Bloomberg is reporting that the CIA is “planning to hire multiple companies for lucrative cloud computing deals,” a move that will likely hurt Amazon.
Amazon was the first company to gain the coveted Impact Level 6 security certification, allowing it to store classified data in the cloud. This gave the company a huge advantage when bidding on government contracts involving sensitive data. However, Microsoft ultimately beat out Amazon for the Pentagon’s JEDI contract, worth some $10 billion. In December 2019, Microsoft also became the second company to gain the Impact Level 6 certification, opening the door to more competition for Amazon.
With the CIA’s latest move, however, that door has been flung wide open, giving multiple companies the chance to compete with the leading cloud provider for lucrative and prestigious contracts.
According to Bloomberg, “the government said the contracts could last up to 15 years with a five-year base period and two five-year renewals. The estimated award date is September 2020.
“The CIA has previously indicated that it intended to spend ‘tens of billions’ of dollars on cloud computing, Bloomberg has reported. It’s unclear whether the agency has finalized an amount it plans to spend.”
With analysts already predicting Microsoft could unseat Amazon as the reigning cloud leader, this latest report is not good news for Amazon. With Microsoft expecting a “halo effect” from the JEDI contact, Amazon may well find itself losing a considerable amount of government work.
Just a week after FedEx Ground announced it would offer Sunday deliveries, UPS said it plans to more than double its weekend deliveries in 2020, according to Reuters.
As Reuters points out, UPS “pioneered seven-day delivery in 2013, in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), and is now spending billions of dollars to speed up its free shipping.” In recent years, however, it has faced increasing competition from FedEx, as well as from Amazon. Amazon has started using its own drivers for deliveries, and often reserves the most desirable, high-density delivery routes, leaving UPS to handle rural and low volume routes.
One way to offset the challenges is by increasing the delivery volume, and is part of the motivation behind UPS’ announcement. Expanding weekend delivery also ensures UPS stays a viable option in the minds of customers who want items delivered as soon as possible.
“E-commerce spikes on the weekends, and retailers want those orders delivered sooner,” said UPS Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Warren, according to Reuters.
As the delivery market continues to heat up, it will be interesting to see if UPS and FedEx’s weekend options help them better compete with Amazon.
According to Quartz, and originally reported on by the Financial Times, Amazon and Goldman Sachs may soon team up “to offer small business loans in the U.S.”
Goldman Sachs has already shown itself willing to work with big tech, as it partnered with Apple to launch the Apple Card. If the report is accurate, Goldman Sachs may be “developing technology to provide lending through Amazon’s lending platform, potentially reaching thousands of enterprises that sell through the e-commerce giant.”
As Quartz highlights, Goldman Sachs has a lot to gain by working with big tech. A latecomer to the consumer banking industry, the company has no branch locations and is likely looking at big tech as a good way to gain market share. In fact, according to Quartz, “the Wall Street bank explicitly outlined partnerships (pdf) and co-branded relationships as part of its strategy for Marcus, its fledgling consumer brand.”
Big tech companies have increasingly been looking to expand into the financial industry, seeing it as a way to keep customers involved in their ecosystems. At the same time, regulators are growing more concerned as tech companies expand beyond their traditional realm. If the report is true, a deal between Amazon and Goldman Sachs is likely to draw further scrutiny.
“Amazon is not going to put everyone out of business,” says retail guru Dan Hurwitz of Raider Hill Advisors. ”In fact, they’ve taught a lot of retailers how to distribute goods properly. They’re actually going to help a lot of retailers thrive at the end of the day. In our business, the best merchant wins, whether it’s Amazon, whether it’s Macy’s, whether it’s Target, or whether it’s Walmart. As a practical matter, if you can have a bricks-and-mortar presence and a digital presence at the same time you’re going to be a winner.”
Dan Hurwitz, CEO of Raider Hill Advisors, discusses how Amazon’s retail success has driven other retailers to improve and some may have found ways to create a retail experience even better than Amazon.
