Schneider Electric has announced the release of the Uniflair Rack Mounted Cooling Solution, specifically aimed at edge computing and micro data centers.
The solution is aimed at freeing up floor space by using the bottom of an IT rack. This makes it ideal for applications, such as on-premise processing, where space is at a premium.
“Simply put, our new vendor-neutral, rack mounted cooling solution is right-sized for edge micro data centers and provides the right answer for cooling today’s critical edge technology,” said Maurizio Frizziero, Director of Cooling, Schneider Electric. “It offers more cooling in less space and simplifies management and maintenance, making it ideal for industries like retail, finance, health care, light manufacturing, and education.”
As 5G technology boosts edge computing, on or near-premise data processing will become far more important for a variety of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality, self-driving cars and more. Solutions such as Uniflair will become an increasingly critical component, helping ensure the success of those technologies.
International Data Corporation (IDC) is projecting the coronavirus outbreak will have a significant impact on IT spending during 2020.
According to the report, the IDC sees hardware spending taking the biggest hit during the first half of the year, with software and services also being impacted. Pessimistically, IT spending growth could drop to as low as 1%, as opposed to the more than 4% growth originally projected.
“The situation is extremely fluid,” said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC’s Customer Insights & Analysis group. “Our monthly data and surveys are clearly pointing in one direction, but it’s still early to understand the full impact of the coronavirus crisis across all sectors of the economy. We are using scenario models to illustrate that forecasts have a wider range than usual, and the downside risks in those models seem to be increasing every day. But the duration of the crisis remains a big unknown and will go a long way in determining overall market growth for the year as a whole.”
“The pessimistic scenario is not a worst-case scenario,” added Minton. “Things are moving so quickly that we need to constantly recalibrate our assumptions and expectations, but the pessimistic scenario reflects an IT market in which weaker economic growth translates into weaker business and consumer spending across all technologies over the next few quarters. Things could get worse, but hopefully not.”
Google Cloud has unveiled machine images, a new kind of Compute Engine resource that will make backup workflows much easier.
Machine images have a number of significant advantages over standard images. A standard image only captures a single drive, with all its various apps and resources. While that works perfectly fine for duplicating a single disk, it can be an unwieldy solution for backing up entire machines.
According to Google Cloud, machine images are far more comprehensive and can contain multiple disks, as well as everything required to create a new instance of that machine. A machine image would include instance properties, data for all attached disks, instance metadata and permissions.
“Backing up an instance requires more than just disk data. To recreate an instance you need instance properties like the machine type, network tags, labels, and more,” writes Ari Liberman Product Manager, Google Compute Engine. “Capturing this information is easier with machine images. When you create a machine image from an instance, it stores the instance information and disk data into a single resource. When it comes time to restore the instance, all you need to do is provide the machine image and a new instance name. Machine images can be created whether the source instance is running or stopped.”
Customers can begin working with machine images immediately via the “the Cloud Console, gcloud or the API.”
Google used RSA Conference to announce new security tools aimed at helping secure customers’ data and cloud services.
The first new feature is related to Chronicle, the Alphabet-sponsored cybersecurity firm that has since been rolled into Google Cloud. Chronicle’s security analytics software helped “change the way any business could quickly, efficiently, and affordably investigate alerts and threats in their organization.” Google says the new feature is designed to help companies “detect threats using YARA-L, a new rules language built specifically for modern threats and behaviors, including types described in Mitre ATT&CK. This advanced threat detection provides massively scalable, real-time and retroactive rule execution.”
Google is also “introducing Chronicle’s intelligent data fusion, a combination of a new data model and the ability to automatically link multiple events into a single timeline. Palo Alto Networks, with Cortex XSOAR, is our first partner to integrate with this new data structure to enable even more powerful threat response.”
The company has also announced the general availability of its reCAPTCHA Enterprise and Web Risk tools. reCAPTCHA Enterprise helps protect websites from unauthorized scraping, automated account creation and more, while the Web Risk API lets companies check URLs against Google’s list of malicious sites.
