Structure News: Apparently, you need cloud computing to know which way the wind blows

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where We Think The Cloud Is Bigly October 21st, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about how our weather forecasters really need to embrace the cloud, why Intel continues to face a changing landscape of computing, and how Apple is planning to make some serious noise in artificial intelligence research. BIG PICTURE Those of us who have been following the rise of cloud computing for years sometimes forget how far most of the world has to go when it comes to adopting the services that have transformed Silicon Valley. The New York Times Magazine published a very interesting article (if you're a weather nerd) about the current state of the National Weather Service, and why it has had problems accurately predicting the path of huge storms like Hurricane Mathew and Superstorm Sandy, which was correctly predicted by European weather services but missed completely by the National Weather Services models. But if you're a cloud computing nerd, the answer should make you a little crazy: because of budget constraints, the National Weather Service is forced to rely on an aging supercomputer cluster and lacks big data expertise. This is kind of insane. Accurate weather forecasts aren't just important to commuters: they help farmers plan for adverse weather, they help airlines save money, and, of course, they have the potential to save lives. When government weather officials get these forecasts laughably wrong, they encourage the public to scoff at future forecasts, no matter how dangerous an incoming storm might really be. The big three of cloud infrastructure services -- Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud -- should be falling over themselves to sign the National Weather Service as a customer. And IBM, which just bought The Weather Channel, is in a very unique position to address this need. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the National Weather Service, has signed a technology cooperation deal with some of these companies, but it needs to go further: who is better positioned to accommodate the need for a short-term burst in computing power and data analysis than the worlds leading cloud infrastructure providers? Part of the problem, of course, is that the federal government procurement process is a notorious slog. This is something we'll be sure to talk about at Structure 2016: the federal government needs to find more flexible ways to accommodate cloud computing providers, because the upside -- giving our public agencies state-of-the-art computing power at taxpayer-friendly prices -- is just so obvious. STRUCTURE NEWS FOG COMPUTING: BALANCING THE BEST OF LOCAL COMPUTING WITH THE CLOUD Our good friends (and Structure 2016 media partner) ZDNet granted me some space on their website to talk about one of our key Structure 2016 themes: fog computing. Although the name makes me wince, the trend is real: mobile computing and the internet of things are changing the way that datacenter infrastructure is being built in demanding thatcomputing needs to becloser to the end user, in hopes of providing uninterrupted quality of service and performance. This is something we're going to talk about with several of our Structure 2016 speakers, from people like Urs Hlzle of Google and Jay Parikh of Facebook, who have been doing this kind of edge computing for years, to newer players like SnapRoute CEO Jason Forrester (pictured) who are capitalizing on this need for more intelligence edge hardware. Our flagship show will be held November 8th and 9th in San Francisco at the UCSF Mission Bay conference center, and you can register for tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS MICROSOFT AZURE REVENUE JUMPED 116 PERCENT IN Q1 2017 Slowly but surely, the cloud is becoming the future of the greatest boxed software company ever. Microsoft is still heavily dependent on sales of Windows and Window Server, but as Venturebeat reports, Azure was the shining star in its Intelligent Cloud division during the last quarter, and there's a long way to go. INTEL POSTS SOLID Q3 WITH RECORD REVENUES IN IOT AND DATA CENTER The other half of the fabled Wintel duo also continues to regain its footing, with revenue from its data center group (led by Structure 2016 speaker Raejeanne Skillern) up strongly year over year, according to ZDNet. But as we're about to discuss, there are potential headwinds on Intel's datacenter chip business that bear watching as the cloud continues to grow. GOOGLE PUTS INTEL ON NOTICE; WHY MICROSOFT IS PUTTING THESE CHIPS AT THE CENTER OF THE CLOUD Intel's chips rule cloud datacetners right now, but that might not last forever. Extremetech reports on Google's renewed interest in the Power architecture for some of its datacenter chips, and Fortune notes a big push by Microsoft to design FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) for artificial intelligence applications, a chip design outside of Intel's historical strengths. APPLE HAS HIRED A BIG BRAIN IN AI TO MAKE SIRI LESS DUMB Most consumers are being introduced to basic artificial intelligence by mobile assistants like Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Echo, and Apple's Siri. Despite Apple's efforts to project a serious tone about artificial intelligence, it has lagged behind competitors, and Recode reports that it has now hired Carnegie Mellon's Russ Salakhutdinov as its new head of artificial intelligence research. IBM IS COUNTING ON ITS BET ON WATSON, AND PAYING BIG MONEY FOR IT It's hard to imagine a computer industry without IBM, but it's obvious to anyone watching that Big Blue has struggled to make its way in growing markets. Steve Lohr of The New York Times has a good update on IBM's big bet on Watson, its cognitive computing powerhouse that might just make it a player in an AI-driven cloud market. CLOUD COMPUTING DISRUPTS SOFTWARE ACCOUNTING RULES On the wonky side this week, the Wall Street Journal checks in on how accounting rules have failed to keep up with changes in the way software is developed and sold. Research and development costs are generally considered hardware or infrastructure costs, and research into software development advances is harder to reconcile on a balance sheet, according to current laws. QUOTE OF THE WEEK It's not just the Silicon Valley startups anymore, it is the core enterprise that is also becoming a digital company." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Looking for press? Fortune, ZDNet, WSJ and more...