Amazon Is NOT Going To Put Everyone Out of Business
Amazon is not going to put everyone out of business. In fact, they’ve taught a lot of retailers how to distribute goods properly. They’re actually going to help a lot of retailers thrive at the end of the day. In our business, the best merchant wins, whether it’s Amazon, whether it’s Macy’s, whether it’s Target, or whether it’s Walmart. We’ve all learned never to bet against Walmart. As a practical matter, if you can have a bricks-and-mortar presence and a digital presence at the same time you’re going to be a winner. Target is doing it right, Walmart’s doing it right, and Best Buy is doing it great.
What’s happening is 70 percent of those people that buy online pick up in-store are also buying something else in the store. The cohesion between bricks and mortar and digital is what’s making people successful. Those that aren’t doing it successfully will ultimately fail. There is (significant) up-sale when you buy online and you still pick up in-store. Don’t forget, people are going to be incentivized to pick up in the store because retailers lose money shipping goods for free. They’re going to have to figure out a better way to get you into the store. When they get you into the store there’s an up-sale and that up-sale is a highly profitable up-sale. We’re going to see more of that as this evolution continues.
The whole concept of an apocalypse of bricks and mortar was really overblown. Best Buy was the best example. People were talking about them disappearing. They’ve done a phenomenal job turning it around as has Target and as has Walmart. That will continue.
Some Department Stores Will Struggle To Survive
Some (department stores) will struggle to survive and some will get it done. I happen to be a fan of Macy’s. I like what Macy’s is doing. I think they have a very strong management team and they have great real estate. They have sophisticated buyers and they’re reinventing their inventory. They’re looking they’re sourcing the right goods just at the right price at the right time. They have to make the experience better obviously. People talk about experience, but the merchandise is the experience. You can have a great experience but if you have lousy merchandise it’s not going to work. Macy’s has a great buying group that I wouldn’t bet against.
There would have been a number of great retailers for Amazon to own (via acquisition) nationally. The question is, if they really have a store, forget about Whole Foods for a minute, just an Amazon store, I’m not so sure what they put in it. They’re great distributors of goods but if you walk into their stores today I don’t know if you would argue that they run a great experience or store with terrific merchandise. I think they have to run a different kind of store. But I do think there’s an opportunity for them to expand their reach dramatically.
Amazon Is NOT Going To Put Everyone Out of Business
Alphabet released its fourth quarter results today and, for the first time, broke down how much money YouTube earns.
According to the report, YouTube generated $15 billion in ad revenue last year, nearly doubling what it made just two years ago. As The Verge points out, that figure “contributed roughly 10 percent to all Google revenue. Those figures make YouTube’s ad business nearly one fifth the size of Facebook’s, and more than six times larger than all of Amazon-owned Twitch.”
In addition to the ad revenue, The Verge reports that Google also has over 20 million subscribers to YouTube Premium and Music Premium, as well as more than 2 million YouTube TV subscribers. The revenue from these services is grouped under the “other” category, which accounted for $5.3 billion in Q4. The company also disclosed its Google Cloud earnings for the first time, with that division bringing in $8.9 billion in 2019.
While Google beat Wall Street’s estimates on profit, its revenue came in lower than expected. That could be the reason the company was suddenly willing to disclose YouTube and Google Cloud’s financial contribution, in an effort to show the company is growing revenue streams outside its core search business.
“In 2019 we again delivered strong revenue growth, with revenues of $162 billion, up 18% year over year and up 20% on a constant currency basis,” said Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer of Alphabet and Google. “To provide further insight into our business and the opportunities ahead, we’re now disclosing our revenue on a more granular basis, including for Search, YouTube ads and Cloud.”
Oracle has added five new cloud regions as it works to take on Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market, according to a company press release.
According to the announcement, Oracle has“added local regions in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah), Australia (Melbourne), Japan (Osaka), Canada (Montreal), and The Netherlands (Amsterdam). As of today, all of them are open for business and available in the Oracle Cloud Console.”
