Friday, October 21st, 2016

Time	Event
12:00p	Microsoft Sales, Profit Top Estimates as Cloud Demand Soars (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp.’s first-quarter sales and earnings topped analysts’ estimates, buoyed by growing demand for cloud-based software and services. Profit excluding certain items was 76 cents a share on adjusted sales of $22.3 billion, the Redmond, Washington-based company said in a statement Thursday. Analysts on average estimated profit in the period ended Sept. 30 would be 68 cents on revenue of $21.7 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has been investing in data centers and striking partnerships to bolster sales of Microsoft’s main corporate cloud products, Azure and Office 365 — internet-based versions of the popular productivity apps, e-mail and collaboration tools. Revenue from Azure cloud services more than doubled, helping Microsoft outperform even as demand for PCs remained in the doldrums and its mobile-phone efforts collapsed. “Cloud is growing significantly and Azure represents incremental new revenue,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., who rates the shares outperform. “Commercial cloud is driving revenue growth, which is somewhat hidden by the fact that Nokia is going to zero.” Microsoft shares jumped as much as 5.8 percent in extended trading to a record high following the report, after losing less than 1 percent to $57.25 at the close in New York. The stock rose 13 percent in the three months that ended in September, compared with a 3.3 percent increase in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. “This transition to the cloud represents the single largest addressable market opportunity we’ve all seen in many many years,” Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said after the report. “There is such an opportunity to grow our overall revenue and do it profitably.” Hood said half of the earnings-per-share estimate beat was because of strong sales, and half was related to a lower-than-expected tax rate and other income. Net income in the recent period declined to $4.69 billion, or 60 cents a share. Earlier this month, on a swing through Europe, Nadella said the company has spent $3 billion — $1 billion in the past year alone — on data centers on the continent to expand cloud services in the region. He promised continued investments there, including new sites in France next year. Hood said in July that gross margins for commercial cloud would “materially improve” in the current year. That’s because previous years of investment are starting to pay off as those data centers support more customers. Commercial cloud gross margin in the recent period was 49 percent, 7 points wider than in the prior quarter. Read more: Microsoft Doubled Cloud Data Center Capacity in Europe in Past Year Microsoft has pledged to reach annualized revenue of $20 billion in its corporate cloud business by the fiscal year that ends in June 2018. That metric stood at more than $13 billion at the end of the fiscal first quarter. The company has been adding customers and workloads for its Azure services, which let clients run and store applications in Microsoft’s data centers. See also: Latest Microsoft Data Center Design Gets Close to Unity PUE PC Market PC shipments in the September quarter were a smidgen better than expected — a decline of 3.9 percent, compared with a 4.1 percent drop in the prior period, researcher IDC said. Still, chipmaker Intel Corp. saw its shares plummet by the most in nine months after a disappointing fourth-quarter sales forecast signaled lackluster demand for PCs heading into the holiday shopping season. Microsoft in July admitted it won’t meet its goal of getting the Windows 10 operating system on 1 billion devices within two to three years of the 2015 release of the software. The company blamed the shortfall on the decision to all but exit the phone hardware business and insisted this year would be a good one for corporate adoption of the system. Analysts are waiting to see evidence. “I’m not yet ready to call success, but we are seeing enough people doing enough prep work for it that it’s quite possible we could see a jump in adoption on the corporate side,” Moerdler said. Sales in the company’s More Personal Computing business, including Windows and Xbox, slipped 1.8 percent from a year ago to $9.29 billion. That compares with the $8.88 billion average estimate of five analysts polled by Bloomberg. Microsoft also reported a new metric for gaming revenue for Xbox and PC, saying it was $1.9 billion last quarter. In the Intelligent Cloud unit, comprised of Azure and server software deployed in customers’ own data centers, sales rose 8.3 percent to $6.38 billion, compared with the $6.26 billion average analyst estimate. Productivity revenue climbed 5.6 percent $6.66 billion. Analysts had estimated $6.55 billion. (Comment on this)
3:00p	Michael Dell Outlines Framework for IT Dominance By The VAR Guy For Michael Dell, the journey from the company he started out of his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984 to standing on the stage of Dell EMC World in front of 8,000 people this week has been a “long, strange trip.” Today, Dell Technologies is the largest enterprise systems company in the world, and Dell can’t wait to provide the infrastructure for the new, connected world that’s being built around us. “It’s the sunrise of a new era,” he said on Wednesday. “A digital dawn.” Our physical reality, Dell said, is transforming into a digital reality, and businesses aren’t sure what their industries will look like in just a few years. Dell wants to be the trusted provider of essential infrastructure for the “next Industrial Revolution,” where digital technologies such as deep