Hello Chitchat,
You read their articles every morning to get the latest insights and news on cloud technologies, company movements and acquisitions. Hear and meet them in person at Structure November 8th and 9th. From Fortune and ZDNet to the Wall Street Journal and NPR, we pick moderators who ask the right questions and push to get the right answers.

Go beyond your email updates and get your cloud news in person this November.

Get $200 off until this Friday by using code MEETTHEPRESS or click here.

Moderators:

Aarti Shahani, NPR

Barb Darrow, Fortune

Iain Thompson, The Register

Jason Hiner, TechRepublic

Jonathan Vanian, Fortune

Matt Weinberger, Business Insider

Nicole Hemsoth, The Next Platform

Stacey Higginbotham, SKT Labs

Stephanie Condon, ZDNet

Steve Nellis, The Information

Steve Rosenbush, Wall Street Journal

Speakers:

Amit Zavery, SVP, Oracle Cloud Platform

Arlette Hart, CISO, FBI

Bob Worrall, SVP, Chief Information Officer, Juniper

Bryan Cantrill, CTO, Joyent

David Reilly, CTO, Bank of America

Ellen Rubin, Co-Founder and CEO, ClearSky Data

Emil Eifrem, Founder and CEO, Neo Technology

Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure, Google

Guido Appenzeller, Chief Technology Strategy Officer, NSBU, VMware

Hamish Boland-Rudder, Online Editor,ICIJ

Jason Forrester, Founder & CEO, SnapRoute

Jay Parikh, VP, Global Engineering and Infrastructure, Facebook

Jeetu Patel,Chief Strategy Officer and SVP of Platform, Box

Joe Weinman, Author, Information Technology

John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer and Group President, Technology and Operations, AT&T

Lance Crosby, CEO, Chairman, StackPath

Mac Devine, VP and CTO of Emerging Technology and Advanced Innovation, IBM Cloud Division, IBM

Mark Muehl, Senior Vice President of Product Engineering, Comcast

Matt Wood, Product Strategy, Amazon Web Services

Paul Madsen, Identity Management Specialist, Ping Identity

Peter Wagner, Founding Partner, Wing Venture Capital

Raejeanne Skillern, VP Data Center Group, GM Cloud Service Provider Business, Intel

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft

Seth Bodnar, Chief Digital Officer, GE Transportation

Sri Shivananda, SVP, CTO, PayPal

Tobias Knaup, Co-Founder & CTO, Mesosphere

Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure, Google

Vinod Khosla, Partner, Khosla Ventures

Get $200 off until this Friday by using code MEETTHEPRESS or click here.

