Comcast Diversifies With .8 Billion DreamWorks Acquisition

DAILY VIDEO: Comcast buying DreamWorks Animation for $3.8B as it expands its reach; Microsoft adds Nano server option to Windows Server 2016; Yammer crosses organization borders with external groups feature; and there’s more.

Today’s topics include Comcast’s acquisition of DreamWorks Animation, the addition of a nano server option to Windows Server 2016, new extensions to Yammer’s team collaboration capabilities and Yahoo’s decision to allow activists members to join its board of directors.

Comcast is acquiring DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion as the cable television service continues to diversify by adding complementary businesses as the future of cable television remains unfocused.

The deal, which was announced April 28, brings together Comcast with the powerful DreamWorks film producer, which has produced a wide range of popular animated features, including Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda.

The merger brings huge opportunities for content streaming to Comcast, which like other cable companies, is seeing its business impacted by customers who are replacing their cable connections with streaming video and original programming from services such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Microsoft released Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 on April 27, a test build that includes what its dubbed the Nano Server as an installation option.

First announced a year ago, Nano Server is a container- and cloud-friendly version of Windows Server that dispenses with the GUI, 32-bit support and other software components that compete for CPU cycles.

This week, Microsoft has incorporated Nano Server as a deployment option on both the Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5.

To help administrators keep a closer eye on their Nano Servers, along with Windows Server 2016’s new data center modernization features, Microsoft also announced the release of System Center 2016 Technical Preview 5.

Yammer is branching out by allowing users to bring their colleagues at other companies into team collaboration sessions.

The new External Groups feature, launched yesterday, builds on Yammer’s existing external contacts and networks functionality to extend team collaboration to colleagues that may be on the same project, but draw a paycheck from different employers.

“Office 365 customers can now create external Yammer groups for seamless and secure collaboration across company and organizational boundaries,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office 365 Client Applications, in an April 26 announcement.

Yahoo, facing rising unrest from number of dissatisfied investors, revealed April 27 that it has decided to diffuse a potential proxy fight with activist investor Starboard Value LP by inviting four of Starboard’s independent directors to join its board.

Starboard CEO and Chief Investment Officer Jeff Smith, the most vocal of the company’s investors in recent months, will be among those joining Yahoo’s board.

He will be joined by Tor R. Braham, former managing director and global head of technology mergers and acquisitions for Deutsche Bank Securities, Eddy W. Hartenstein, a director of SanDisk, Sirius XM Holdings, Broadcom Ltd., and Rovi Corporation, and Richard S. Hill, chairman of Tessera Technologies.

Hartenstein was formerly CEO of the Tribune Company, chairman and CEO of DirecTV and publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times Media Group. Yahoo independent board members Lee Scott and Sue James will be leaving the board as part of the Starboard deal.

Source: eWeek

Microsoft Flow Takes On IFTTT at Work

The software giant gets serious about workflow automation with the launch of its IFTTT-like Flow service and a preview of the company’s custom line-of-business app builder, PowerApps.

IFTTT is getting some competition from Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash., software giant on April 29 announced Microsoft Flow, a workflow automation service aimed at business users.IFTTT, short for “If This Then That,” is a popular Web service that uses configurable templates, or “recipes,” to trigger a series of interactions between other Web and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for users, typically with a single action, or in an automated fashion. For example, IFTTT recipes can be used to automatically upload a new Dropbox file to Google Drive or tweet an Instagram picture as a native Twitter image rather than a link back to Instagram.On April 29, Microsoft launched a similar product called Flow. Unlike IFTTT, which welcomes all comers, Flow is restricted to the company’s business customers and requires a work or school email address to sign up for the service.”Microsoft Flow makes it easy to mash-up two or more different services,” said Stephen Siciliano, principal group program manager for Microsoft Flow, in an April 29 announcement. “Today, Microsoft Flow is publicly available as a preview, at no cost. We have connections to 35+ different services, including both Microsoft services like OneDrive and SharePoint, and public software services like Slack, Twitter and Salesforce.com, with more being added every week.”