The announcement comes as Google is working hard to build its cloud business, trying to make headway against rivals Microsoft and Amazon, and will likely help the company as it works to attract new enterprise clients.
“Digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. McDermott says there are three things that any c-suite executives will tell you:
We have to create great customer experiences to attain fierce customer loyalty.
Employee engagement and really getting employees inspired about working for their company is essential to win the talent war.
Step function productivity improvement generated from digitization is necessary to get cost down where it should be and revenue up where it has to be to win.
Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, discusses how digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time in an interview on CNBC:
Digital Transformation is the Biggest Opportunity of Our Time
Now I’m at ServiceNow and I’m so excited about this cloud future and digital transformation. I have been all over the world and met hundreds of customers in the last three months. Digital transformation is the biggest opportunity of our time. There are basically three things that any c-suite executives will tell you. One, we have to create great customer experiences to attain fierce customer loyalty. Two, employee engagement and really getting employees inspired about working for their company is essential to win the talent war. And three, step function productivity improvement generated from digitization is necessary to get cost down where it should be and revenue up where it has to be to win.
ServiceNow is the platform that essentially is the platform of all platforms. Every environment in the enterprise today is a heterogeneous environment. We are that cross-platform integration engine of the 21st-century economy which is why ServiceNow is growing faster than all of the companies in the cloud.
You’ve Got To Move Everything To a Modern Cloud Architecture
Here’s the root cause of the problem (of executives hesitating on digitization). It took 50 years to build the chaos, the complexity that exists in these enterprises. When you’re talking to these executives they don’t know what to do. That’s because they don’t know how to dig their way out of the mess. The fact is they’re not going to dig their way out of the mess. The fact is they are not going to did their way out of this mess. These systems of record will stay there for long periods of time.
A system of innovation, a system of action, over these systems of record (is what is needed), where you can integrate the data into a new generation workflow in the cloud. Workflow designed experiences can take the mess and move it into a modern cloud architecture so they can execute their mission. The light bulbs go on when they see the solution. Unfortunately, and sadly, the vendors who got them there in the first place are telling them to buy new messes and add it on to the old mess. You have got to leave that old mess alone, put a tourniquet on it, and move everything to a modern cloud architecture, a modern workflow.
Digital Transformation is the Biggest Opportunity of Our Time, Says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott
“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
“Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally,” says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe. “It’s been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way.”
Our customers are very excited about mobile coming to the enterprise. It’s been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. You can show a young new employee, a millennial, that you are in fact a modern company that helps get them onboard and productive quickly.
Also, the Now Mobile app which will allow employees to get their questions answered, problems reported and then dealt with, and get information. All my approvals are now in one place where I can check them. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way. Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally.
We feel very good about our growth. We feel very good about our customer and very good about our prospects. We are just focusing and executing so our customers get those great experiences.
We Feel Very Good About the Relations We Are Building
We now have 766 customers that are a million dollars and greater. We signed 14 customers that are a million dollars and greater in the quarter. That’s just symptomatic of the fact that we now work with 75 percent of the global 500. We are increasingly a strategic partner with those customers. Of our top 20 deals, 17 had three or more products. We feel very good about the relationships that we are building with our largest customers, which are the world’s largest companies and governments.
Our relationship with Microsoft is a very good one. We are initially focusing on US federal business where Microsoft has a strong presence as do we. We have a huge federal business and our datacenters have a certain security clearance. Microsoft Azure has the highest security clearance. Rather than us trying to replicate that, we are going to partner with them to take advantage of that Azure capability and jointly call on US federal customers.
We are doing the same with federal customers in Australia and increasingly we will look at other government markets. We have 20 different product integrations with Microsoft and a long history with them. We think there is a lot of shared opportunity together.