The company has added 10 new regions in the last six months, making a total of 21 locations offering Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud. The company’s goal is to reach 36 by the end of 2020 and, with this announcement, it says it is on target to reach that goal.
The company is also focused on redundancy to meet customers mission-critical needs.
“To that end, four of these new regions—Osaka, Melbourne, Montreal, and Amsterdam—give customers a second site within the same country (or, in the case of Amsterdam in the EU, a second jurisdiction paired with Oracle’s existing Frankfurt region),” the press release reads. “The fifth region, in Saudi Arabia, will be joined by a second region later this year.
“Oracle plans to put a minimum of two regions in almost every country where we operate, and these new regions mark a big step toward this goal. The United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, India, and Brazil will also have two regions live by the end of 2020.”
It remains to be seen if Oracle can compete long-term with Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon currently dominates the cloud market, but Microsoft has been making significant headway, with some analysts predicting it could overtake Amazon. In the meantime, Oracle is one of the companies seen as most vulnerable to continued gains by Microsoft.
“The market narrative is always it’s a zero-sum game,” says Imran Khan, co-founder and CEO of Verishop, a new Amazon competitor launching soon. “You are coming in and it’s Verishop versus Amazon or Snap versus Facebook. Those are great stories, but ultimately I fundamentally believe that all of us are on the right side of the history in a sense. Not one company will take everything. It’s just impossible for one company to solve every problem.”
Imran Khan, co-founder and CEO of Verishop, discusses how the Verishop shopping platform can compete and win market share from Amazon and others in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:
There’s a Lot of Opportunity to Innovate in Ecommerce
Ecommerce is now only 9 percent of the overall retail market. I believe that over the next decade 30-40 percent of all retail will be online. There are actually not that many consumer choices when you look for buying branded products, having a better experience, or having a better way to discover products. We think there’s a lot of opportunity to innovate. In markets like China, for example, where 25 percent of the market is ecommerce there are many more players in China compared to the US. So I think that’s a better way to bring joy in the consumer mind when they’re trying to buy things.
In my time at Snap I noticed that millennials like to do more research before they buy something. They also care about responsibility in terms of shopping. They care about economy and sustainability. If you as a consumer, for example, want to buy sustainable products where do you really go? So we have a lot of different ways of discovering products. On our platform, we’ll have around 200 different attributes that consumers can use to find products. I’m really excited to bring in a new way of shopping to consumers. The market is very large and I think it can accommodate a lot of players.
As Ecommerce Grows Not One Company Can Solve Everything
I really admire Amazon and I’m a shareholder of Amazon personally through my fund. However, I think as ecommerce goes from 10 percent to 40 percent, not one company can solve everything. Amazon is also a juggernaut. They do software, they do a lot of different things. Again, I really admire the company but there are a lot of parts of ecommerce that are not being addressed by existing players. I think we can bring that. For example, discovery, we know that because ecommerce is still very much intent based I think we can give consumers a lot of different ways to discover new products.
The key thing to keep in mind is the time spent on mobile device is only going to grow. The market narrative is always it’s a zero-sum game. You are coming in and it’s Verishop versus Amazon or Snap versus Facebook. Those are great stories, but ultimately I fundamentally believe that all of us are on the right side of the history in a sense. People are spending more and more time digitally and as people spend more time digitally there will be a lot more new businesses. Not one company will take everything. It’s just impossible for one company to solve every problem. Facebook does a great job with Instagram and Snap has done a great job with camera. I think one will be bigger and the other smaller, but only time will tell. But I think both can co-exist very well.
Verishop to Focus on Trust
We are going to launch in late June or early July. You will see our commitment in four areas. Number one is trust. Most of the ecommerce players are marketplaces. When you’re in a marketplace where anybody can go list something or anybody can post something the platform is prone to counterfeit and fraud. We saw that with eBay we saw that with Facebook with the Russians and we saw that with Talbot in China. What we’re doing is we’re acquiring all the product directly from the brands by guaranteeing that everything you’re buying is real.