Sincerely,

Clare Ryan

Unsubscribe

Structure News: The week Amazon Web Services blessed the hybrid cloud

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where Ken Bone Is Plotting His Structure 2017 Appearance October 14th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about a big partnership between companies that once appeared to be on opposite sides of the cloud revolution, a possible path foward for traditional transistor designs, and why Facebook wants you to use Facebook at work even more than you already do. BIG PICTURE Sometimes it's nice to realize the world isn't as binary as it might appear. Just three years ago, VMware and Amazon Web Services considered each other existential threats. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger made it pretty clear how his company felt about AWS in 2013, implying that once VMware lost workloads to the public cloud, it would never get those back on the style of datacenter computing around which VMware rose to prominence. For its part, AWS has been championing the idea that all workloads should run in a public cloud for its entire existence, and admitting that large enterprises might have valid reasons to keep some workloads under their own control was anathema to its leaders around that time. As the next generation of enterprise computing evolves, the hot takes of the past are cooling. The joint appearance between AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Gelsinger this week to introduce a ground-breaking partnership between the two companies shows that the hybrid cloud approach is here to stay. Structure 2016 media partner Fortune broke news of this partnership last week, and summarized the deal here. (Network World also had a nice breakdown of the winners and losers in the deal here.) We'll have Matt Wood of AWS, who outlined details of the partnership in Thursday's press conference, at Structure 2016, and Guido Appenzeller of VMware is also going to be in the building, so we'll have much more to say about this partnership in a month. This won't be available until the middle of next year, so we'll see how the details play out, but this appears to be a good deal for current and potential customers of both companies. AWS will make it easier to run VMware's software inside its environment and pick up workloads it wouldn't otherwise be able to access, and VMware will be able to offer its customers the flexibility they would have sought one way or another without VMware's help. Last year at Structure 2015, worries about public cloud lock-in were front and center. Announcements like this should help calm those fears, and while AWS will continue to promote the idea that the cloud is easier, cheaper, and safer than rolling your own infrastructure, it appears to have decided that it wasn't going to be able to catch them all. STRUCTURE NEWS STRUCTURE 2016 JUST ONE MONTH AWAY We're putting the finishing touches on the schedule for Structure 2016, the best and longest-running independent cloud computing conference. In addition to Matt and Guido, were welcoming back Structure veterans like Google's Urs Holzle and Facebook's Jay Parikh, and introducing newcomers like Seth Bodnar of GE Digital and Jeetu Patel of Box (pictured). Our flagship event will be held November 8th (vote early, vote often) and November 9th at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. More details about the conference can be found here. INDUSTRY NEWS THE INTERNET HAS BEEN QUIETLY REWIRED, AND VIDEO IS THE REASON WHY We extensively covered the battles over how video traffic should travel over the internet backbone in our last iteration, and more and more video providers are taking control of how their content makes it onto your laptop. Quartz has a nice overview of how companies like Google, Facebook, and Netflix are investing in core networking technology to control their own distribution, which sounds like something traditional media companies should have done 15 years ago. TRANSISTOR WITH A 1NM GATE SIZE IS THE WORLD'S SMALLEST We're fast approaching some fundamental materials science problems in semiconductor manufacturing, but Ars Technica reports that scientists have found a way to make a stable 1-nanometer wide gate with materials other than silicon. Who knows if anybody will be able to replicate their technique at scale, but somebody will spend a lot of money trying to keep Moore's Law afloat with more-or-less conventional transistors. HOW DIANE GREENE IS REINVENTING GOOGLE CLOUD There have been an awful lot of "Google's getting serious about the cloud" reports this year, right? While Google is obviously striving to get out in front of potential cloud customers, The Information (subscription required) has a good report on how things are going so far, which Urs can back up at Structure 2016. HPE, IBM, ARM, SAMSUNG, AND PALS IN PLOT TO WEAVE 'MEMORY FABRIC' The process of developing new standards for memory is extremely important and a enormous minefield at the same time. The Register reports on the efforts of a consortium of tech companies to develop new standards for the connections between memory and processors that lacks a rather prominent player in this world: Intel. HOW TO WIN THE CYBER WAR AGAINST RUSSIA. One good thing about this crazy election year is the canon of great spy movies that will be inspired by true events. Security experts I've talked to are divided on exactly how the U.S. should respond to this year's Russian cyber offensive, but Foreign Policy lays out a pretty hawkish case for fighting back. WORKPLACE BY FACEBOOK OPENS TO SELL ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORKING TO THE MASSES Given that a lot of people spend half their workday on Facebook anyway, it's not surprising that the company has tried to get folks to use Facebook for actual work as well. Those efforts have not caught on, but Facebook is trying again with Workplace, which is clearly targeting Slack and Workday, according to Techcrunch. QUOTE OF THE WEEK In some cases, it was a risk to put [Google engineers] in front of customers because they were too technical, lacked patience, and would tell the customer they were stupid." -- a former Google cloud executive, speaking anonymously to The Information Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

It’s not about who you know.

It's about who you will meet. Year after year, Structure is where the cloud computing industry comes to discover the future, and where attendees leave determined to make that future happen. The meetings, the introductions in the hallway, and the networking opportunities; previous Structure attendees tell us that's what they remember and value. Learn what you need to know on stage. Meet your next business partner in the crowd. Companies sending their best people to Structure 2016 include: Bloomberg LP Business Sweden CenturyLink Chick-fil-A Cisco Citigroup Citrix credit suisse Deutsche Bank Ericsson Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Gap Inc Goldman Sachs Gracenote, Inc. Hitachi Solutions America Huawei Intel Corporation Khosla Ventures Lending Club Microsoft NTT DATA, Inc. Oracle PwC Samsung SanDisk, a Western Digital brand The Walt Disney Company UK Department for International Trade yahoo ZDNet Who can help you leverage the power of the cloud to take your organization to the next level? Find out at Structure 2016. Snag your special ticket at a $200 discount and see who you can connect with this November. SPEAKERS MAC DEVINE IBM SCOTT GUTHRIE Microsoft ARLETTE HART Federal Bureau of Investigation URS HOLZLE Google RAEJEANNE SKILLERN Intel JAY PARIKH Facebook NOVEMBER 8-9, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Structure News: Apple's new cloud strategy: Let everybody sit together!