RPO Is the Best Forward-Looking Indication of Our Business
We do think RPO is a very good indication and probably the best forward-looking indication of our business because it demonstrates what kind of revenue you can expect going forward. Our current RPO grew 35 percent in the quarter. We feel very good about the outlook and future of our business. We raised guidance for the full year, both on revenue and billings. We see a lot of opportunity and we have a lot of strong momentum. We are focused on building those customer relationships that drive that growth.
Mobile Is Finally Coming To the Enterprise, Says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe
FedScoop is reporting that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will soon close its last data center as it finishes moving its data and applications to AWS.
ATF CTO Mason McDaniel told FedScoop the goal is to completely transition users to its AWS cloud environment by the end of the year. The last remaining data center will then be converted into office space.
The transition has been a long time coming, as the agency has worked to modernize its IT after shutting down its disaster recovery data center in 2013. From that point forward, the agency was operating without a safety net, a situation it put to the test in 2016 when it had to evacuate its data center for two days as a result of weather. With no disaster recovery plan in place, the agency had to hope for the best that nothing catastrophic would happen during those two days. Moving to AWS will provide the safety and redundancy the agency needs.
McDaniel believes the upgrade to the cloud should result in significant efficiency gains as well.
“What they’re going to see soon after that, once we finish this part, is a focus back on the actual processes themselves,” McDaniel told FedScoop. “Many, many of the processes that our users and analysts and agents have to go through require them to go from system to system to system because of how we built things in projects over time. Every time something new was needed, the teams that developed the old ones were gone. And over time, we’ve got all the tiny little disconnected systems so the users have to manually go back and forth between them to do stuff.”
This, in turn, should reduce by “half or more the amount of time it takes them to do a lot of their daily activities,” McDaniel said. “That’s when they’re really going to start seeing the benefits.”
For the third time in a year, Intel is preparing to release a patch to address two microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) flaws, also known as Zombieland flaws.
According to the company’s blog post, of these two new issues, one is considered low risk and the other medium. Both of them require authenticated local access, meaning a hacker should not be able to remotely exploit these flaws. These new issues are closely related to issues that were addressed in May and November 2019, as Intel has worked to progressively reduce the MDS vulnerability.
“These issues are closely related to INTEL-SA-00233, released in November 2019, which addressed an issue called Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) Asynchronous Abort, or TAA,” writes Jerry Bryant, Director of security communication in the Intel Platform Assurance and Security group. “At the time, we confirmed the possibility that some amount of data could still potentially be inferred through a side-channel and would be addressed in future microcode updates.
“Since May 2019, starting with Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), and then in November with TAA, we and our system software partners have released mitigations that have cumulatively and substantially reduced the overall attack surface for these types of issues. We continue to conduct research in this area – internally, and in conjunction with the external research community.”
Intel has faced intense criticism from security researchers for its decision to address these vulnerabilities in phases, rather than taking an immediate, comprehensive approach to fixing them.
In the meantime, the latest patch should be available “in the near future.”
“We’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future,” says Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco. “What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills.”
“I lead our DevNet and technical community and certifications team for Cisco,” says Whaley. “This includes everything about helping developers use our APIs. We do a lot of work on the paths that you can take to build the skills to learn about Cisco technology, to learn about software skills, to learn about automation, and then prove and test those skills by earning some certifications.”
Mandy Whaley, Sr. Director, DevNet & Certifications at Cisco, says that the engineer of the future combines infrastructure, software, and automation skills:
How To Be An Engineer Of The Future
I come from a software development background. I’m working with a lot of DevOps, network engineering teams, infrastructure engineering teams, and we’re really looking at how all these skill sets have been evolving over time. What we see at Cisco is that the most successful teams and the most successful companies are building teams with this combined skill set of infrastructure skills and software and automation skills. Whether those skill sets are combined in one person or combined within a team of engineers who have specialties, that’s what it really takes to succeed with the scale, the speed, the agility, and the distributed nature of applications that we’re seeing today.
We’ve really seen this come into effect with COVID and the way that companies have had to respond really quickly. Automation came to the forefront as being very important. Companies that had at least a start on those skill sets have been able to respond more quickly. Now we’re seeing an increased interest in how people take teams, work with their engineers, build towards these automation and software skill sets, and create the engineer of the future.