Early adopters can pick from dozens of productivity-enhancing templates in the Flow gallery. Selections include “flows” that issue Slack notifications when new files are uploaded to Dropbox or automatically copy Salesforce leads to CRM, among several others.

In the near future, Microsoft plans to roll out more enterprise-friendly features, added Siciliano. The company is working on enabling connections to on-premises data sources and adding intra-organizational content-sharing capabilities, he added.Joining Flow is the preview release of PowerApps, a cloud-based service that enables organizations to build custom line-of-business applications, forms and workflows without code. Like Flow, PowerApps is restricted to Microsoft’s business and education users.The PowerApps Studio client, available at the Windows Store, enables users to create apps from a variety of data sources including Salesforce or Dynamics CRM; customize prebuilt templates; or start from scratch. Once finished, apps are saved to the cloud and can be shared with other users within an organization.Users can access their newly created apps with a Web browser or the PowerApps mobile clients for iOS and Android. Microsoft assures that the PowerApps platform respects data source permissions, ensuring that only authorized users access an app’s data.PowerApps can also be used in conjunction with Flow, revealed Darshan Desai, Microsoft PowerApps group program manager, in a blog post. “Microsoft Flow is fully integrated with PowerApps, which allows you to automate business workflows as part of the app. For example, send an approval email when a button is clicked or create a record in your CRM system,” he wrote.As the PowerApps preview wends its way to general availability, Microsoft is concentrating on improving performance and adding more templates and connectors. Support for an expanded set of SharePoint data types is also in the works, said Desai.
Source: eWeek

Mitel, Polycom Deal Is Latest Move in a Dynamic, Crowded UC Space

Mitel officials in April announced the company is buying video conferencing vendor Polycom for $1.96 billion, a move that will create a much larger communications and collaboration company that will compete with such established players as Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Avaya. It’s also a continuation of Mitel’s aggressive acquisition efforts under CEO Rich McBee, who has argued that the unified communications (UC) market is ripe for consolidation and that his company will be among the buyers. That said, Mitel’s acquisition of Polycom will be only the latest move in rapidly changing UC and video conferencing markets, both of which are being impacted by such trends as an increasingly mobile workforce, a proliferation of mobile devices, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and big data, and the growing demand for cloud- and software-based solutions. That has led to other acquisitions, partnerships and product rollouts designed to help vendors gain ground in a collaboration space that is highly competitive, very crowded, and dominated by Cisco and Microsoft. Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst with ZK Research, has argued that companies must be able to evolve and adapt if they are to survive. “There’s not enough revenue for all companies to win,” Kerravala told eWEEK. “Vendors must be willing to put both feet into the new [cloud] world and embrace it, and not sacrifice the future for their legacy businesses.” This slide show takes a look at some of the more recent moves by vendors.

Source: eWeek

Oracle Expands Cloud Services With Acquisition of Textura

Oracle is looking more and more like Salesforce every day. This is a direction the company needs to follow as its hardware sales continue to slip.

Oracle added to its growing cloud services roster April 28 by acquiring publicly traded Textura, a provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services for about $663 million in cash, net of Textura’s liquid assets.The purchase price amounted to $26 per share, exactly the price at which the stock closed April 28.Oracle is looking more and more like Salesforce every day. The cloud services business is a direction the company needs to follow as its enterprise hardware sales continue to slip each quarter.Textura says its cloud services process about $3.4 billion in payments for more than 6,000 projects each month.   The company provides its cloud services in a consumption model preferred by the engineering and construction industry, in which the companies involved pay based on project activity.

In addition, Textura said, usage of its cloud services creates a network effect of sorts that benefits participants because more than 85,000 general and subcontractors are connected to the platform and benefit by shared information and economies of scale.