learning, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing will once again change the way the world does business. “You go to bed an industrial company,” Jeff Immelt of GE said in a video, “and wake up as a software and analytics company.” Every company is now a tech company. Cloud technology is a big part of Dell’s vision of the future, but he sees a world where users can shift seamlessly between on-prem, public cloud, converged systems and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as needed depending on the use case. “Everything is on a journey to the hybrid cloud,” he said. The company has a three-step plan to bring that vision home: modernize existing infrastructure, automate systems and transform IT operations to deliver like a service provider. The range of technology brought under the Dell Technologies umbrella with the recent merger of Dell and EMC means the company is positioned to implement that plan and provide “world class technology—democratized by Dell.” And this week was packed with new product announcements that fall in line with that strategy, utilizing elements from across the Dell Technologies family. Modernize In the spirit of the new “software-defined everything” world, Dell EMC announced a new software-defined version of Dell EMC Data Domain protection storage delivering increased scalability and support for Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers, along with new cloud-enabled software updates to help protect applications and data in the modern data center. There’s also a new addition to the Isilon family that combines flash technology and Dell EMC’s scale-out NAS platform and an expanded converged infrastructure portfolio, as well as a new hyper-converged infrastructure offering called VxRACK, which David Goulden, President of Dell EMC’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, called VxRAIL’s big brother. Automate Bringing VMware’s tech into the Dell portfolio will, Dell says, enable a software-defined approach to data center operations and make the entire infrastructure programmable and automated. The company unveiled an Endpoint Data Security and Management portfolio that blends tech from Dell, Mozy, RSA and VMware AirWatch to provide data protection, backup and recovery, identity assurance, threat prevention and advanced response, and endpoint device and application management capabilities. Transform To support the transformation of IT operations to an as-a-service model, Dell outlined a vision in which users can shift workloads between the public cloud and on-prem infrastructure, while securely allowing flexibility in device, location and network connection to accommodate the new workforce. “Work is an activity, not a location,” said Jeff Clarke, Vice-Chairman of Operations and President of Client Solutions at Dell EMC. “You don’t go to work, you do work.” Virtustream will be integral to that strategy, as well as VMware partnerships with public cloud providers like AWS. The company also released a new open platform analytics solution called the Analytic Insights Module that bundles hardware, software and services into one platform for big data analytics and cloud native application development. This first ran at http://thevarguy.com/information-technology-events-and-conferences/michael-dell-outlines-framework-it-dominance-dell-emc- (Comment on this)
6:49p	GE Adds Flywheel Energy Storage to UPS Lineup GE has added a flywheel energy storage option for some of its UPS products for critical facilities, a category that includes data centers. Flywheels are an alternative to lead-acid batteries, the most common energy storage technology used by UPS systems today. Proponents of flywheels argue that they’re more environmentally friendly, require less maintenance and cooling than batteries do, and take up less space. Their drawbacks include much shorter ride-through times and the high amounts of energy needed to spin them. Which option works best for a particular facility depends on many factors, including things like ride-through requirements, recharge time (it’s much shorter for flywheels), operating temperature, and power density, among others. GE is introducing the new solutions in partnership with Calnetix Technologies subsidiary Vycon, a flywheel vendor that has had similar arrangements in the past with other major electrical infrastructure vendors, including Emerson Network Power and Schneider Electric, in the past. Neither of the two appears to be actively marketing the solutions. Perhaps the most well-known vendor who is selling flywheel-based UPS systems for data centers is Austin-based Active Power. The company has recently agreed to be acquired by Piller, a subsidiary of the British engineering and industrial giant Langley Holdings, saying it has had difficulty raising capital to sustain operations. One of Active Power’s most high-profile data center customer is Yahoo, which has deployed its flywheel-based UPS systems in its mega-scale data centers. (Comment on this)