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where The Only Clouds We Hate Surround Hurricane Matthew October 7th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Apple's plan to jumpstart its cloud computing group (again), another tough week for Yahoo, and another case of strange bedfellows in the cloud. BIG PICTURE For all its amazing accomplishments across the tech landscape, Apple remains somewhat of a running joke in cloud computing circles. iTunes remains a relic of another era, iMessage outages are far too common, and the default amount of iCloud storage is laughable compared to competitive products. So, eight years after Steve Jobs threw a fit at Apple's web teams following the disastrous launch of MobileMe, why are we still having this conversation? Apple is probably the best organization on the planet when it comes to hardware and software design, but it's missing an enormous opportunity to be a public cloud services player: just think how many iOS developers would consider running their applications on Apple services instead of Amazon Web Services or Azure if Apple had a competitive product, optimized for iOS workloads, maybe running on servers with customized ARM processors designed by Apple? Apple has the resources to make that happen. But first things first. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple plans to move all of its cloud-facing teams (iTunes, Maps, Siri, for example) into a single division that will reside in the same building. The report also indicates that Apple has a new infrastructure strategy called "Pie, "in which it is running several important workloads on its own Apple-made infrastructure. If Apple can get its cloud infrastructure story right, it could offer its developers the holy trinity of cloud services (software, infrastructure, and platform) at aggressive prices, backed by the growing revenue it gets from the consumer-facing cloud services it already operates, such as iTunes and Apple Music. Maybe it's not at AWS or Google scale just yet, but Apple is building datacenters and snapping up talent. Bloomberg's report indicated that employee collaboration and bug fixes were hampered by the old strategy of siloing these cloud groups, so maybe this is just the step Apple needs as it looks for new sources of growth after saturating the planet with iPhones. Apple doesn't need to be the best cloud computing company on the planet, but if it wants its iPhone customers and developers to spend more of their money with Apple on web services, instead of Google or AWS, it needs to get better. STRUCTURE NEWS STRUCTURE TICKETS GO UP IN PRICE MIDNIGHT FRIDAY We're getting all the pieces in place for the ninth annual Structure event, scheduled for November 8th and 9th in San Francisco, and if you're ready to buy a ticket, today is a good day. Early-bird prices will increase on Structure tickets as of midnight Pacific Time Friday evening, and since you're already planning to attend, you might as well save you (or your company) a little extra cash by getting your tickets here. Some great speakers are on tap for Structure 2016, including Urs Holzle of Google, Jay Parikh of Facebook, and Jason Forrester of Snaproute (pictured). A preliminary list of speakers is here, but we'll be adding more speakers and topics soon, so stay tuned. EXCLUSIVE: YAHOO CISO BOB LORD DISCUSSES HISTORIC BREACH, SECURITY CULTURE AT STRUCTURE SECURITY 2016 It can't have been easy for Yahoo CISO Bob Lord to appear at Structure Security last week and answer questions about the causes and timing of the massive security breach suffered by his company, but showing up is an important part of life. Lord doesn't break a lot of new ground in this video interview, which we believe is the first interview Yahoo has done about the breach since disclosing it, but I was struck by his determination to contribute something back to the security community once he's freed from legal constraints to discuss exactly what happened. INDUSTRY NEWS AT SALESFORCE'S BIG SHOW, THE PITCH IS MORE DREAM THAN REALITY SoMa traffic will start returning to normal this weekend after Salesforce.com's big annual show moves on, and The Information (subscription required, but you should really get it) takes a look back at Dreamforce announcements from past years and how they've panned out. Spoiler: results have been mixed, but if Marc Benioff buys Twitter next week that's all anybody will remember about Salesforce.com in 2016. SAMSUNG ACQUIRES VIV, A NEXT-GEN AI ASSISTANT BUILT BY THE CREATORS OF APPLES SIRI Android partners that rely on Google Android development are once again being forced to consider how they'd fare with Google as a direct competitor, and Samsung isn't taking any chances. Amid a big Google event this week to introduce new consumer products, Samsung announced that it had acquired some AI smarts in Viv, a younger sibling of Apple's Siri, according to Techcrunch. VMWARE WILL TEAM WITH FORMER NEMESIS AMAZON IN CLOUD PACT Changing tech cycles always make for fun pairings between companies that used to fight tooth and nail. VMware once considered AWS "a mortal enemy," but Fortune reports the two companies will soon share a stage to announce a partnership allowing VMware software to run better on AWS cloud services. YAHOO SAID TO HAVE AIDED U.S. EMAIL SERVICE BY ADAPTING SPAM FILTER The details of this one are still a little sketchy, but it's likely another black eye for Yahoo. The U.S. government seems to have convinced Yahoo to help it search for criminals using existing spam filters to scan incoming email traffic for certain data, according to the New York Times, and privacy advocates are up in arms. VENTURE CAPITALIST MARC ANDREESSEN EXPLAINS HOW AI WILL CHANGE THE WORLD Check out this Vox interview with Marc Andreessen about the rise of AI and how it will impact the future of tech product development. He thinks AI is the next big platform differentiator, the way iOS changed the world in 2007 or the web browser did so back in the 1990s. SAM ALTMAN'S MANIFEST DESTINY This piece is a little broader than I usually highlight, but this profile of Y Combinator President Sam Altman in The New Yorker is a must-read for its vivid description of modern Silicon Valley. No matter your outlook, you'll find something in here that resonates, from the awesome power of startups to reinvent the world for the better to the growing notion that a lot of these tech leaders are, um, different. QUOTE OF THE WEEK If you talk to the automakers, they all think that autonomy is a feature they're going to add to their cars. The Silicon Valley companies think it's a brand new architecture. It's a bottom-up reinvention of the fundamental assumptions about how these things work." -- Marc Andreessen, on the coming of AI, in Vox Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.