New Job Roles Are Emerging
Part of that has a lot to do with new job roles that are coming out of that. These business drivers of speed and agility and scale are driving things like the need for CI/CD pipeline for more than just your software, even for your networks, for your infrastructure. Out of that are these new job roles emerging, things like a Network Automation Engineer or DevSecOps Engineer, bringing security strongly into your DevOps flow.
That’s part of what we’re learning from the DevNet community and what we’re working with the DevNet community on is how people are building the skills to go after those new job roles. There are a lot of opportunities and a lot of fun stuff to learn.
Cisco’s Mandy Whaley Explains How To Be An Engineer Of The Future
In light of the ongoing ascendancy of clouding computing, Google has released a new whitepaper addressing cloud-native security.
The whitepaper highlights a new approach to cloud security, emphasizing the unique needs of cloud-based systems. For example, in traditional computer security, tremendous emphasis is placed on perimeter security—keeping people out. As Google points out, however, that approach doesn’t work well with cloud-based systems.
“It had become clear to us that a perimeter-based security model wasn’t secure enough,” the whitepaper reads. “If an attacker were to breach the perimeter, they would have free movement within the network. While we realized we needed stronger security controls throughout our infrastructure, we also wanted to make it easy for Google developers to write and deploy secure applications without having to implement security features themselves.
“Moving from monolithic applications to distributed microservices deployed from containers using an orchestration system had tangible operational benefits: simpler management and scalability. This cloud-native architecture required a different security model with different tools to protect deployments aligned with the management and scalability benefits of microservices.”
This new approach is called BeyondProd. BeyondProd builds on the principles outlined in a previous approach called BeyondCorp, and emphasizes zero trust between services.
“In the same way that BeyondCorp helped us to evolve beyond a perimeter based security model, BeyondProd represents a similar leap forward in our approach to production security. The BeyondProd approach describes a cloud-native security architecture that assumes no trust between services, provides isolation between workloads, verifies that only centrally built applications are deployed, automates vulnerability management, and enforces strong access controls to critical data. The BeyondProd architecture led Google to innovate several new systems in order to meet these requirements.
“All too often, security is ‘called in’ last一when the decision to migrate to a new architecture has already been made. By involving your security team early and focusing on the benefits of the new security model like simpler patch management and tighter access controls, a cloud-native architecture can provide significant benefits to both application development and security teams. When applying the security principles outlined in this paper to your cloud-native infrastructure, you can strengthen the deployment of your workloads, how your workloads’ communications are secured, and how they affect other workloads.”
The full whitepaper is a must read for companies designing and deploying cloud-based systems and illustrates the unique approach cloud security demands.
“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
“When people look at what’s happening with Amazon trying to get into their businesses, the need to transform is also front and center for every c-level executive,” says Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. “Given that Adobe’s been through our own transformation and has software they want to hear from us and they want to experience that same benefit that we have been able to see.”
When we talk about helping businesses transform we do every aspect of it. We help them create that experience and help them understand how to attract customers. That last mile of transacting with customers is so critical. Adobe was a company that actually innovated tremendously but we had a two-tier distribution channel. We have two businesses. We have the creative business and we have the enterprise business. If you look at what we’ve been able to accomplish in the long run and the two tailwinds that we have, we continue to be really optimistic about Adobe’s prospects.
When we completely moved to the cloud we recognized that every other company would go through what we did. Namely, how do you engage with your customers digitally? Do you understand how to acquire them and how do they use your software? I think sharing our learnings with other people gives us incredible credibility in the enterprise and we learn from these customers.
Creating a Real-Time Customer Profile is So Critical
In enterprise software, this third generation, which is all about customer experience management, I think it’s the companies who recognize that you have to partner with an entire ecosystem to create this real-time customer profile that’s absolutely so critical. That’s why our partnerships, whether they be with ServiceNow or Microsoft or the other cloud kings is so critical in enabling our customers to completely transform themselves.