Oracle said it will integrate Textura into its Primavera software to fill out its construction services offering. The Redwood City, Calif.-based IT giant bought Primavera, which makes project management software for the construction industry, back in 2008.Oracle Primavera offers a suite of cloud solutions for project, cost, time and risk management. The Oracle Primavera flagship products have been completely re-architected for the cloud, and the result is a set of cloud services that are growing rapidly as construction and engineering companies embrace digital transformation. Together, Oracle Primavera and Textura will form the Oracle Engineering and Construction Global Business Unit offering a comprehensive cloud-based project control and execution platform that manages all phases of engineering and construction projects.Cloud is the fastest growing part of Oracle’s business. Oracle Cloud currently has about 63 million users and carries an average of 23 billion transactions each day. Oracle Cloud runs on 30,000 devices and uses 400 petabytes of storage in 19 data centers around the world.  Textura’s mission, according to CEO David Habinger, is “to bring workflow automation and transparency to complex construction projects while improving their financial performance and minimizing risks.”Twelve-year-old Textura, based in Deerfield, Ill., went public in June 2013 yet has never reported a profit. In its last fiscal year, it had recorded $87 million in revenue with a net loss of nearly $17 million. It had about $79 million in cash on hand at the time of the acquisition.The transaction is expected to close in 2016, subject to approval by Textura stockholders.
Source: eWeek

Zscaler Uses the Cloud to Create a VPN Alternative

A new Private Access service takes a different approach to enabling secure remote connectivity.

Since the dawn of the Internet era, virtual private networking (VPN) has been the cornerstone of enterprise remote access technology. Now security vendor Zscaler is aiming to disrupt the staid VPN market with a new approach built for the modern cloud era.Zscaler’s core technology is a cloud-based Web security platform that can help reduce risks for connections outbound from an enterprise. In contrast, with its new Private Access technology, Zscaler is aiming to reduce risks for connections inbound to an enterprise.Zscaler has been working on the Private Access technology for nearly three years, according to Patrick Foxhoven, CIO and vice president of Emerging Technologies at Zscaler. He added that Private Access is functionally different from a traditional Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or Secure Sockets Layer VPN (SSL-VPN).”The VPN space hasn’t been disrupted in a meaningful way in over a decade,” Foxhoven told eWEEK.

Zscaler didn’t want to provide simple network connectivity as a VPN, Foxhoven said, since a VPN in his view can negatively impact security by increasing the attack surface. The Zscaler secure access technology takes a different approach from a traditional VPN, which typically simply provides a secure tunnel into an enterprise network.

“We wanted to bring a disruptive cloud-scale approach to the challenge of remote access,” he said.Zscaler already has a client that runs on endpoints that helps enforce policy and filter outbound Internet traffic. Foxhoven said the client application has been enhanced now to enable the Private Access technology.In terms of the security architecture, Zscaler now also has a lightweight virtual machine (VM) connector technology that can be deployed in a private data center or in a public cloud. Basically, the connector reaches out to the Zscaler cloud service, enabling access to an enterprise or private data center without actually exposing the private areas to the public Internet, Foxhoven said. From a security perspective, Zscaler is using multiple forms of strong authentication, including digital fingerprinting of connecting devices.”We can have a very strong chain of trust and identity,” he said. “We then stitch together very dynamically for on-demand, per-application tunnels.”That is, instead of enabling remote VPN user access, which provides access to a given slice of a network, Zscaler is aiming to provide very granular access to the specific services needed by a remote user.”We’re not giving the client an IP address on the remote network, so the user doesn’t have any presence or remote visibility on the network,” Foxhoven said.In some typical VPN use cases, users are simply aiming to get remote file and printer access, which are both supported use cases in the Zscaler Private Access approach. Another common use for VPN is for remote voice access, providing users with a phone number inside of a corporate network. Most modern voice over IP (VoIP) technologies make use of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is not supported in the first release of Zscaler Private Access. Foxhoven said SIP support is on the roadmap for a future update.”We believe that in the future there is going to be no such thing as a trusted network, and that’s why we have invested in developing Zscaler Private Access,” he said.Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Source: eWeek

Intel Cancels Low-Power Chips Aimed at Mobile Devices

As part of a restructuring announced last week, Intel reportedly is ending its SoFIA and Broxton projects and shifting the money to its 5G efforts.

