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.
According to Business Insider, a recent Goldman Sachs poll shows Microsoft making significant inroads into the cloud market at Amazon and especially Google’s expense.
Goldman Sachs polled 100 IT executives from Global 2000 companies to see what cloud platforms were in the best position moving forward. The results showed that while Amazon’s “AWS still gets the largest share of cloud revenue, a ‘significantly higher number of respondents’ indicated they use Microsoft Azure and plan to in the next three years.” In fact, “97 respondents said they are currently using Microsoft Azure, compared to 58 using AWS and 25 using Google Cloud Platform.”
This should be deeply worrying to Amazon and Google. Amazon recently lost out to Microsoft in the bid for a Pentagon contract valued at $10 billion. Microsoft is also the second company to achieve the coveted Impact Level 6 security clearance—behind Amazon—allowing it to store sensitive government data in the cloud. Achieving that clearance will only improve the company’s odds of scoring other major contracts in the future.
With Microsoft currently being used in so many companies, and the inherent advantage it has due to its established software ecosystem, Amazon and Google will have their work cut out trying to avoid losing any more market share.
CyberScoop is reporting that Jeanette Manfra, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant director for cybersecurity, will be joining Google.
Google has been trying to gain traction acquiring federal cybersecurity contracts. Manfra will offer a big boost in that area, as she will take on the role of “global director of security and compliance as part of a new security team at Google Cloud,” according to Google’s statement to CyberScoop.
“She will lend her considerable experience in cybersecurity toward helping our customers, particularly those in regulated industries, build and maintain the highest levels of security and trust into their technical infrastructure and services,” a Google Cloud spokesperson went on to say.
Manfra is well respected in the cybersecurity community and, as CyberScoop points out, has been praised by politicians for her role in election security. Her name alone will lend gravitas to Google’s efforts to make headway in the field.
She will stay on at her post at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency through the end of December, before beginning her new role with Google in January.
Yahoo is reporting that Dell is increasingly looking to AMD in response to Intel’s chip shortages.
Intel has experienced significant supply issues in 2019, even penning an open letter to customers and partners apologizing for the chip shortages. In the letter, executive vice president Michelle Johnston Holthaus wrote:
“I’d like to acknowledge and sincerely apologize for the impact recent PC CPU shipment delays are having on your business and to thank you for your continued partnership. I also want to update you on our actions and investments to improve supply-demand balance and support you with performance-leading Intel products. Despite our best efforts, we have not yet resolved this challenge.”
It appears that at least one major customer is not waiting for the challenge to be resolved. According to Yahoo, Dell is looking to source chips from AMD to make up for Intel’s shortages.
“We are evaluating AMD chips,” Tom Sweet, Dell’s CFO, said on Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade in response to a question about what the company planned to do in view of Intel’s struggles.
The move is particularly significant, as Dell has predominantly used Intel’s chips for 35 years. That focused reliance on the chip giant, however, is largely to blame for Dell’s 6 percent decline in consumer PCs during its most recent quarter.
With Intel not expected to have their supply issues resolved until the second half of 2020, Dell appears to be adopting the philosophy ‘don’t have all your eggs in one basket.’
After years of convincing customers they should rent server space and computing power, Amazon is in the business of selling rack servers. It’s a major shift in strategy for the company, as it bows to market realities and embraces a hybrid approach.
Hybrid cloud options contain a mixture of onsite and cloud servers, giving customers options and flexibility that one alone would not provide. In an effort to stay ahead of Google and Microsoft, Amazon is embracing the idea.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Outposts at the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference.
“Over the past several years, AWS has delivered services like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, and Amazon Storage Gateway to make it easier for customers who want to run their on-premises datacenters alongside AWS. In 2017, AWS collaborated with VMware to introduce VMware Cloud on AWS, giving the vast majority of companies who are virtualized on VMware the ability to use the same on-premises VMware tools that they had been using for years to manage their infrastructure on AWS. Still, some customers have certain workloads that will likely need to remain on-premises for several years such as applications that are latency sensitive and need to be in close proximity to on-premises assets. These customers would like to be able to run AWS compute and storage on-premises, and also easily and seamlessly integrate these on-premises workloads with the rest of their applications in the AWS Cloud. Early attempts by other vendors have fallen short – unable to provide the ability to use the same APIs, the same tools, the same hardware, and the same functionality across on-premises and the cloud, therefore unable to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience to customers.