What we have been able to do is create this real-time customer profile. People are really within an enterprise saying how do I create native applications? ServiceNow is clearly the leader in IT Service Management. What John (Donahoe) has done is truly special. I think partnering with them to enable IT professionals within an enterprise to use Adobe’s Customer Experience Management with ServiceNow’s IT Service Management, that was a natural.
The Need to Transform is Front and Center for Every C-Level Executive
Design and creativity have never been more important. Everything has a screen. So people are creating content, whether that’s a car, whether that’s a retail experience, whether it’s a basketball stadium. Adobe is the content provider that enables all of these screens to be delivered with incredible content. Given design is more important and given mobile devices are in every single place, that’s a tremendous tailwind.
Secondly, when people look at what’s happening with Amazon trying to get into their businesses, the need to transform is also front and center for every c-level executive. Given that Adobe’s been through our own transformation and has software they want to hear from us and they want to experience that same benefit that we have been able to see.
I’ve talked about how video is explosive. II think what Disney is doing both with their own service as well as with more control of Hulu is really saying people are consuming more and more content digitally. So providing the analytics for that, providing the digital rights management for that, the right ability to audience segment in terms of who you are attracting, a lot of that is what Adobe powers. This is not just for Disney but for frankly all the major media companies in the world.
Adobe Powering Big CPG Companies Through a Digital Transformation
The big CPG companies are going through the following question. They have sometimes hundreds of millions or billions of people using their products and they just don’t necessarily know who they are. Giving them that insight into how they create this incredible customer database, how they understand usage patterns, and how they understand what these people want. If we can provide that insight to companies then all the CPG companies can recognize that this direct relationship will enable them to innovate at a faster pace.
For example, what Unilever is trying to do is really say we have this tremendous distribution network but what they’ve tried to do even with Dollar Shave Club is really say, “How do we create an incredible customer database?” But the same thing is happening across Colgate or Procter & Gamble. We are partnering very heavily with Unilever as they embark on this digital transformation and understanding customer patterns and customer sentiments across the world.
The Need to Transform is Front and Center for Every C-Level Executive, Says Adobe CEO
On the heals of a survey showing Microsoft making significant inroads in the cloud industry, Morgan Stanley has even worse news for the company’s competitors, according to Business Insider.
In the previous survey by Goldman Sachs—despite AWS taking in the lion’s share of cloud revenue—97% of companies said they currently use Azure, compared with 58% for AWS and 25% for Google Cloud. Even more concerning, the survey showed that far more companies were planning to use Microsoft’s platform within the next three years compared to its competitors.
Morgan Stanley’s research provides more validation for Microsoft’s current strategy, predicting the company will “gain the largest percentage of IT budgets over the next three years, while VMware, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle, and Dell stand to lose the most.”
Further complicating things is an expected slowdown in IT budgets in 2020. The slowdown will negatively impact the above companies as more and more businesses move to the cloud. This move signals more good news for Microsoft, however, as it is expected to see gains “driven by an increasing proportion of customers citing Microsoft as their preferred hybrid cloud vendor,” according to the survey.
After years of telling customers onsite hardware was antiquated and unnecessary, even Amazon recently joined the hybrid market. As Business Insider points out, with Microsoft’s lead in this particular segment, Amazon may regret ignoring the hybrid cloud market for so long.
“Innovation is the key,” says Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk. “Anything we do in Honeywell, innovation is always the key. Whether it’s expanding into Europe, driving more robotics, a connected warehouse offering which we are bringing to customers and having a broader play, are the key technology levers for that business.”
Darius Adamczyk, CEO and Chairman at Honeywell, discusses how the company is using innovation and technology to drive growth in an interview on Bloomberg:
Honeywell Digital Makes Us a More Contemporary Digital Company
As we always said my number one priority as CEO was to drive organic growth, but we never say we’re going to give up on our margin expansion. We do it through a combination, both commercial levers, which is managing our mix, and always introducing new products, which bring more value to customers. But also not forgetting our roots, which is driving productivity. With the number of ERPs we have and the kind of complexity we have in our supply chain, Honeywell Digital, which is going to make us a much more contemporary digital company, we have plenty of levers for productivity as well.
