Structure News: Why the enterprise will drive the internet of things

Where Security Is Social February 12th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about a brand-new conference in the Structure Series, a milestone for Netflix, and the path to glory for the internet of things. STRUCTURE NEWS INTRODUCING STRUCTURE SECURITY: MAPPING THE FUTURE OF SECURITY Structure was created in part to take our events series to new places, showcasing other parts of the tech industry (and maybe even beyond…) alongside the events you already know and love. The first brand-new event we plan to host is Structure Security, which will happen September 28th and 29th in San Francisco. I wrote a preview of what you can expect from the show here. CAN DATA PLAY THE HERO DURING A TUMULTOUS TIME IN TECH? It's best not to look at the Nasdaq these days. But the companies that thrive despite what might be a coming tech downturn are the ones that understand the best way to collect, analyze, and utilize data, argues Structure Data curator Derrick Harris. Remember, Structure Data 2016 is around the corner of February, coming March 9th and 10th to UCSF Mission Bay. Register here. THE STRUCTURE SHOW: WHY AI IS THE FITURE OF SEARCH, CISCO'S IOT BET, AND STRUCTURE CONNECT On this week's edition of the podcast, old friends Barb Darrow of Fortune and Stacey Higginbotham of The IoT Podcast joined me to talk about AI and search, which we covered in last week's newsletter, Cisco's $1.4 billion bid for Jasper, and Structure Connect, which we're thrilled to have Stacey organizing again (more on that in a bit). Photo Credit: Yu. Samoilov via Compfight cc   INDUSTRY NEWS ANDY RUBIN UNLEASHED ANDROID ON THE WORLD. NOW WATCH HIM DO THE SAME WITH AI At Google, Andy Rubin changed the trajectory of the smartphone market by developing and releasing a "free" mobile operating system that anyone could use to build a phone. Rubin has something more-or-less similar in mind for his new venture, Playground Garage, which according to Wired hopes to nurture startups that will create the building blocks for AI-based applications and devices. ZENEFITS FOUNDER PARKER RESIGNS AFTER COMPLIANCE FAILURES One of the highest-flying enterprise cloud-software startups in the Valley had a hell of a week. Zenefits, which helps smaller businesses offer benefits to their employees, forced its founder and CEO, Conrad Parker, to resign after finally admitting that its disdain for the laws of the insurance market had gone too far. Buzzfeed, which first pointed out how Zenefits was flouting state laws to a rather disruptive degree, has the story. STEPHEN PRATT, HEAD OF IBM'S NEW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE GROUP, LEAVES IBM is chasing younger (although to be fair, that's everybody) and nimbler competitors on a host of fronts in enterprise computing, and it encountered another setback this week with the departure of Stephen Pratt, who was leading its AI efforts, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). The company has a great marketing vehicle for its AI efforts in the ubiquitous Watson (as Rob High of IBM will talk about at Structure Data), but AI research is an extremely competitive field at the moment. GOOGLE HAS QUIETLY LAUNCHED ITS ANSWER TO AWS LAMBDA Diane Greene's Google cloud unit continues to make noise as it fights uphill, releasing this week Google Cloud Functions, which as Venturebeat reports mimics Lambda, a very well-regarded feature within Amazon Web Services. In classic Google mode, it's an alpha release, which means most enterprise customers will wait and see, but it checks off the "Is Google serious about the enterprise?" box on many lists. NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION IS VMWARE'S NEXT FRONTIER VMware is in a very weird position going into 2016, waiting to see how the Dell-EMC plays out while trying to assure customers that everything is business as usual. This week CEO Pat Gelsinger talked up a few of the things the company has planned for the future, such as a big bet on software-defined networking, according to Fortune. NETFLIX FINISHES ITS MASSIVE MIGRATION TO THE CLOUD Netflix has always been one of the leading examples of the cloud computing revolution, and it made that designation official on Thursday by announcing that it has closed its last data center. Ars Technica reports that billing and payments was the last thing to move to the cloud, which underscores that even the biggest cloud evangelists take their time when it comes to moving their customers' financial information into the cloud.   BIG PICTURE There have been many computing revolutions: punch cards to mainframes, mainframes to mini computers to PC-based servers, and the rise of mobile devices. In almost all of those revolutions, consumers have been on the trailing edge of adoption: obviously regular people didn't buy mainframes, PCs were way too expensive for a very long time to be ubiquitous anywhere but work or school, and BlackBerry used to own the smartphone market. We think the internet of things is in a similar place. This week Stacey Higginbotham, who created the Structure Connect conference back in a different world, laid out some of the principles she's thinking about as she puts together the program for Structure Connect 2016, which will be held in San Francisco this June. One thing that struck me was the notion that the enterprise is likely to be the first place IoT companies see a lot of adoption, after years of all of us talking about the smart home. This makes a lot of sense. Consumer-focused IoT companies have been tripping all over themselves peddling a bunch of incompatible products and services to a public that has yet to see an iPhone moment ("oh, wow, that's totally something I want!") in this market. Meanwhile, enterprise customers have been quietly investing in sensors and connected devices that can improve their supply chains and unlock new data about their business practices. We plan to showcase both kinds of companies at Structure Connect, and stay in touch to hear more about those plans as they come together. Someday the iPhone moment will happen for the smart home/car/toaster market, but the road to that moment will likely pass through a few enterprise-driven places first, until somebody takes the acquired knowledge from those experiences and makes something that delights the masses. Come find those companies at Structure Connect. Photo courtesy Flickr user Hans Poldoja/CC 2.0       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) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.