Trust is going to become an important topic on the internet. Over the last 25 years, the internet was built on the premise of an open platform and we saw that when everything is open and there are no rules it brings chaos. We solve that at Verishop by sourcing all of the products that we are sourcing directly from the brands to ensure that they are real.
The second key thing (that distinguishes) the Verishop platform is discovering new products. Again, ecommerce is very much intent-based, so we are giving consumers more choices to discover products through a lot of different ways that you will see. Our third focus is we’re going to continue to make a big commitment on convenience. I know Amazon and other companies do this it but we’re going to continue to do so by offering free shipping, free return, all those kind of things. We’re excited and it’s just the beginning. It takes a long time to build a business and hopefully we’ll continue to bring new products and new innovation to the platform.
Verishop CEO Imran Khan On Competing With Amazon: “It’s Not a Zero Sum Game”
TechCrunch is reporting that New York City has made it abundantly clear autonomous delivery robots are not welcome.
FedEx, like Amazon and Postmates, has been experimenting with autonomous delivery robots, some of which were in NYC over the weekend to be previewed at the company’s Small Business Saturday event. After some of the bots—called Roxo—were spotted, Mayor Bill de Blasio and transportation officials wasted no time making their position known—again, despite the fact the bots were only there for a presentation and not actually delivering anything.
According to TechCrunch, “the mayor tweeted that FedEx didn’t receive permission to deploy the robots; he also criticized the company for using a bot to perform a task that a New Yorker could do. The New York Department of Transportation has sent FedEx a cease-and-desist order to stop operations the bots, which TechCrunch has viewed.
“The letter informs FedEx that its bots violate several vehicle and traffic laws, including that motor vehicles are prohibited on sidewalks. Vehicles that receive approval to operate on sidewalks must receive a special exemption and be registered.”
The bots use machine learning, in combination with an array of sensing technology and cameras to plot a safe route, while at the same time avoiding obstacles and obeying traffic or sidewalk rules.
While FedEx has been testing “the bots in Memphis, Tennessee as well as Plano and Frisco, Texas and Manchester, New Hampshire,” it’s a safe bet NYC won’t be seeing them anytime soon.
“Over 50% of everything that gets sold on Amazon actually comes from small and medium-sized businesses.,” says Amazon’s VP of Small Business, Nick Denissen. “Their success is our success so we’re definitely focused on doubling down on that. We have over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US who work together with Amazon to conduct their business. Those include our sellers, authors, and skilled developers. They’re just a very important part of the customer experience we serve up.”
Nick Denissen, vice president of small business at Amazon, discusses the huge impact that small businesses have on Amazon sales in an interview on CNBC:
Over 50% of Everything Sold On Amazon Is From Small Businesses
Over 50% of everything that gets sold on Amazon actually comes from small and medium-sized businesses. Their success is our success so we’re definitely focused on doubling down on that. We have over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses in the US who work together with Amazon to conduct their business. Those include our sellers, authors, and skilled developers. They’re just a very important part of the customer experience we serve up.
The 58 percent I just culled out they are actually the part of the business that is growing faster than our first-party business. We definitely have our interests aligned with small businesses on all fronts. As I pointed out, 58 percent of everything that gets bought is from small and medium-sized businesses. Many customers don’t realize that.
Amazon Storefronts Shed a Little Bit More Light On Small Businesses
Last year, we launched Amazon Storefronts to shed a little bit more of a light on small businesses. Amazon Storefronts is essentially a curated shopping experience where customers can dedicatedly shop from local small businesses. They’re all US-based small businesses. When we opened that Storefront last year a little bit over a year ago we had 20,000 sellers. To date, we’re excited to announce that we actually have 30,000 sellers.