“AWS Outposts solves these challenges by delivering racks of AWS compute and storage, with the ability to run services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) on this AWS-designed infrastructure. AWS Outposts will initially come in two variants:
For customers who want to use the same VMware control plane and APIs they’ve been using to run their infrastructure, they will be able to run VMware Cloud on AWS locally on AWS Outposts. This variant, called VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, delivers the entire VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) – compute, storage, and networking infrastructure – to run on-premises and managed as a Service from the same console as VMware Cloud on AWS, using AWS Outposts and enables customers to take advantage of the ease of management and integration with AWS services that they enjoy today.
For customers who prefer the same exact APIs and control plane they’re used to running in AWS’s cloud, but on-premises, they can use the AWS native variant of AWS Outposts. These customers will have the opportunity to run other software with native AWS Outposts, starting with a new integrated offering from VMware called VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, which will feature popular VMware technologies and services that work across VMware and Amazon EC2 environments, like NSX (to help bridge AWS Outposts to local data center networks), VMware AppDefense (to protect known good applications), and VMware vRealize Automation (for workload provisioning).
“In both cases, AWS will deliver the racks to customers, install them (if customers prefer), and handle all maintenance and replacement of racks. These AWS Outposts will be an extension of a customer’s Amazon VPC (in the closest AWS Region to each customer), and customers can seamlessly connect from their AWS Outposts to the rest of their applications in AWS or any other AWS service.”
Polte has announced its Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud is now available on the AWS Marketplace. Polte is a Cloud Location over Cellular (C-LoC) provider, offering a patented Location-as-a-Service (LaaS) solution as an alternative to traditional GPS.
According to the company website, “the Polte Cloud provides seamless indoor and outdoor coverage leveraging cloud computing and existing 4G and 5G cellular networks. No need to deploy thousands of Bluetooth beacons, hundreds of Wi-Fi access points, or launch more GPS/GNSS satellites – Polte uses global IoT mobile networks, which already reach 99% of the population.”
Not only is the Polte Location API available on the AWS Marketplace, but the company has also been invited to demo its API at AWS re:Invent 2019.
“Polte’s Cloud Software enhances Amazon’s ecosystem with an easy to use, secure and affordable geolocation offering,” said Ed Chao, Polte chief executive officer. “Polte delivers simply better location, and we are creating new and different opportunities never thought possible. If you make things, sell things or own things, Polte locates all those things.”
“Polte’s disruptive C-LoC technology is a software-only solution that makes it simple for developers to add indoor and outdoor location capability to their IoT applications for supply chain, asset and inventory management. Polte-enabled IoT devices listen to 4G and 5G cellular networks, the tracker sends the data via the open Polte Location API to the Polte Location Engine. The Polte Location Engine uses patented algorithms to determine and provide location data with building, block, neighborhood and city granularity. Polte’s simple implementation process allows developers and programmers to easily access Polte’s API after programming an AT command in an embedded module.
“Polte’s positioning technology can be integrated for use in a variety of industries, including aerospace, appliances, automotive, energy, food & beverage, government, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, manufacturing, retail, smart buildings, smart cities, and transportation-as-a-service for supply chain, asset, and inventory management. Whether tracking containers, pallets, machines, or components, Polte makes finding them easy, affordable and secure.”
“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
While 5G is just beginning to roll out and is only supported by a handful of phones, MediaTek and Intel have announced a partnership to bring the new technology to PCs.
5G promises to be a revolutionary upgrade to the wireless experience, offering speeds measured in gigabits per second rather than megabits. Latency is also significantly better with the specification calling for ping between 1 and 4 milliseconds (ms), verses the 20 ms of 4G.
It’s easy to understand why 5G would make an appealing addition to a PC as, in many cases, it would be substantially faster than a cable or DSL connection.