Honeywell Digital really has three primary elements. First is data governance, which is standard across all our various businesses. We’ve done over 80 acquisitions in the last 15 years so we have a lot of disparity. Then there are common processes, which is we want to run our businesses the same way in a very consistent manner. We have some pockets of excellence, but those have some inconsistency. Finally, all integrated into a common IT platform. Just to give an example, we had well over 1,500 different software applications before we started. We had over 150 ERP systems. It’s just very difficult to run a company efficiently and enable us to really make good data-based decisions. Honeywell digital is really all about enabling that.
Anything We Do In Honeywell, Innovation is Always the Key
Warehouse automation, which we started in 2016 with our Intelligrated acquisition. It’s been just a terrific business growing strong double-digit. We also made another acquisition called Transnorm which added to that technology in Europe in Q4 last year. We were planning on growing it organically, but also we’re looking to enhance our offerings, so we’re looking for inorganic opportunities as well. Innovation is the key. Anything we do in Honeywell, innovation is always the key. Whether it’s expanding into Europe, driving more robotics, a connected warehouse offering which we are bringing to customers and having a broader play, are the key technology levers for that business.
Amazon is a big customer but we have a lot of big customers. I wouldn’t say it’s a predominant customer in that business. Just about everybody is looking into ecommerce because with a lot today’s retail you really have basically two options. One option is to enhance the in-store experience which a lot of retailers are doing. The other one is to drive ecommerce. We think that this trend is going to continue. Although I would say it’s in the middle innings in the US, it’s just beginning in Europe. We think we have a huge opportunity in Europe, India, and some of the other overseas markets.
We have a very active venture capital fund and we’ve made about six investments in the last six months which is augmenting our technology plays. So although we haven’t made any big acquisitions, other than Transnorm in Q4, we are continuing to invest through our venture fund and we’re deploying capital that way. It’s been a terrific story for us in 3D printing for instance, particularly for our aerospace business. For a lot of the slow-moving parts we’re trying to basically get a new part certified and three printing per day. That’s our objective. Our aerospace businesses have made tremendous progress in achieving that and it’s really helping both for our inventory and on-time delivery for a lot of our aftermarket customers.
It’s Important For Teachers To Be More Effective in STEM Education
Regarding the workforce, education is the key and particularly STEM education. Honeywell is a big believer in that. Not only do we develop a lot of our young people that we bring into the company but we also spend a lot of money and time on developing teachers. It’s important for teachers to be more effective in STEM education. It’s something that we’re going to be supporting going forward even on a broader scale because that’s the way to differentiate our company.
We’re always going to be differentiated by technology and we want to bring the brightest and the best. We want to make sure that it’s a competitive issue, not just here in the US, but everywhere we hire people, and we hire people just about everywhere. We have engineers in the US, China, India, everywhere around the globe. I would say lately we’ve actually been very much on the hiring string. When you grow 8% that creates a lot of opportunities to hire a lot of people particularly in the area of technology and engineering and software.
At Honeywell Innovation is Always the Key, Says CEO
Google has announced a partnership with IBM to bring IBM Power Systems to Google Cloud, providing businesses with “a truly hybrid environment.”
For many businesses, moving to a cloud-based solution can be difficult, especially if the business relies on legacy infrastructure or workflows. As Google’s announcement says, “at one end of the spectrum, some organizations are replatforming entire legacy systems to adopt the cloud. Many others, however, want to continue leveraging their existing infrastructure while still benefiting from the cloud’s flexible consumption model, scalability, and new advancements in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and analytics.”
By partnering with IBM, Google can offers customers the ability to run “IBM Power Systems as a service on Google Cloud—whether you’re using AIX, IBM i, or Linux on IBM Power.