We’ve also developed special technology for them to share more content. They can actually share their story. Those sellers have reached 70 million customers in the last year and sold over 250 million products. I think those numbers speak for themselves that we really are helping and that small businesses can get discovered on Amazon.
Amazon Announces Small Business Spotlight Awards
Today, we’re super excited to announce our Small Business Spotlight Awards. We’re continuing to shine a spotlight on many of these exciting small businesses where they can share their stories. We’re announcing 18 finalists across three categories. There’s Small Business Woman of the Year Award, Entrepreneur Under 30, and Small Business of the Year Award. When we asked our sellers to nominate themselves for this process we actually had over 1300 nominations. Since it’s the first time we did it we really didn’t know what to expect.
Starting today our customers can vote until November 8th for their favorite small business in this category. One thing that we’ve learned is that customers do like to learn more about these small businesses, about their stories, and also other small businesses get a lot of inspiration from small businesses. We’re pretty excited to have these sellers on this journey with us.
Small Business Winner Will Get $80,000
We’re also conducting two live seller events in the US today where we’re enabling small businesses to meet customers and to actually conduct a sale. I just want to call out that one of the nominees, one of the finalists in the Small Business of the Year award, is Damhorst Toys and Puzzles. They are a multi-generational company. They’ve been in business for 48 years. They hand manufacture their wooden toys in Missouri and now they found their way online with Amazon. They’re growing and it’s great to see those types of companies.
The winner will get an $80,000 award so we’re pretty excited to have them continue to grow and prosper on Amazon. One of the things we hear from small businesses is it’s not easy to find the skill sets to help them drive an online business, in particular businesses who have started offline. That’s one of the areas we’re also looking at. How can we help small businesses on that front? So stay tuned on that.
Amazon VP Nick Denissen Says 58% of Sales Come From Small Businesses
IDC’s year-end report on the tablet market shows good news for Apple and, to a lesser extent, Amazon—and bad news for pretty much everyone else.
According to IDC’s research, Apple widened its market share lead over the course of 2019, going from 29.6% in 2018 to 34.6% in 2019. In particular, the 10.2-inch iPad was a big hit, accounting for 65% of the company’s tablet sales.
Amazon also had a decent year. Although the company posted a 29% decrease in 4Q19 shipments, compared with Q418, Amazon saw an overall increase of 9.9% market share for the year in total, compared with 2018.
In contrast, Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo and others all saw declines in the their market share. Even the segment in general saw an overall decline of 1.5%, making Apple and Amazon’s positive results all the more impressive.
Google has used the National Retail Federation’s annual conference as a platform to unveil its latest efforts to gain retail cloud customers.
Amazon may be the dominant cloud player, but Microsoft and Google are both working to chip away at that lead. One area, in particular, that Amazon is vulnerable is in the retail market. Many retailers are reluctant to rely on the cloud giant, with whom they often compete with for online sales. Microsoft has made headlines lately with a focus on the retail market, emphasizing partnership with retail customers, rather than competing with them.
Google appears to be taking the same approach, improving their retail-oriented features in the hopes of continuing to be an appealing alternative to Amazon. According to a post on the company’s blog, Google has expanded its Retail Acceleration Program (RAP).
“That’s why we’re excited to expand our Retail Acceleration Program (RAP) to a broader set of customers in 2020. RAP is a services offering that helps retailers optimize their websites, build a unified view of customer data, and drive increased foot traffic. Today, we’re also expanding the availability of Customer Reliability Engineering, a white-glove service that helps retailers plan and execute flawlessly during their peak shopping seasons. Customers such as Kohl’s, Wayfair, and Shopify have already turned to Google Cloud to help them stay worry-free during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
Google is also using its position to help retailers provided a unified experience for customers.
“Retail customers are becoming more and more “channel-less” in their shopping. It’s imperative, then, to provide a consistent experience for customers as they move between channels in their shopping journeys. Our Google Cloud API Management for Retail solution, powered by Apigee, allows retailers to easily integrate the systems that power different sales channels, providing a more unified shopping experience for customers.