“Our 5G modem for PCs, developed in partnership with Intel, is integral to making 5G accessible and available across home and mobile platforms,” said MediaTek President Joe Chen. “5G will usher in the next era of PC experiences, and working with Intel, an industry leader in computing, highlights MediaTek’s expertise in designing 5G technology for global markets. With this partnership, consumers will be able to browse, stream and game faster on their PCs, but we also expect them to innovate with 5G in ways we have not yet imagined.”
“5G is poised to unleash a new level of computing and connectivity that will transform the way we interact with the world,” said Gregory Bryant, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group. “Intel’s partnership with MediaTek brings together industry leaders with deep engineering, system integration and connectivity expertise to deliver 5G experiences on the next generation of the world’s best PCs.”
Dell and HP are the first manufacturers expected to release computers offering Intel and MediaTek’s 5G connectivity, with the first devices expected in early 2021.
Business Insider is reporting that Microsoft is building out a new team of technical trainers to help customers at all levels of proficiency.
Microsoft and Amazon are locked in a bitter rivalry in the cloud computing business. While Amazon’s market share was three times that of Microsoft in 2018, Microsoft is making impressive headway. Most recently, the company beat out Amazon for a Pentagon contract with $10 billion.
One area where Azure can continue to take market share away from AWS is by appealing to non-technical audiences. AWS is widely viewed as more complicated than Azure, with a much higher barrier-to-entry. If Microsoft can successfully appeal to non-technical users, including those just looking to migrate to the cloud, they will continue to chip away at AWS’ lead.
The new team of trainers is a significant step toward that goal, as it will help Microsoft educate and train customers at every stage of their journey with Azure. This is especially important as the company appeals to non-developers, or casual developers, in addition to professionals. Microsoft’s ultimate goal appears to be enabling non-developers to take full advantage of the platform with minimal, or even no, coding required.
Blender is a “free and open source 3D creation suite.” Originally released in 1994 as an in-house application for a Dutch animation studio, Blender has gone on to become a staple in the animation community. The software is used extensively by NASA and has been part of projects such as Spider-Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Man in the High Castle.
Being open-source software, Blender relies on donations to support development, with both individuals and corporations donating to the effort. Nvidia has now become the latest corporation to commit to the highest donation level, contributing at least €120,000 a year. This makes them the second company, along with Epic, to achieve “Patron” level support.
“NVIDIA joined the Blender Foundation Development Fund at Patron level. This will enable two more developers to work on core Blender development and to keep NVIDIA’s GPU technology well supported for our users. Thanks NVIDIA for the trust in our work! https://fund.blender.org #b3d”
Continued support of open-source software, especially such a well-known and widely used package as Blender, is a good thing for everyone involved.
Microsoft pulled off an upset, beating Amazon for a defense contract valued as high as $10 billion.
According to a statement by the U.S. Department of Defense, Microsoft emerged the winner of the JEDI Cloud contract. The win is a major step in Microsoft’s attempts to take on Amazon, widely regarded as the industry leader. It’s also a testament to how far the Azure platform has matured to become a viable competitor to AWS.
“The JEDI Cloud contract will provide enterprise level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support Department of Defense business and mission operations. Work performance will take place at the awardee’s place of performance. Fiscal 2020 operations and maintenance funds in the amount of $1,000,000 are being obligated on a task order against this award to cover the minimum guarantee. The expected completion date is Oct. 24, 2029, if all options are exercised.”
Since CEO Satya Nadella took the reins from Steve Ballmer, he has increased the company’s focus on cloud computing and cross-platform interoperability, a strategy that has paid off as Microsoft navigates a more mobile, cloud-based industry. These kind of gains will likely lead more companies to take note of Microsoft’s offerings, further putting pressure on Amazon.
Forbes is reporting that Arm Holdings has taken a major step toward helping its processors compete even better and make them more appealing to customers.
Arm designs processors and then licenses those designs to companies for use in their products. ARM CPUs are used across the entire computing spectrum, although they are most widely used in mobile devices, such as phones and tablets.
According to Forbes’ report, Arm announced that it is opening its CPU cores to allow licensees to add custom instructions via a special block that’s integrated into the CPU’s cores. This will allow licensees to optimize chips for power, energy, differentiation and reduced costs. Best of all, thanks to how Arm is implementing the custom instructions, the reliability, security and predictability of the processors is unaffected.
