Structure News: Twitter scales, Intel sales, Dell's whales

Where Michael Dell Is Back, Baby October 16th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Wal-Mart's lock-in picker, Intel's datacenter dollars, and the historic merger of Dell and EMC. STRUCTURE NEWS STRUCTURE REWIND: TWITTER ON AUTOMATION AND SCALING One of the hallmarks of our Structure events over the past seven years has been a focus on scaling: whether you're a cloud-native company or one that runs its own datacenters, scaling effectively and efficiency is one of the most important things you can do as a tech company. After some initial fits and starts, Twitter has figured this out with aplomb, but there's a human cost to scaling efficiency. Twitter's decision to lay off eight percent of its staff this week -- with the cuts hitting engineering particularly hard -- was likely possible because of the work the company had done over the years becoming a more efficient engineering organization, as former Twitter VP Raffi Krikorian (now at Uber) explained at Structure 2014 in this week's edition of Structure Rewind. While a desire for renewed focus might have been the major impetus behind new and former CEO Jack Dorsey's move, the confidence that the lights would remain on allowed the move to happen. Remember, Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here. Photo Credit: ed and eddie via Compfight cc INDUSTRY NEWS WAL-MART WANTS TO HELP UNCHAIN COMPAINES FROM THEIR CLOUD Wal-Mart is not exactly the first name you think of in cloud computing, but the company is working on technology that could help make it easier for cloud customers to move workloads between different public clouds. Fortune reports on Wal-Mart's OneOps technology, which it developed internally to manage multiple public cloud workloads and plans to release later this year. ZENDESK ACQUIRES CLOUD BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STARTUP BIME ANALYTICS FOR $45M Continuing on the theme that cloud services companies are more focused on feature enhancement than evangelism or price cuts these days, Zendesk has added busiess-intelligence features to its help desk product with the acquisition of We Are Cloud. Venturebeat reports that the company behind BIME Analytics was snapped up for $45 million and will help Zendesk compete against Salesforce.com. BRACKET RAISES $45 MILLION TO MAKE CLOUD COMPUTING EASIER Bracket Computing, which makes a sort-of sandbox for cloud computing users, has raised an additional $45 million in funding from Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bracket's technology, called the Computing Cell, lets a company interested in cloud computing surround its workloads and data with a protective layer that can run across multiple public clouds. INTEL'S RESULTS REFLECT MOVE TO CLOUD COMPUTING A few years ago, Intel appeared to be in deep trouble as the PC market began its steady decline and the mobile market exploded with Intel outside. However, led by Structure 2015 speaker Diane Bryant, Intel's Datacenter Group is picking up some of the slack, with revenue from datacenter chips helping to offset continued declines in PC chip revenue. “If you zoom out, we’re not a PC company anymore,” Stacy Smith, Intel's CFO, told The New York Times after reporting earnings results this week. THE CUSTOM GEAR INSIDE AMAZON'S CLOUD Last week's Re:Invent show dominated the cloud discussion, and it also shed some light on some of the new technologies Amazon is deploying inside its cloud service in hopes of staying on top of the market. The Platform has one of its customary deep-dives into some of the things Amazon revealed last week. SAP BESTS ORACLE, OTHER RIVALS IN SHIFT TO CLOUD COMPUTING The giants of the early days of enterprise software have had a tough time adjusting to this whole cloud thing, but Bloomberg reports that longtime Oracle nemesis SAP is making better progress than some might have thought. SAP saw a increase in new license sales during its last quarter, compared to the decrease Oracle experienced, which suggests customers with datacenters are still finding a reason to deploy SAP while also taking advantage of new SAP cloud services.   BIG PICTURE Sun co-founder Scott McNealy, a survivor of the pre-social media era of Silicon Valley in which technology executives weren't afraid to say what they thought in public, often described the pending merger of rivals HP and Compaq in the mid-2000s as "a slow-motion collision of two garbage trucks." Near as I can tell, nobody tracked down McNealy to get his thoughts on what his old nemesis Michael Dell is up to with the historic purchase of EMC, but I'll go out on a limb and suggest cargo ships might have been invoked this time around. We've all known change was coming to the EMC Federation, but the largest merger in tech history? Dell's record $67 billion purchase of EMC, which won’t officially close until next year, is a clear sign of the impact that cloud computing has had on IT's old guard, forcing two historic giants into a megamerger at a time when nimbler competitors are running circles around them. It's not yet clear what impact this merger will have on VMware and Pivotal, the more cloud-friendly members of the former federation, although nothing will change for quite some time. In a statement, EMC CEO Joe Tucci -- who will finally retire once the deal is complete to make way for Dell as the CEO of the combined operation -- vowed that VMware will stay a public company and that Pivotal is likely headed that way itself. It is quite difficult, however, to understand how a merger of this size is going to play out to the benefit of anyone but shareholders, bankers, and lawyers. The track record of megamergers in the tech industry is not very good; ten years removed from the Compaq deal, HP is actually splitting itself up to deal with the impact of the cloud at the same time Dell and EMC are getting bigger. Merging two technical organizations and sales forces will take a lot of time, time which will be spent by their rivals creating good old FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt; the kids call this "shade" these days) regarding the combined entity's ability to serve its customers' needs. There is certainly an argument that if the cloud is going to turn into the future of IT, there will always be a market for big tech conglomerates that can serve big non-tech conglomerates. But there is a counterargument that nothing changes as fast as the tech industry, and that the bigger the battleship, the slower the turn. Michael Dell turned the PC industry on its head fifteen years ago by focusing on cost and customization. If he's going to change the cloud market in similar fashion, this is an interesting way of going about it.       DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com 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