“Retailers struggle with the real estate that bulky computer servers take up in their stock rooms, and also face challenges in centrally managing all of their server applications. Today, we’re piloting Google Cloud Anthos for Retail, which helps retailers streamline and modernize their store operations. Rolling out more broadly in 2020, Anthos for Retail enables retailers to consistently deploy, configure, and manage applications across their fleet of stores at scale—without sacrificing performance or reliability.”
With Google a distant third among U.S. cloud providers, behind Amazon and Microsoft, it will be interesting to see if the company’s retail efforts yield results.
Microsoft beat analysts expectations with its quarterly results, with particularly good news coming from the cloud front, according to Bloomberg.
Overall the company reported revenue of $36.9 billion, a 14% increase over last year. Operating income was $13.9 billion, representing an increase of 35% and net income was $11.6 billion.
One of the big takeaways, however, was the impact Microsoft’s Azure business had on the company. Azure’s revenue grew 62% over last year. According to AP News, “Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Bellini said in a note to investors Wednesday that Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing business has been growing faster than the broader cloud market.”
This substantiates earlier reports that Microsoft is making significant headway against AWS in the cloud wars, with a far greater percentage of companies planning on deploying Azure than either AWS or Google Cloud.
It also seems that securing the Pentagon’s JEDI contract is having the desired ‘halo effect.’ According to AP News, “Mizuho analyst Gregg Moskowitz said in a note that the JEDI cloud contract was a game-changer for Microsoft that goes beyond its likely $10 billion in revenue over the next decade. He said it could also serve as a template leading to broader adoption by other government agencies and business customers.”
Despite AWS’ commanding lead in the cloud market, it no longer seems a stretch that Microsoft could soon take the lead from AWS.
In what is good news for electric vehicle fans, Rivian has announced that it’s upcoming vehicles will be priced less than originally expected, according to Reuters.
Rivan announced in December that it had secured an addition $1.3 billion in funding. Although the automaker has not yet produced any vehicles, its technology will be used by Ford in its electric vehicles and the company will also create 100,000 electric vans for Amazon.
One of the appealing elements of Rivian’s designs is a more traditional aesthetic, unlike Tesla’s Cybertruck that looks like it’s straight our of a dystopian science fiction movie. For customers excited about Rivan’s upcoming truck and SUV, there’s more good news than just the vehicles’ looks.
According to Reuters, “Rivian on Saturday displayed its pickup truck and SUV at an event in San Francisco’s Bay Area and said that when their prices are unveiled soon they will be lower than has been previously announced.”
It’s possible the move may be due to the number of pre-orders the company has received. While founder and chief executive R.J. Scaringe didn’t say how many individuals had paid the $1,000 pre-order deposit, he did say the reaction had been “really positive.”
FedEx has announced “that FedEx Ground has officially started delivering FedEx Home Delivery packages on Sunday for the majority of the U.S. population.”
The moves comes as FedEx strives to “better serve the fast-growing e-commerce market.” Over the holiday season, Amazon banned its third-party sellers form using FedEx Ground over concerns the service was too slow and that packages would not arrive in time for Christmas. The news should go a long way toward dispelling those concerns moving forward.
“Now that FedEx Ground delivers FedEx Home Delivery packages on Sundays to most U.S. residences, we have increased our speed advantage significantly to kick off the new year,” said Raj Subramaniam, president and chief operating officer of FedEx. Corp. “This provides added value to e-commerce shippers throughout the U.S. and the 188 million online shoppers in 7,700 cities and towns where FedEx Home Delivery packages are delivered on Sundays. As more customers expect weekend delivery, this enhancement to our network means that every day is now a delivery day at FedEx.”
The change is another example of the increasing importance of e-commerce to the U.S. economy and the changes companies are willing to make to keep pace with it.
Gizmodo is warning of a new scam involving text messages posing as FedEx tracking notifications.