This will be a boon to companies who want the benefits of utilizing an existing design—rather than starting from scratch—but need more customization than is offered by standard, third-party chips.
The first chip with the new capability, the Cortex M33, is due out in 2020.
Adesto Technologies Corporation provides application-specific semiconductors and systems for the Internet of Things (IoT). In a press release today, Adesto announced it has joined Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT. This will allow customers to use Adesto’s SmartServer IoT on hardware and software designed to work with Microsoft Azure IoT services.
Adesto’s SmartServer IoT is a multi-protocol industrial edge server that helps customers easily connect their industrial data to Microsoft Azure IoT. At the same time, SmartServer IoT eases the challenges that go with integrating existing control and management systems with new sensing, analytics and predictive AI, acting as a go-between for the myriad of non-interoperable protocols.
From the Press Release:
“With SmartServer IoT, we are bringing to bear 30 years of industrial communications and networking expertise to dramatically simplify deployment of advanced IoT applications and reduce total cost of ownership in industrial settings,” said Apurba Pradhan, VP product marketing and management, Adesto. “SmartServer IoT enables system integrators, application developers and OEMs to maximize legacy infrastructure investments while accelerating toward Industry 4.0. Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT validates our ability to jumpstart customers’ industrial IoT implementations with pre-tested device and operating system combinations.”
“Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT extends our promise to bring IoT to business scale, starting with interoperable solutions from leading technology companies around the world,” said Jerry Lee, director of marketing for Azure Internet of Things, Microsoft Corp. “With trusted offerings and verified partners, Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT accelerates the deployment of IoT even further.”
It’s no secret that Oracle has its sights set on the cloud infrastructure market, which is currently dominated by Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle’s latest attempt to pry open the market is their most ambitious yet.
On September 16, Oracle announced a new, free tier of cloud services, paired with credits developers can use for additional options. Free plans come with two virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB of memory each, along with the choice of Autonomous Transaction Processing or Autonomous Data Warehouse. This gives developers two databases, each with 1 OCPU and 20 GB of storage.
The Oracle Cloud Free Trial Credits, a $300 value, can be used on infrastructure, databases, application development, analytics, content, and experience, management and security or integration.
Until now, Oracle has had little success convincing developers to jump ship from Microsoft or Amazon. These new plans, however, could be a game-changer. The goal is to provide a way for developers to try Oracle’s services risk-free, instead of being forced to choose between committing to an untested solution or going with one of the industry leaders.
The Autonomous Database feature, in particular, is sure to drive growth. The feature has already been a solid hit with existing customers and offers companies with on-premise databases a clear path to the cloud.
Even if Oracle’s free tier of services doesn’t unseat one of the established leaders, it should help the company carve out a healthy segment of the market.
“Customers continue to affirm the need to accelerate the digital transformation and take advantage of the explosion of data we see around us,” says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “This ultimately is the core aspect of how they derive an improved business outcome. We have a very complete portfolio from the edge to the cloud. Digital transformation starts with secure connectivity. We have a phenomenal platform called Aruba that provides a mobile-first cloud-first approach.”
Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses on CNBC the companies latest earnings driven by customers continuing to accelerate their digital transformation:
Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation
Customers continue to affirm the need to accelerate the digital transformation and take advantage of the explosion of data we see around us. This ultimately is the core aspect of how they derive (an improved) business outcome. Obviously, the uncertainty (do to the China trade war) can create a little bit of a pause. It takes a little bit longer for them to make decisions, particularly with larger deals. That’s what we saw (this quarter), elongated sell cycles.
We executed with incredible discipline both on the cost side and on the pricing side. We actually have done a remarkable job in the last seven quarters to continue to make our cost structure more competitive and to streamline everything across the company. When I became the CEO I established three key priorities for ourselves. One of them, at the core, was to start with our HP Next next program which was to rearchitect the company from the ground up. That included a cost-benefit but at the same time, a portfolio shift. We are seeing the benefit of the portfolio shift today in our margin profile. That gives us the ability to expand margins significantly. I believe we will deliver record levels of year-to-date free cash flow which gives us the confidence to raise the guidance again for seven consecutive quarters.