Find your next customer, client, partner at Structure

Our main stage is the place to learn about trends, gain insights and hear first hand cloud strategy use-cases from leading brands and businesses. But Structure is well-known as the place that starts high-quality conversations around business development, partership opportunities and major customer acquisitions. Come to Structure for the speakers, but stay for the conversations that will give your business the advantage leading into 2016. Who will you meet at Structure? Shall we add you to our list or would you prefer to go to work? Register for Structure.   SPEAKERS   ERIC BREWER Google DIANE BRYANT Intel Corporation QUENTIN CLARK SAP SE ADRIAN COCKCROFT Battery Ventures MICHELLE MCKENNA-DOYLE NFL JAY PARIKH Facebook   SPONSORS   HEADLINE     PRIMETIME     SHOWTIME     HEADLINE MEDIA PARTNER     PARTNERS     NOVEMBER 18 – 19, 2015 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com 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

Structure News: Europe says enough, Dell-EMC says how about it, Amazon says it's the future

Where Amazon Is Coming For Your Workloads October 9th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Europe's new data standards, a possible Dell-EMC merger, and Amazon's big week. STRUCTURE NEWS STRUCTURE REWIND: AMAZON CTO WERNER VOGELS As Amazon's Re:Invent winds down (more on that in a bit), we decided to take a look back to a year ago at Structure, when Amazon CTO Werner Vogels took the stage with Gigaom founder Om Malik to discuss international clouds and the tricky transition for older companies that want to invest in the cloud but have a ton of legacy apps to manage. A lot of his points ring true a year later, so check out that interesting interview. Remember, Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. The early-bird price ends today! Buy your tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS COURT 'DROPS BOMB' ON US COMPANIES For fifteen years, U.S. internet companies have been allowed to operate in Europe thanks to a "safe harbor" agreement that allowed companies to declare themselves compliant with European data-protection standards. Politico reports that arrangement is now in disarray after a court struck down the agreement, which is causing all kinds of internet companies to scramble, although Microsoft, for one, reassured Azure and Office 365 customers that it had a solution already in place. IBM ACQUIRES CLEVERSAFE TO SCALE ITS PUBLIC CLOUD INTO THE EXABYTES IBM continues to buy, rather than build, the components it needs to catch up to public cloud providers. SiliconAngle notes that it picked up Cleversafe this week for what was likely several hundred million dollars in order to give its SoftLayer cloud service a pretty compelling storage product. WAR STORIES: FIVE YEARS OF BUILDING INSTAGRAM Structure 2015 speaker Mike Krieger posted an interesting recap of the past five years of Instagram, focusing on the scaling and engineering challenges behind one of the world's most popular apps. I was particularly struck by the challenges Krieger and his team faced migrating Instagram into Amazon Web Services once its growth became viral, and then out of AWS after it was acquired by Facebook. DELL IS IN TALKS WITH EMC OVER POSSIBLE MERGER We've been waiting for some news out of the EMC Federation for a few months now, as the group tries to figure out the future of EMC, VMware, and Pivotal, but the Wall Street Journal brought news (subscription required) of an interesting development this week: Dell is considering the acquisition of EMC (or at least some of its assets) that it would finance in part by spinning off all or some of VMware. Michael Dell would lead the new organization, and the deal sent EMC's stock up nearly five percent at the close of trading Thursday. TECH UNICORN GETS COLD SHOULDER AS PURE STORAGE DROPS BELOW IPO PRICE One company that would face upgraded competition from a Dell-EMC deal would be Pure Storage, which had the unfortunate timing of going public this week as the rumors swirled. Shares in the company opened below its IPO price, Forbes reported, and they closed Thursday at $15.93, still below the IPO price of $17, as investors appeared lukewarm about the prospects of the flash storage company. FACEBOOK, BIG SWITCH TEAM ON OPEN SWITCH STACK We've long been big fans of the Open Compute project and the amount of open-source innovation it has brought to datacenter hardware, and so a partnership between Facebook and Big Switch to introduce their own open-source network operating system called OpenNetLinux is worth noting. The Platform takes a closer look at the announcement, which follows a similar imitative from HP.     BIG PICTURE Amazon's big week in the desert brought together the cloud community to hear the latest from the public cloud giant. Amazon Web Services continues to be the gold standard in enterprise public cloud, and has increasingly become one of the more lucrative pieces of Amazon's whole business: the company revealed that Amazon Web Services is on track to do $7 billion in revenue this year and has a million active customers. There was a ton of coverage of the event, but we'll single out stalwarts like Fortune, Venturebeat, Recode, and Bloomberg for their various takes on the week. You'd also be remiss not to scroll back through the Twitter timeline of Structure 2015 speaker Adrian Cockcroft for a comprehensive rapid-fire summary of the week's events. One thing in particular stood out to me after following the events, which isn't an entirely new notion but nonetheless grows stronger each year: the public cloud is such an established concept that features and services, rather than evangelism, are the focus of cloud companies. Amazon's Andy Jassy (pictured above) tried to claim that Re:Invent isn't a sales and marketing conference, but rather a cloud education conference, but that rings a little hollow. That's because cloud companies like AWS are going up-market, trying to woo bigger and bigger enterprise IT departments over to the public cloud by providing them with the same services that legacy IT vendors provided around on-premises software. Jassy even had to defend the company for not cutting prices -- a staple of past Re:Invents -- during the week. Amazon remains the class of this industry, which has so much growth ahead of it, despite strong competition from Microsoft (which is betting much of its company on the cloud) and Google (which has the resources and infrastructure to be a major player). Amazon might have even gained share over the past year, depending on how you slice it. "Our goal is to have every company run all of their businesses and all of their applications on top of our technology infrastructure platform," Jassy told CNBC this week. While 100 percent market share is perhaps a little ambitious, Amazon made it quite clear this week that it sees no limit to the reach of cloud computing as the engine of the 21st century.       DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com 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