Android and iOS users (including this writer) have received text messages including what purports to be a FedEx tracking number and a link to set delivery preferences. Clicking on the link, however, goes to a fake Amazon listing and survey.
As Gizmodo highlights, this is where the scam takes a turn. “If you proceed any further, the survey will then ask users for a range of personal information including their credit card information, which for anyone who hadn’t already started feeling suspicious, should set off serious alarms.
“Apparently, by entering in your address and credit card number and agreeing to pay a shipping fee for your “prize,” you are also signing up for 14-day trial that turns into a $100 recurring subscription for a range of products, which you will continue to get billed for every month until you figure out how to cancel the payment.”
One way to spot the scam is the alphanumeric nature of the supposed tracking numbers. FedEx tracking numbers are almost always exclusively numbers, whereas the fake ones include letters as well. Similarly, FedEx tracking numbers are 12 or 15 digits long, as opposed to the 10-digit fake ones.
Police departments are warning citizens of the scam and encouraging individuals to check any tracking numbers they receive directly on FedEx’s website, rather than following a link in a text message.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has created a prototype oxygen plant to create oxygen from moon dust, according to a post on the agency’s site.
Space exploration is once again front and center on the agendas of governments and corporations alike. The U.S. recently created Space Force as a sixth branch of the military, Amazon established new headquarters for its space-based initiative and a myriad of other companies are working to cash in on the new space age. Unfortunately, long-term colonization still poses a number of significant hurdles, not the least of which is oxygen.
The ESA may be on to a solution, however, at least in the context of a future lunar base. According to their post, “samples returned from the lunar surface confirm that lunar regolith is made up of 40–45% percent oxygen by weight, its single most abundant element. But this oxygen is bound up chemically as oxides in the form of minerals or glass, so is unavailable for immediate use.”
The method used to separate the oxygen out, salt electrolysis, was originally developed for commercial alloy and metal production. As a side benefit, the process of harvesting the oxygen “also converts the regolith into usable metal alloys.”
The potential benefits go far beyond just having a way to produce breathable air, important though that is. The oxygen can also be used to create fuel on a lunar base, while the alloy byproducts may have a use in manufacturing, spacecraft repair and other applications.
The current prototype has been set up in the Netherlands, and the ESA is shooting for the mid-2020s for the first technology demonstration.
Business Insider is reporting that RBC Capital Markets Managing Director Alex Zukin believes Microsoft could unseat AWS as the dominant cloud player.
AWS currently holds a commanding lead in the market, with some 47.8% market share. In spite of that, Amazon’s status as a leading retailer is proving to be a handicap, especially when trying to win business from companies that compete with it.
“There’s the perception that Amazon has access to all your data and owns all your data,” Zukin told Business Insider. “That perception does sometimes get in the way of signing large long term strategic engagement in some industries that Amazon is particularly competitive with.”
Zukin cites the example of Walmart, one of Amazon’s biggest competitors, who is using Microsoft’s Azure primarily because it’s not AWS.
In addition to the competitive factor, there’s also the barrier-to-entry many developers experience with AWS. AWS is one of the most comprehensive cloud platforms available, but it also has a reputation for being difficult to use. Often its tools are better suited to hard-core programmers than business IT departments. In contrast, Microsoft has deep roots in the consumer and business industries, with a heavy focus on making things as easy as possible for non-programmers. This gives it a major advantage over AWS.
There have been multiple reports recently that Microsoft is gaining significant ground in the cloud market. There have also been previous reports that this is, at least in part, because companies trust Microsoft more than a company they routinely compete with. As a result, Microsoft’s momentum seems to be picking up speed at a rate that should be alarming to Amazon, as well as others. If Amazon wants to retain its spot as the dominant cloud player, it will need to address the issues threatening to unseat it.
CNN is reporting that investors are growing increasingly restless with IBM’s cloud strategy and are anxious to see results.
