Structure News: The return of Structure Data, Steve Ballmer, and AI Madness

Where Our Cloud Runrates Are Totally Awesome December 4th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll start getting ready for Structure Data, ponder the inevitable AWS spin-off, and prepare ourselves for the rise of the machines. STRUCTURE NEWS GET READY FOR STRUCTURE DATA 2016 Now that we've put Structure 2015 to bed, it's time to start gearing up for Structure Data 2016, which is scheduled for March 9th and 10th at our old familiar stomping grounds: the UCSF Convention Center in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. Several great speakers have already agreed to take part in the show, including the CEOs of Cloudera and Hortonworks (Tom Reilly and Rob Bearden) as well as renowned data scientist Andrew Ng of Baidu (pictured above). More information and tickets are available here, and we'll begin to showcase additional speakers and key themes in this space over the next few months. INDUSTRY NEWS BALLMER CHIDES MICROSOFT OVER CLOUD REVENUE DISCLOSURES Welcome back, Steve B! Microsoft's former CEO, not exactly the shy, retiring type, can't have made too many people in Redmond happy this week by criticizing new CEO Satya Nadella's financial reporting strategy for Microsoft's new focus on cloud services, as reported by Bloomberg. I mean, he's right, terms like "revenue run-rate" are misleading and vague, but it's not like Microsoft's cloud unit was a bastion of fiscal transparency under his watch. HPE & MICROSOFT AZURE DEEPEN THEIR CLOUD PARTNERSHIP Now that the new HPE has given up trying to build its own public cloud, it's cozying up to old friend Microsoft. SDX Central reports that the two companies plan to work together on platforms for their respective customers that use HP servers on Azure's service. BIG CHANGES AT CENTURYLINK'S CLOUD UNIT The departure of two senior cloud executives from CenturyLink this week prompts a few questions about the direction of that unit. Fortune reports that Jared Wray and Jonathan King are out amid strong competition in the public cloud market. King landed at Ericsson with old buddy (and Structure 2015 speaker) Jason Hoffman, both formerly of Joyent. AMAZON'S AWS CONUNDRUM With the financial performance of AWS blowing people's minds, and the different types of sales and marketing folks required to sell enterprise services (as opposed to books or toilet paper), there's growing chatter that Amazon might want to spin out AWS as a separate company. The Information (subscription required) takes a look at how that might work in practice if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos pulls the trigger. ZERO TO EXPERT IN EIGHT HOURS: THESE ROBOTS CAN LEARN FOR THEMSELVES Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be big topics at Structure Data 2016 (more on that in a bit), and it's easy to see why based on this report from Bloomberg on AI startup Preferred Networks. The company developed algorithms that allowed a robot to learn how to perform tasks on its own in a matter of hours, which could have a huge impact on the manufacturing economy.   BIG PICTURE There have always been unintended consequences associated with advances in technology, but rarely have I seen so many people worried about the future of a technology that has barely gotten off the ground. Hands have wrung over the development of artificial intelligence, and understandably, from where I sit: most tech industry humans still think humanity is something special worth preserving. But I also think we've raced so far ahead of ourselves, envisioning a Hal 9000 future in a ColecoVision present. I hope we can explore these issues more deeply at Structure Data 2016. This week's development? The University of Cambridge (go Sporting Blue) has established the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, according to the Wall Street Journal, which will study "the implications of artificial intelligence and try to influence its ethical development," according to its report. It's pretty clear that we're in an era where the tech industry is no longer an interesting side pursuit: it's nothing less than the economic engine of the modern world. And its also clear that our legislative bodies, paralyzed by inertia and infighting, move at a snail's pace when confronting the realities wrought by the advance of techonology. But we have to be careful and realistic about the rise of artificial intelligence, to recognize the duality of the situation: there are amazing things we can't even yet imagine that artificial intelligence will enable, and there are scary things we need to monitor to prevent the machines from taking over. This will be a multiyear process, and it's the type of discussion we here at Structure hope to foster.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.