Digital Transformation Starts With Secure Connectivity
It (the Huawei issue) is an opportunity for us. We have a very complete portfolio from the edge to the cloud. Digital transformation starts with secure connectivity. We have a phenomenal platform called Aruba that provides a mobile-first cloud-first approach. At the same time, we are here to serve our customers in the countries where they participate. We have a very diverse global supply chain that allows us to navigate through these challenges. I take this as an opportunity for us to serve our customers better and continue to provide the value they’re looking for. Obviously, we need to navigate through this uncertainty, whether it is Huawei or others. At the end, we are really focused on our business and our customers.
As our CFO Tarek Robbiati said we are focusing this year on stabilizing our business. We continue to shift our portfolio to higher value, higher margin and deliver everything we can as a service to our customers. You see the results of that in a portfolio mix in key strategic growth areas like high performance compute, which is the backbone for how analytics and AI will be run going forward. We are extremely excited about the completion almost of the acquisition of Craig which will be completed by the end of Q4. At the same time, in the core business, we have to continue to deliver what I call world load optimized hybrid cloud solutions delivered as a service. We are on that journey. We have made tremendous progress. We have a truly differentiated offer called HPE GreenLake, which is to deliver everything as a service.
Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation, Says HPE CEO Antonio Neri
“5G brings a couple of things,” says Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek. “One is the density of the network which is enabling things like IoT, the Internet of Things. That’s an exciting thing but also poses some new security risks. Second is speed of connectivity which we all want and which we all sort of are hoping to get better. But in terms of timing, it kind of differs geo by geo. East Asia is always ahead in that regard. In Europe, we can realistically expect something within two or three years.”
Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast, discusses new security risks with 5G and how privacy is becoming a big part of their business in a conversation on Bloomberg:
5G Poses Some New Security Risks
There were really two drivers (to our earnings results this quarter). The first one was our consumer direct segment, desktop direct, which grew 12.5 percent. The second was consumer indirect, which is actually powered by both the Jumpshot business that we have as well as the Secure Browser. These were kind of the two main things.
5G brings a couple of things. One is the density of the network which is enabling things like IoT, the Internet of Things. That’s an exciting thing but also poses some new security risks. Second is speed of connectivity which we all want and which we all sort of are hoping to get better. But in terms of timing, it kind of differs geo by geo. East Asia is always ahead in that regard. In Europe, we can realistically expect something within two or three years.
Privacy Is The Other Side Of The Security Coin
I think privacy is a new category. We see it as the other side of the security coin. We are heavily investing in creating privacy-oriented solutions. So actually our portfolio today is not just security, antivirus protection is now actually less than half of our business. Now the second half is made of tools like privacy controls because we see a big opportunity. At the same time, the need is real. Consumers are more and more realizing there are privacy risks in what they are doing online and there is something that needs to be done about that.
I got sort of inspired by the captains from the Silicon Valley such as Google and Facebook. So I gave up my salary and my bonus and I’m only getting compensated by stock which I think is the right thing for the CEO to do. Clearly, my objective is to keep the company growing. We’ve got a great runway and I’m very optimistic, being new in the role and seeing the opportunities. This is a good position to be in.
5G Poses New Security Risks, Says Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek
“We’ve learned this past year that the tracking system we have with the NFL is actually considered to be the best by the broadcasters, coaches, and the fans,” says Zebra Technologies CEO Anders Gustafsson. “Our type of technology works particularly well with football but it would also work for basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. With ice hockey, the challenge is the puck. How do you track the puck and put the tag inside the puck? We can do it but it’s more costly. With basketball, they have been more focused on the ball than the players.”
Anders Gustafsson, CEO of Zebra Technologies, discusses how their tracking technology is being integrated deeply within sports and business in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:
Our Tracking Technology Works Particularly Well With Football
We’ve learned now this past year that the tracking system we have with the NFL is actually considered to be the best by the broadcasters, coaches, and the fans. The NFL owns the data so we can’t give (fantasy players) access to the data. I think they give access to some of the data but not all the data. Then you would have all the information you could possibly want to have about every player on all of the teams.