8:55p	Hackers Take Down Sites From New York to LA in Web-Host Siege (Bloomberg) — Millions of internet users temporarily lost access to some of the world’s most popular websites Friday, as hackers hammered servers along the U.S. East Coast with phony traffic until they crashed, then moved westward. In what is believed to be a coordinated attack on one particular Domain Name Server provider, the hack took down sites including Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, CNN, Etsy and The New York Times for long stretches of time, from New York to Los Angeles. Unlike data breaches, the latest so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack didn’t steal anything. It just caused big headaches for everyone affected, especially Manchester, New Hampshire-based Dyn Inc. Dyn first reported site outages relating to the DDoS attack at around 7:10 a.m. New York time. The company restored service two hours later but was offline again at around noon, as another attack appeared to be underway, this time affecting the West Coast as well. “Our engineers continue to investigate and mitigate several attacks aimed against the Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company wrote on its web site shortly before 2 p.m. Though routine, DDoS assaults on companies like Dyn are on the rise in volume and power. The latest comes the day after Doug Madory, Dyn’s director of Internet Analysis, gave a presentation at an industry conference about research he had done on questionable practices at BackConnect Inc., a firm that offers web services, including helping clients manage DDoS attacks. According to Madory, BackConnect had regularly spoofed internet addresses through a technique known as a “BGP hijack,” an aggressive tactic that pushes the bounds of accepted cyber-security industry practices. Madory’s research was conducted with Brian Krebs, a well-known writer on computer-security issues, who also published an article based on the research last month. Within hours, his website was hit by a “extremely large and unusual” DDoS attack, he wrote. The barrage likely originated with a large amount of poorly secured devices like internet-connected cameras, routers, and digital video recorders, according to an analysis of the attack on Krebs’s site. These devices, collectively referred to as the “Internet of Things,” have been the source of DDoS onslaughts since early 2015, Flashpoint and Level 3 Threat Research Labs said in a report published last month. BackConnect has denied having any connection with the incident involving Krebs’s website, and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Krebs wrote on his blog that he had no evidence that the attacks on Dyn were related to Madory’s research. Dyn didn’t respond to requests for comment. Common Warfare With attacks on the Internet’s Domain Name Servers, hackers compromise the underlying technology that governs how the web functions, making the hack far more powerful and widespread. The DNS translates website names into the Internet Protocol addresses that computers use to look up and access sites. But it has a design flaw: Sending a routine data request to a DNS server from one computer, the hacker can trick the system into sending a monster file of IP addresses back to the intended target. Multiply that by tens of thousands of computers under the hackers’ control, and the wall of data that flooded back is enormous. A small server may be capable of handling hundreds of simultaneous requests, but thousands every minute cause overload and ultimately shut down, taking the websites it hosts offline with it. The practice often is employed by groups of hackers. In 2012, a DDoS attack forced offline the websites of Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., US Bancorp and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. A DDoS can be achieved in a number of ways, but commonly involves a distributed network of so-called “zombie” machines, referred to as botnets. A botnet is formed of personal computers in homes or offices infected with malicious code which, upon the request of a hacker, can start flooding a web server with data. One or two machines wouldn’t be an issue, but if tens or hundreds of thousands fire such data simultaneously, it can be enough to cripple even the most sophisticated of web servers. In the case of the Dyn incident, the computers targeted were DNS servers. Without a DNS server, large numbers of websites are inaccessible by users across a country or even the world. In other words, taking away the DNS servers is like taking away all the road signs on a country’s highway system. Single Company Targeted “I would suspect there was a single company being attacked, and everybody else who was on the same service also experience outages,” said Carl Herberger, vice president for security solutions at Radware, an Israeli-based internet security company. “That would explain why other authoritative services were not being attacked.” So-called “authoritative” DNS providers like Dyn are notoriously hard to secure. Herberger likens them to hospitals, which must admit anyone who shows up at the emergency room. Dyn must consider traffic going to a website as initially legitimate. In the event of a DDoS, Dyn must work quickly to sort out the bad traffic from the good, which takes time, resources and creates outages that ripple across the Internet, as was the case Friday. Dave Palmer, director of technology at U.K. cybersecurity company Darktrace, said the most recent DDoS attacks have been linked to Internet of Things devices, in particular web cams. “The joke about the Internet of Things was that you were going to get people hijacking people’s connected fridges to conduct these attacks, but in these recent cases the culprit seems to be webcams,” Palmer said. “We will probably see, when this is investigated, that it is a botnet of the Internet of Things.” To avoid massive outages, companies ramp up their capacity to try to absorb the deluge of traffic and reroute it, often with the help of a major telecommunications carrier or cloud-services provider like Akamai Technologies Inc. and CloudFlare Inc. But the only way to really prevent denial-of-service attacks may be to increase the overall security level of consumers around the world, Palmer said, a task that is getting harder as more and more devices are connected to the Internet. “This is exactly what happens when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of devices are left unprotected,” Palmer said. (Comment on this)

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