“For organizations using a hybrid cloud strategy, especially, IBM Power Systems are an important tool. Because of their performance and ability to support mission critical workloads—such as SAP applications and Oracle databases—enterprise customers have been consistently looking for options to run IBM Power Systems in the cloud. IBM Power Systems for Google Cloud offers a path to do just that, providing the best of both the cloud and on-premise worlds. You can run enterprise workloads like SAP and Oracle on the IBM Power servers that you’ve come to trust, while starting to take advantage of all the technical capabilities and favorable economics that Google Cloud offers.”
Some 80% of Fortune 100 companies rely on IBM Power Systems, with the platform especially popular in finance, retail, insurance and healthcare. These are also industries where even minimal disruption can be disastrous. Google’s announcement provides Power Systems users with another option to move towards a cloud-based architecture, while at the same time giving Google one more way to continue growing its cloud business.
The controversy surrounding the Pentagon’s recent $10 billion JEDI contract seems without end, although the DOD is aiming to end at least part of it by trying to shut down Oracle’s appeal, according to GCN.
In the recent bidding process, AWS, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft were the four top companies in the running. Oracle and IBM were eliminated first, leaving AWS and Microsoft. Many industry experts believed AWS was all but guaranteed to come off with the win, as the company has extensive prior experience working with sensitive government projects. To everyone’s surprise, Microsoft ultimately ended up winning the coveted contract.
In the midst of Microsoft’s win, Oracle has launched repeated attempts to have the results invalidated and a new bidding process started. In particular, Oracle wants a multi-vendor contract, rather than a single, winner-takes-all award. Oracle also claimed there was unfair bias toward AWS due to a conflict of interest stemming from a Pentagon employee who was trying to sell his own company to Amazon, while allegedly tailoring the terms of the contract to favor the cloud provider.
The DOD is arguing that Oracle’s contentions are essentially moot points. First and foremost, even if Oracle won and the terms of the contract were redesigned, the company would still not qualify, even in a multiple-award result. Second, since Microsoft ultimately won the contract, the DOD is arguing that any possible conflict of interest is a non-factor that ultimately did not benefit AWS.
It will be interesting to see how far Oracle continues to fight this, given there seems to be little evidence they had any real chance of winning the contract under any circumstances.
“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
“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
“What’s happening is that digital transformation is a strategic priority for every company,” says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe. “If you can’t compete digitally you can’t succeed. ServiceNow is one of the core strategic digital transformation partners for increasingly virtually every company around. Companies are focusing on how can they deliver better experiences to their customers, better experiences for their employees, and drive real productivity growth.”
John Donahoe, CEO of ServiceNow, discusses how digital transformation has become the key strategic priority for every company in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Digital Transformation Is A Strategic Priority For Every Company
What’s happening is that digital transformation is a strategic priority for every company. If you can’t compete digitally you can’t succeed. ServiceNow is one of the core strategic digital transformation partners for increasingly virtually every company around. I was in Europe and met with several customers and some of our big partners and they aren’t focusing on macroeconomics they aren’t focusing on Brexit.
They’re focusing on how can they deliver better experiences to their customers, better experiences for their employees, and drive real productivity growth. ServiceNow is one of their core platforms that enable all three.
Cross-Functional Workflow Is the Wave Of the Future
I inherited a wonderful company from Frank Slootman, a company that had enormous potential. My role over the last three years has been to try and bring us up into the C-Suite and begin to pull us outside of IT. The reason for that is employees don’t really care if their issues are IT or HR or finance. Historically, software has been very siloed. Cross-functional workflow is the wave of the future. That’s what digitization enables. I’ve gotten us started to do that.
However, with our next CEO, Bill McDermott, there is no one in the world who was operated more across all the major buying centers in the enterprise. He knows all the functional software and all seams that exist. There’s no one in the world that has greater C-Suite relationships than Bill McDermott. He’s going to take this even to the next level.
Digital Transformation Is A Strategic Priority For Every Company – ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe
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.