Our type of technology works particularly well with football but it would also work for basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. With ice hockey, the challenge is the puck. How do you track the puck and put the tag inside the puck? We can do it but it’s more costly. With basketball, they have been more focused on the ball than the players.
Zebra Tracking Technology Works Particularly Well With Football
We Are Becoming An Essential Part of Retailers’ Strategies
Savannah is our data platform. We can connect all sorts of devices or sensors on the south side and on the north side we can have APIs to all sorts of other applications. We can provide a lot of analytics around what’s happening there. We integrate with a lot of independent software vendors. If you look at large companies like Oracle, SAP, Manhattan, and JDA, they’re all partners of ours. We exchange data with them and we provide data that they use for their operations. We also have our own software capabilities. We bought a company called Profitect. It does any predictive analytics. This is a good example of this but we have other software capabilities also.
We are now becoming an essential part of retailers’ strategies for building omnichannel and ecommerce capabilities. Historically, we were probably viewed a bit more as a tactical device supplier. Today we’re much more of an integral part of enabling them to execute on their strategy. We moved ourselves up the solution stack to be able to deliver more value to them.
Companies are now tracking employees, patients, assets
Today, more and more things are being tracked and there are more and more efficiencies out of this. Companies are now tracking employees, patients, assets, all of these things. We said we provide the performance edge to the front line of business by having every employee, device, and technical thing being connected and optimally utilized and visible to the network.
Tableau (a company recently bought by Salesforce) would more than likely integrate our data. We could be a source for data insight analytics for them. We aspire to get those kinds of valuations (and the higher multiples that Tableau got when they sold to Salesforce). We also overlap (with Honeywell) in a number of areas but we do quite a few different things also. We have our own strengths and we compete with them but not everywhere.
Zebra Tech Tracking Technology Integrating Deep Into Sports and Business – CEO Anders Gustafsson
“You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten,” says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen. “We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.”
John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, discusses the impact of 50 years of datacenter that will shift to the cloud over the next ten years, in an interview on CNBC:
Software Is Now Eating the World
Software is now eating the world as a lot of folks know. It’s how we bank, how we shop, how we do just about everything. These applications have gotten much more complex over the last five years as they have moved to cloud platforms. The spend in the traditional datacenter is declining quickly and the move is over to the cloud. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.
For example, Carribean Cruise, one of our customers, is reinventing the travel experience for Millenials. They’re doing it all through software on their ships. They provide a little wrist band that interacts with software on ship and on shore to transform the experience. What we’re seeing is really still a continued focus on growth. New revenue streams, new opportunities, and taking in existing core application environments and rebuilding it to be cloud-native. That’s the shift that we see. Still growth, still attack market, still competitive advantage for most companies that are pushing forward aggressively.
50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud
We’ve always built the company around a direct sales approach. Our products are used by enterprises. Enterprises want to connect directly with the company that builds these products. We’ve really always gone to market that way and it has served us very well. It makes it a very predictable business and a very strategic platform for these enterprises. We run across all of the cloud platforms and then some. We target the global 15,000 enterprise companies. We expect to talk to the CIO, CTO, and sort of the executive level that are driving this shift within their organizations’ digital transformation projects. That’s our focus.
What’s happening now is that the cloud is moving from the early days where people would put applications in the cloud to where they really are taking their entire datacenter and shifting it to the cloud. That’s what’s driving these webscale multi-cloud environments that we do so well in. It’s still early days. There’s a lot of room to go in this marketplace. You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten. We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast.
Cloud Is So Much More Efficient and Economical For Companies
This market is very large. We estimate it’s about $18 billion. Others have the estimates in the $20 billions. It’s plenty of room for a company like us to grow and actually probably multiple companies to grow in this space. We feel very secure and happy with our organic innovation. We’ve been able to reinvent the business several times now. It’s a very dynamic space, this application world. Organic innovation is our thrust going forward.
The cloud is so much more efficient and economical for companies that as there is any kind of disruption anywhere in their markets they’re going to lean toward applications. The things that really drive connective tissue with their customers and their marketplaces that create more automation and more information that they gather when they go through digital channels.