Intel reportedly is ending its efforts around some chips aimed at smartphones and tablets as part of larger strategy to shift to areas that promise more growth.The chip maker, which last week announced it is cutting 12,0000 jobs and refocusing its efforts around such markets as the data center, Internet of things (IoT) and the cloud while reducing its reliance on PCs, is shelving its planned SoFIA and Broxton Atom chips for mobile devices. The SoFIA LTE and Broxton chips has been delayed but were most recently scheduled to be released this week.Intel had been late getting the systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) to the market, and there were reports that companies like Asus—which uses Intel processors in its ZenPhone smartphones—where lessening their dependence on the Intel products and turning more of their attention to ARM-based SoCs from the likes of Qualcomm.In a column on Forbes.com April 28, Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights and Strategy, wrote that during a meeting senior Intel officials told him that they were ending their SoFIA projects—SoCs with integrated 3G and 4G wireless modems—and the Broxton chips for smartphones and tablets. The goal is to free up resources for Intel’s efforts around modems and 5G, Moorhead wrote.

“Intel has been showing some serious commitments to 5G deployment and penetration in the future, and they clearly believe that 5G is their opportunity to carve out a competitive advantage for themselves end to end in the future of mobility and in connecting the growing number of smart and connected ‘things’ to the cloud,” he wrote. “From my vantage point, Intel has a better chance in 5G than they do in low-end 4G mobile devices.”

Wells Fargo analyst David Wong, after attending a meeting with Intel CFO Stacy Smith, sent a note to clients saying that he expected there would be restructuring around the chip maker’s smartphone and tablet initiatives. Many of the projects impacted by the cost cuts and shifting priorities would come from Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG), which includes PCs and mobile devices, Wong wrote, according to Barrons.”Within CCG, Intel plans on scaling back its investment in tablet and smartphone SoCs (system-on-a-chip)—we assume this refers to a reduction in investment in the SoFIA product line,” he wrote.Qualcomm is the dominant player in the 4G, and Intel, after being slow initially to respond to the rise of smartphones and tablets, has struggled to gain traction the in the space. Intel has spent billions over the past several years on its mobile chip efforts with little to show for it.In a post on the company bog April 26, Krzanich outlined the company’s strategy going forward, which was built on five core beliefs around the cloud, the IoT, memory and programmable chip technologies, 5G and the continued strength of Moore’s Law. Connectivity is the key to all these areas, the CEO wrote.”The fact [is] that providing computing power to a device and connecting it to the cloud makes it more valuable,” he wrote, pointing to autonomous cars as examples. “Connectivity is fundamental to every one of the cloud-to-thing segments we will drive. As the world moves to 5G, Intel will lead because of our technological strength to deliver end-to-end 5G systems, from modems to base stations to all the various forms of connectivity that exist today and will exist tomorrow.”The PC and mobile units have been a focus of Intel’s in recent months. In November 2015, Krzanich hired Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala, who came to the company from Qualcomm, to be president of the new Client and IoT Businesses and Systems Architecture Group. Earlier this month, it was announced that two longtime Intel veterans—Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the CCG, and Doug Davis, senior vice president and general manager of the IoT Group—were leaving Intel. There also were reports that Aicha Evans, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Communications and Devices Group, had resigned, though Intel never confirmed that and reports later in the month she had decided to stay.
Source: eWeek

Sprint Selling More Assets in Fight for Long-Term Profitability

Sprint is selling some equipment to raise $1.1 billion, while also receiving a $2 billion bridge loan for 18 months as it gathers more cash.