IBM may be one of the most trusted names in the tech industry, with a history going back decades, but that hasn’t prevented it from losing investors’ confidence. Recent years have seen it fall behind in the move to the cloud, surpassed by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
According to CNN, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty cut her price target on IBM and commented: “Despite significant investments, IBM remains challenged as workloads shift to cloud.” She also said that “views of IBM’s positioning in cloud haven’t improved materially and in some cases deteriorated over the past year.”
Some analysts believe a change at the top could help, along with a major cloud strategy announcement. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is considered a prime candidate. Whitehurst was brought into the company when IBM acquired Red Hat in 2018. Several years prior, in 2014, he announced Red Hat’s own shift to a cloud-based strategy, and his leadership could be a valuable asset in the top role at IBM.
There has even been talk of activist investors buying a stake in the company in an effort to force a shakeup of the status quo. With Microsoft, Amazon and Google getting the lion’s share of the cloud market and news, IBM will need to do something to keep investors happy.
Google Cloud scored a big win as German airline Lufthansa has selected the platform to help ease the impacts of flight delays, according to CNBC.
Lufthansa plans on migrating its assorted IT systems to Google Cloud, providing much needed uniformity to their processes. This should enable the airline to better optimize its operations and come up with solutions more quickly when issues do arise and cause delays.
“By combining Google Cloud’s technology with Lufthansa Group’s operational expertise, we are driving the digitization of our operation even further,” said executive board member Detlef Kayser. “This will enable us to identify possible flight irregularities even earlier and implement countermeasures at an early stage.”
According to a company spokesperson, Lufthansa went with Google, over AWS or Microsoft, due to “their high technical expertise and their databases with very good data quality.”
With Google a distant third behind Microsoft and AWS, a deal of this size, importance and mission-critical nature could help it gain similar contracts and make up ground in the cloud race.
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.
NASA and AWS are working together to use artificial intelligence to protect Earth from solar superstorms, according to an Amazon blog post.
As the world becomes ever more wired, solar coronal mass ejections (CME) represent a significant threat to countries around the globe. One such event occurred in March 1989, affecting the U.S. and Canada.
According to Amazon, “the Hydro-Quebec electric grid collapsed within 90 seconds. A strong electric current surged through the surface bedrock making all intervention impossible. Over 6 million people were left without power for nine hours. At the same time, over in the United States, 200 instances of power grid malfunctions were reported. More worryingly, the step-up transformer at the New Jersey Salem Nuclear Power Plant failed and was put out of commission.”
Given how much more digital the world is now, a CME like the ‘89 one could wreak havoc on power grids, satellites, wireless communication and much more. As a result, NASA is continually looking for ways to detect and warn of CMEs as early as possible, to give grid and satellite operators time to take protective measures. This is where AWS and Amazon’s experience with machine learning come into play.
“NASA is working with AWS Professional Services and the Amazon Machine Learning (ML) Solutions Lab to use unsupervised learning and anomaly detection to explore the extreme conditions associated with superstorms,” writes Arun Krishnan, editor of the Amazon Science website. “The Amazon ML Solutions Lab is a program that enables AWS customers to connect with machine learning experts within Amazon.
“With the power and speed of AWS, analyses to predict superstorms can be carried out by sifting through as many as 1,000 data sets at a time. NASA’s approach relies on classifying superstorms based on anomalies, rather than relying on an arbitrary range of magnetic indices. More specifically, NASA’s anomaly detection relies on simultaneous observations of solar wind drivers and responses in the magnetic fields around earth.”
By analyzing anomalies, it gives NASA the ability to better understand what causes a solar superstorm and predict when one will occur.
“To improve forecasting models, scientists can examine the anomalies and create simulations of what it would take to reproduce the superstorms we see today,” the blog continues. “They can amplify these simulations to replicate the most extreme cases in historical records, enabling model development to highlight subtle precursors to major space weather events.”
NASA and Amazon are providing another excellent example of the transformative effect artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to have on day-to-day life.
