatch Founder Michael Goldstein says that his VC backed software startup is using artificial intelligence to bring significant efficiencies to solar projects all over the world. Their DeepSolar solution captures data, does an AI-powered analysis, and then provides action items to large solar panel users so that they can improve energy yield and reduce costs.

    Michael Goldstein, Chairman, and Founder Of Raycatch discussed their breakthrough technology on ILTV ISRAEL DAILY:

    Raycatch Uses Data Analytics to Manage Solar Panels

    Raycatch is a solar company that does data analytics for solar owners and solar maintenance people. What happened in the whole energy system is that there was a main revolution where the cost of panels went dramatically down in the last ten years. That caused a large number of new installations all over the world, either on roof mounting or ground where you saw more and more solar projects all over the world. The only thing that did not change, besides the reduction, of course, was the fact that owning and maintaining those projects did not improve.

    Improves Solar Panel Efficiency with Artificial Intelligence

    So that’s exactly where we come in. We’re trying to improve ownership and maintenance by using AI, artificial intelligence, to better run those assets. We are a VC backed 15 person startup based in Tel Aviv operating with projects all over the world, currently in Israel and Europe. We have prominent customers and we are already running over 100 different projects in those countries. We will eventually be in the United States as well.

    Improves Solar Yield by 5 Percent, Operational Costs by 20 Percent

    People that are using our software are able to increase the yield by 5 percent. They can reduce the cost of operation by 20 percent and they have better transparency about the value of their assets they’re running. Bear in mind that it’s not only residential installations but imagine all those large installations over the ground, utility-scale, utility companies, that are using solar panels today.

    We are targeting mainly the large-scale installations because it’s more efficient for us business-wise but in principle were relevant for both small and large installations. They can be residential, they could be on a commercial roof or on the ground.

    How DeepSolar Works:

    About Raycatch:

    Based in Israel, Raycatch was founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs and solar experts. Raycatch is an AI diagnostics technology for solar energy, on a mission to revolutionize the manual PV monitoring market by enabling automated, insight-driven management of solar assets. By deciphering existing solar energy data, Raycatch transforms PV Operation and Maintenance (O&M) tasks from traditional manual scheduled operations to on-demand automatic management. No hardware or software installation or site visits are needed. 

    The result is maximized performance and maintenance of solar assets, leading to increased yield, decreased operational costs and the acceleration of solar energy penetration in the global energy market.

  • SAP + Qualtrics – Why Did They Do It?

    SAP + Qualtrics – Why Did They Do It?

    SAP released a compilation video (below) featuring SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith that really sums up well why SAP is acquiring Qualtrics:

    Bill McDermott: First it’s an honor to team up with Brian Smith, a great CEO, and an inspirational leader. We couldn’t be prouder of our relationship with Qualtrics.

    Ryan Smith: This is a once in a generation opportunity and we’re gonna change the whole face of enterprise technology with this combination.

    Bill McDermott: SAP is the fastest growing cloud company in the large-scale business software industry while Qualtrics is the fastest growing business software company in the experience management space. If you combine those two forces you have a juggernaut of cloud growth.

    Ryan Smith: There are two types of data. You have operational data which is telling you what’s going on and what just happened. These are your analytics, this is your CRM product, this is your HCM product. Then you have experienced staff which allows us to get human sentiment in the moment to understand the why, how someone feels. SAP owns the operation systems from end-to-end, we own the experience systems from end-to-end. The ability to combine those and have one single view will transform the way we even think about CRM as we know it.

    Bill McDermott: We want to be the jet fuel that propels them to 193 countries with the biggest business software sales go-to-market force in the world in 25 industries, small, mid, and large alike. Every customer should know that X-Data and O-Data are together now.

    Ryan Smith: We are fired up today is a new beginning and with all the resources from SAP, we’re super excited for that.

    Bill McDermott: And the loyalty effect is what the experienced management of Qualtrics and the operational data of SAP drive. So X-Data, experience, and O-Data, what’s going on in the operations, put that together, you could inspire everyone in the company to take care of everyone outside the company.

    Ryan Smith: I could not be more excited to work with SAP, McDermott, all of the SAP family. The Qualtrics family is excited and we’re going to go do something legendary.

  • 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.

  • Dropbox CEO: The Opportunity is Massive

    Dropbox CEO: The Opportunity is Massive

    Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that making their product better is their primary strategy to achieving continued strong growth and he doesn’t expect their growth to slow down in the near future. Houston says that the opportunity is massive and that they are not going to run out of people who need Dropbox anytime soon.

    Drew Houston, Co-Founder & CEO of Dropbox, talked about their earnings release and their growth strategy on CNBC:

    The Opportunity is Massive

    We had another strong quarter, strong revenue growth, strong free cash flow. The way we see driving conversion is about bringing people along a journey from using Dropbox as individuals, maybe they start using the free version, and then they bring it into work and start using the business product. We’ve been able to do that at bigger and bigger scale over the last few years.

    The opportunity is massive. When we think about it, every company, every team in the world has content and needs to collaborate around it. We’re not going to run out of people who need Dropbox anytime soon and we have hundreds and millions of people who have used Dropbox. We’re operating in massive scale. So really we think about how do we drive people along that journey as effectively as possible?

    We Drive Value Per Subscriber by Making the Product Better

    The way we drive value per subscriber is make the product better. There’s a number of improvements we’ve made in this quarter and in the last few quarters. When you think about new features in Dropbox like Smart Sync and a feature called Showcase which is about richer sharing, those are driving higher and higher adoption of our premium individual plans in the business version of Dropbox.

    A really important part of our strategy is our open ecosystem and our customers love having the freedom to use any different tool or any different ecosystem. That’s a big strength of ours. We’ve announced integrations earlier this year with companies like Google and Salesforce. This quarter we also announced some integrations with companies like Zoom who is a leader in video communication and collaboration. We saw that our Dropbox customers were using all of these products and Zoom found that their customers are using Dropbox. Building a seamless integration is a really powerful way to both increase engagement and then improve the stickiness of our platform.