Tech leaders are coming to Structure 2016; are you?

Structure 2016 brings cloud visionaries to the stage. We're going to have the best lineup of speakers we've ever assembled at our flagship cloud computing event, Structure 2016, this November in San Francisco. They'll be announcing news, sharing insights and providing candid commentary on the issues of the day. If you need to be informed about the most important computing shift of our time, join us in five weeks at this essential cloud event. For a limited time only, get our "buddy pass" to attend Structure 2016 and bring a colleague for the price of of single ticket. You and your buddy will have a lot to discuss on the way home from two great days of learning at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, November 8th and 9th. Put simply Structure was the most productive event I've presented at for years. I thoroughly enjoyed it and learnt an enormous amount from the best in the industry. I'd be honoured to participate in a future event. -- Geoff McGrath, CIO, McLaren Applied Technologies The attendees were outstanding - very high quality and engaged! Perhaps the best quality for an industry event that I have attended. -- Craig S. Nunes, Chief Marketing Officer, Datera Structure 2016 Speakers: Arlette Hart, CISO, FBI Barb Darrow, Senior Writer, Fortune Bob Worrall, SVP, Chief Information Officer, Juniper Bryan Cantrill, CTO, Joyent Cade Metz, Senior Staff Writer, WIRED David Reilly, CTO, Bank of America Guido Appenzeller, Chief Technology Strategy Officer, NSBU, VMware Jason Forrester, Founder & CEO, SnapRoute Jay Parikh, VP, Global Engineering and Infrastructure, Facebook Jeetu Patel,Chief Strategy Officer and SVP of Platform, Box John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer and Group President, Technology and Operations, AT&T Mac Devine, VP and CTO of Emerging Technology and Advanced Innovation, IBM Cloud Division, IBM Mark Muehl, Senior Vice President of Product Engineering, Comcast Matt Wood, Product Strategy, Amazon Web Services Mayumi Hiramatsu, VP, Product Operations, Cisco Systems Nicole Hemsoth, Co-Founder, Co-Editor, The Next Platform Raejeanne Skillern, VP Data Center Group, GM Cloud Service Provider Business, Intel Rodney J. Rogers, CEO, Virtustream Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft Seth Bodnar, Chief Digital Officer, GE Transportation Sri Shivananda, SVP, CTO, PayPal Stacey Higginbotham, Editor, SKT Labs Steven Rosenbush, Editor, CIO Journal Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure, Google Vinod Khosla, Partner, Khosla Ventures And more... SPEAKERS MAC DEVINE IBM SCOTT GUTHRIE Microsoft ARLETTE HART Federal Bureau of Investigation URS HOLZLE Google RAEJEANNE SKILLERN Intel JAY PARIKH Facebook NOVEMBER 8-9, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Copyright (C) 2016 StructureSeries All rights reserved.