50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen
“What Fungible is set to do is to revolutionize the economics, the reliability, and the performance, of data centers at all scales and in all geographies,” says Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu. “The reason that it is time to do this is because of some of the really important trends that have been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. There is, of course, the flattening of Moore’s Law. There is the hyper-connectivity that the internet has brought. Then there’s big data. The confluence of these three things is bringing us to a data-centric world.”
The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World
What Fungible is set to do is to revolutionize the economics, the reliability, and the performance, of data centers at all scales and in all geographies. The reason that it is time to do this is because of some of the really important trends that have been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. There is, of course, the flattening of Moore’s Law. There is the hyper-connectivity that the internet has brought. Then there’s big data.
The confluence of these three things is bringing us to a data-centric world. It is time now to invent a new kind of microprocessor and this is exactly what we are doing. We’re inventing something called the DPU to improve the economics and reliability and performance of data centers. That’s what Fungible is doing.
In Five Years 90 Percent of All Servers Will Have DPUs Inside
Many, if not most, new applications are data-centric in that the amount of data that they ingest and they process is very large. As a result of this change in application, there’s a new workload that we call data-centric. In fact, the change that we see happening in data centers will happen in the redefinition of what we call a server. In five years we expect 90 plus percent of all servers to have DPU’s inside.
It will reflect in the way in which the networks are put together inside datacenter buildings. They’ll be much flatter, much faster, much lower latency, and with much more predictable latency. The DPU will enable that. Finally, the global architecture of the way data centers are built in the future will include Edge Datacenters in addition to these massively scalable data centers. The DPU is said to play a very important role in all three areas.
It’s not a zero-sum game because of the emergence of this new kind of workload, which has been building now for 30 years. There’s been some 600 X change increase in the ratio of I/O to compute. This demands the invention of a new kind of microprocessor. We don’t have any direct head-to-head competition. We will work in a manner which is completely complementary to the existing two kinds of microprocessors which is Intel x86 and GPUs built by Nvidia. The DPU will be the third kind of microprocessor inside data centers.
The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World, Says Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu
“Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything,” says the Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies Joe Batista. “That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. That’s public enemy number one for us. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.”
Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies, discusses the challenges companies face with the exponential pace of changes in technology and innovation in an interview with theCube at WTGtransform 2019:
Helping IT Re-Image the Business
Literally, it (Joe’s ‘Creatologist’ job) sits at the nexus of business and technology. My job, simply, is to help IT re-image the business because now every company’s a technology company. So what does that look like? I’m involved in all sorts of really cool problems, opportunities, that customers are facing by re-imaging IT.
I’ve been around for a long time, and, in the old days, we had swim lanes. You thought about certain vendors, they were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.
You Have To Rethink the Logic
There’s a couple of thoughts (regarding keeping up with the competition as things constantly change). You have got to look at these vectors that impact a trajectory of the thinking. I love the Peter Drucker quote: If you’re using yesterday’s logic, you’re probably going to get in trouble. You have to rethink the logic, and the example I give was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1968. As in the Fosbury Flop. So the question becomes what are those vectors?
At Dell Technologies, we have a huge portfolio of technology. But how do you think about the parameter about how those things change over a depreciation cycle? During a conference talk I got a lot of post questions afterward and a lot of engagement regarding this, so it seemed to resonate with the field. The thing that they liked the most was the business conversation of IT. They’re like, we don’t do that enough.
Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything
Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything. That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. It’s Glass’s Law. Every 25% increase in function is 100% increase in complexity. That’s public enemy number one for us.
I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence (before joining Dell) about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal. Not only about the hardware but the software. I think, actually, Jeff (Clarke) said it best. I think we have more software engineers now than we have hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we’re pivoting our talent to the software. But it’s the innovation that’s in this company. I think customers are amazed at that innovation.
The supercharger on it is, how does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company, and what value do you extract from that? And that’s where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you, though, I’m really excited that Dell Technologies is doubling down on business outcomes. They’re really trying to change the culture in helping customers understand what the technology means.
Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything – Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies
