Friday, March 10th, 2017

Time	Event
4:00p	SoftBank Sells 25 Percent Stake in ARM to Vision Fund By Pavel Alpeyev and Dinesh Nair (Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp. plans to sell a 25 percent stake in ARM Holdings Plc to a technology fund it is creating with Saudi Arabia after lead investors expressed a desire to include the chipmaker in their portfolio, according to people familiar with the matter. The Japanese company will receive about $8 billion for the shares, the people said asking not to be identified because the details are private. The transaction will be separate from the $25 billion SoftBank plans to contribute to Vision Fund, one of the people said. The deal was previously reported by the Financial Times. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is in the process creating the $100 billion fund with the Saudis, Abu Dhabi investor Mubadala Development Co. and other backers that would make the Japanese billionaire one of the world’s biggest technology investors. Son acquired ARM for $32 billion in September, a bet on the future of connected devices. SoftBank separately led a $1.2 billion investment in satellite startup OneWeb Ltd., which Son has said will be included in the Vision Fund when it closes. See also: Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips in Challenge to Intel Mubadala will invest as much as $15 billion into the fund and should reach a formal agreement by the end of this month, one of the people familiar with the matter said. That would make it the second-biggest outside contributor after Saudi Arabia’s $45 billion. Apple Inc., Qualcomm Inc. and Oracle Corp. Chairman Larry Ellison may invest $1 billion each, people familiar with the matter have said. SoftBank has lined up $10 billion to $15 billion in financing from Japanese banks to partly finance their share of the fund, people familiar with the matter said in January. The Abu Dhabi fund is already a major investor in the semiconductor industry. The state-owned investor is the largest single shareholder in Advanced Micro Devices Inc with a stake of 10.3 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. It also has ownership in Globalfoundries Inc., one of the largest contract manufacturers of semiconductors globally. “Our discussions around participation in the fund are productive and ongoing,” Brian Lott, Mubadala’s head of communications, said in a text message. “Mubadala has made a number of significant investments in advanced technology, and we see our potential involvement in the Vision Fund complementing those investments.” SoftBank’s shares fell 0.6 percent to close at 8,426 yen in Tokyo, erasing an earlier drop. The company’s spokesman Matthew Nicholson declined to comment. (Comment on this)
4:55p	Cloudera Said to Tap Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, BofA for IPO Alex Barinka (Bloomberg) — Cloudera Inc., the big-data company backed by Intel Corp., is working with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. on its initial public offering, people with knowledge of the matter said. The company, based in Palo Alto, California, has filed paperwork for an IPO confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Cloudera is planning to go public this year and is eyeing a valuation of about $4.1 billion, said the people, in line with what it fetched in its last private funding round three years ago. Allen & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Barclays Plc are also working on the deal, one of the people said. A representative for Cloudera declined to comment. Spokesmen for Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Barclays, Bank of America and Citi declined to comment, while a representative of Allen & Co. didn’t respond to a request for comment. After a slow start to the year for initial offerings, Snap Inc., the maker of disappearing-photo app Snapchat, raised $3.9 billion this month, including an overallotment to underwriters. The company priced the shares above the marketed range, and the stock surged 44 percent in its debut. Though the shares have trimmed those gains, they’re still up 34 percent since the offering, a positive outcome for the first technology IPO of 2017. MuleSoft, Alteryx MuleSoft Inc., an enterprise software company based in San Francisco, is seeking to raise as much as $209 million in an IPO scheduled to price March 16, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Data-analytics company Alteryx Inc. filed its initial prospectus last month with a placeholder amount of $75 million. Cloudera creates tools and provides services that center on the open-source data analysis software, Hadoop. Its technology helps wrangle mass amounts of data, analyze it and use it to make decisions in real time. The company competes with the likes of Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. It has raised upward of $1 billion in private funding, including a $900 million round in March 2014. That injection included $740 million from Intel, as well as $160 million from investors T. Rowe Price Group Inc., Google Inc.’s venture arm and Michael Dell’s investment firm, MSD Capital LP. Companies with revenue of less than $1 billion are able to file IPO documents confidentially under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. It allows them to work out details with the SEC away from the public eye. (Comment on this)
6:57p	Can Google Lure More Enterprises Inside Its Data Centers? Google spent the better part of the week making the case to businesses that they’re better off not only moving out of their own data centers and into its cloud, but that its cloud was a better option than the clouds its biggest rivals in the market, Amazon and Microsoft, have built. At a conference in San Francisco, the Alphabet subsidiary announced a myriad of new products across the public cloud services spectrum (from cloud infrastructure to office tools), rolled out a major cost cut for clients who commit to long-term cloud use, paraded several recently sold enterprise customers (including some heavyweights, such as Verizon and HSBC), cranked up its efforts to take its cloud services to market via partners, and touted the might of its global data center network. Among all the players in the enterprise cloud space, Google is a very special case. While it probably has the world’s biggest and most powerful cloud, it didn’t build it to provide the kinds of services it now really wants to grow. The infrastructure was built to support its core business, which is essentially serving ads to users of its big free consumer services, such as search and YouTube. It’s certainly easier to adopt an existing network of data centers for enterprise cloud than to build one from scratch, and the company has been doing that to the extent possible, but it doesn’t have data center footprint in all the locations a hyper-scale cloud provider needs to truly compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The result is the company with the largest cloud in the world has a much smaller cloud than its two top competitors do to provide enterprise cloud services, although it’s pouring a lot of money to catch up on that front – about $10 billion a year – and adding new locations quickly. See also: Google Expands Cloud Data Center Plans, Asserts Hardware, Connectivity Leadership Additionally, because Google has largely been built around its online advertising business, it also lags behind the other heavyweights in the ability to sell to enterprises and assist them in deploying whatever it is they need deploying in its cloud. Microsoft has been in the enterprise IT space ever since the creation of enterprise IT, while a myriad of managed service providers and consultants have sprung up over the years to help companies use AWS. Google has been making progress there too, and the announcements of partner program expansion this week were its biggest step in that direction yet. Another obvious thing that makes Google a special case is its unique and forward-looking approach to technology. It pioneered the hyper-scale data center design, from cooling and power infrastructure to servers and network switches. The company has been collaborating with Intel to customize every generation of Intel’s server processors to fit its needs for more than a decade, and was involved with the development of server chips built on Intel’s latest Skylake architecture from the start. It has already upgraded several of its cloud data centers with the new chips, and it will be a while before any other cloud provider or server vendor will be able to get their hands on the part. Google has also been a major driving force in the rise of Deep Learning, a type of Artificial Intelligence, and has been ahead of others in terms of using Deep Learning in production for its consumer services. Now, Deep Learning is its core differentiation message in the enterprise cloud space. It wants companies to consume its Deep Learning technologies via APIs, as cloud services. Today, Google is “the third horse in a two-horse race, but it could well become a three-horse race,” Michael Warrilow, VP at the market research firm Gartner, told Data Center Knowledge in an interview. “They’re doing all the right things.” The big challenge for Google is becoming more enterprise-friendly than it has been. “They’re enterprise-scale, but are they enterprise-friendly? And the answer is, that’s still a work in progress.” (Comment on this)
7:30p	Datto Shakes Up Partner Program Tiers Brought to you by MSPmentor Storage giant Datto today changed the criteria by which it doles out partner benefits, doing away with a ranking based on the amount of data a customer has in storage, in favor of a system that rewards recurring revenue. Datto’s rebranded Global Partner Program will still feature four tiers of partner status, which until now were determined by the amount of cloud data being stored. For example, a partner with between 10 and 25 terabytes stored would fall into the “Premier” level – the second-highest tier – qualifying that partner for marketing development funds and lead-sharing benefits not available to those in lower tiers. Under the new system, MSPs will be slotted into one of the four renamed tiers based on the amount of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) they generate through Datto. “We’re not just a storage company,” said Samantha Ciaccia, partner marketing manager at Datto. “We offer plenty of products and services that don’t directly involve storage. “This allows us to reward our partners for whatever program they (sell),” she added. “MRR is a universal, easy-to-track way to measure success.” Datto officials said the new program was developed with feedback from their MSP community. “The Datto Global Partner Program was developed to accelerate partners’ business growth with actionable enablement programs focused on sales and marketing,” the company said in a statement. “Datto’s overarching goal of the program is to further invest in the MSP community with more training, education and resources to empower partners with the tools they need to be successful.” Another new feature of the revamped program is access to MarketNow, a marketing automation platform, now available to partners at no cost. The tool – designed to aid business owners, regardless of marketing knowledge – offers pre-built promotional campaigns, customizable collateral and social media content. “We’ve always provided marketing assets,” said Sue MacGregor, director of partner marketing for Datto. “But we felt what we were missing is the execution part of that.” “A lot of our (partners) aren’t as marketing savvy,” she added. “They might not have a platform to push marketing content out to customers.” This article originally appeared on MSPmentor. (Comment on this)
9:58p	IT Service Providers Scramble to Protect Customers after CIA Cyberweapons Leak Brought to you by MSPmentor Needless to say, it was a busy week at managed security services provider (MSSP) Digital Guardian. The release by WikiLeaks this week of secret C.I.A. cyberweapons and methods for hacking into smartphones, computers and even smart TVs, set into motion a chain of responses aimed at protecting customers from a variety of previously unknown threats. The steps taken by Digital Guardian likely mirrored activity at a range of IT services outfits, which found themselves scrambling to identify the new exploits, asses which clients might be vulnerable, and fix as much as possible as quickly as possible, before the exploits fully reach the wild. “We need them to patch those vulnerabilities,” said Tim Bandos, director of cybersecurity at Digital Guardian. See also: Can MSPs Really Make Money Selling Managed Security? Delivering Security Services Now Critical to MSP Success The document dump appears to reveal hundreds of millions of lines of code containing secret C.I.A. cyber-weapons, including “malware, viruses, Trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation,” WikiLeaks said in a statement. According to the release, the C.I.A. and other allied intelligence services have cracked Apple and Android smartphones, and can circumvent encryption on services like Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. Bandos and his team at Digital Guardian were among those who immediately began poring over the documents, trying to gauge the implications. “One thing that we do is make sure that our technology hasn’t been exploited,” Bandos said, noting that numerous hardware and software vendors learned for the first time of vulnerabilities to their products. Thus far, WikiLeaks has refrained from releasing the full code for the cyberweapons, in part, until it can ensure they can be disarmed. “I think this is an effort to allow time to patch a lot of these issues,” Bandos speculated. “The fact that they haven’t released the actual code, leaves me with a bit of confidence.” Ultimately, Bandos expects that WikiLeaks will release the full cyberweapons and hopes that by then, affected vendors – including major names like Cisco, Apple and Symantec – will have addressed the flaws. “Every vulnerability will be different,” he said. “I think, really, the delay is going to be in getting (patches) deployed out to the consumers.” “If you look at the smart TVs, they’ll have to update the firmware,” Bandos added. “You can’t just automatically push that out. “Someone is going to have to connect to the Internet and download the update. There’s going to be a lag.” The process is well underway at Digital Guardian. “If we’re running anything that has those holes, we are proactive,” Bandos said. “We’re cross-referencing all of the things that have been mentioned,” he continued. “We’re then monitoring those (vendor) sites to find out when the patch is available and we’ll immediately push that out to our customers.” The wave of new threats is expected require close attention and careful monitoring for some time to come. “We’re always looking for that kind of thing anyway,” Bandos said. “But we’re definitely on high alert.” This article originally appeared on MSPmentor. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2017/03/10 [Calendar]

Next Day >>