Sprint is continuing to corral a growing pile of cash liquidity by selling more of its network assets, this time for $1.1 billion, as it works to reverse a 10-year pattern of losses.In its latest deal, Sprint has signed a second contract with Mobile Leasing Solutions, LLC (MLS) to sell about $1.3 billion worth of unidentified network assets for $1.1 billion in cash in a lease-back arrangement, the carrier announced April 29. In addition, Sprint also announced that it has signed a deal for a $2 billion bridge loan for 18 months with Mizuho Bank that will provide additional cash. Both transactions are in addition to a $2.2 billion lease-back deal the company announced in early April that involved $3 billion of the company’s network cell towers, according to an earlier eWEEK story.The latest transactions mean that Sprint has secured about $5.3 billion in cash in April as it continues to try to reverse long-time losses and return to profitability.

In the most recent deal with MLS, the new lease-back arrangement will be accounted for as financing on its balance sheet, with its assets remaining in property, plant and equipment and continuing to be depreciated over their remaining useful lives, according to Sprint. The payments made to MLS under the lease-backs will be reflected as principal repayments and interest expense over the respective terms.

MLS was formed by a group of equity investors, including Softbank, and has obtained debt financing from several lenders, according to Sprint. Brightstar Corp. is again providing lease management and asset tracking for the transaction, as well as reverse logistics and device remarketing services.The 18-month bridge financing contract “provides Sprint with $2 billion of liquidity as the company continues to execute its turnaround initiatives, densify and optimize its network, and progress toward other financing transactions in the future,” the company said in a statement. The bridge loan can be expanded by up to another $500 million in additional money, if needed.A sprint spokesman could not be reached for comment by eWEEK on April 29, but the company said in its statement that it will address questions about the deal during its fourth quarter and full-year 2015 earnings call on May 6.Bill Menezes, an analyst with Gartner, told eWEEK that the latest Sprint lease-back effort “looks like more of the same—a need to raise cash for network expansion and to cover the costs of Sprint’s heavy promotional activity in acquiring customers.”The cash-raising work is also “a big reason Sprint decided to go big on device leasing … whether or not they’re feeling more financial pressure to do so will become clearer when we see their earnings next week,” said Menezes. “Back-to-back good quarters in terms of adding postpaid customers and improving profitability would seem to tell us the turnaround finally is getting traction. We’ll see.”Earlier this month, Sprint unveiled its plans for its original $2.2 billion cash infusion for a network gear lease-back. That gear will be bought back in 2018 when the company projects its financial standing will be improved. Essentially, these deals allow Sprint to raise large sums of cash at a time when it sees an opportunity for a turnaround, buoyed by growth in the number of its mobile phone subscribers, a company spokesman said earlier. The idea is that Sprint will be in a stronger financial position in the future when it pays the cash back.In January, Sprint reported revenue of $8.1 billion for the third quarter of 2015, while sharply narrowing its operating loss for the period to $197 million from $2.54 billion a year earlier and adding 501,000 new wireless postpaid customers. The wireless carrier’s third-quarter results portrayed a company that is still in transition as it fights competitors like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile in a very volatile consumer market. 
Source: eWeek

Accenture and Splunk Form Alliance to Help Organizations Analyze Machine Data to Drive High-Impact Business Performance

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) entered into an alliance relationship that integrates Splunk products and cloud services into Accenture’s application services, security and digital offerings. Accenture is helping clients use Splunk solutions to improve business outcomes by mining vast amounts of application and operational data to identify trends and improvement opportunities that were previously difficult to detect.

Deployment of this new platform leveraging an intelligent delivery strategy strengthens our position as Hawaii’s technology leader,” said Amy Aapala, Vice President of Information Technology and Order Management Systems at Hawaiian Telcom. “The real-time insights gleaned from our customized dashboards enables our team to be more strategic and proactive on a day-to-day basis, which ultimately improves our customer service and increases productivity.”

Accenture is expanding its network of trained Splunk practitioners in order to meet significant client demand for operational intelligence solutions. Accenture and Splunk are also collaborating and bringing to market new packaged solutions, the first of which integrates Splunk analytics into Accenture’s Managed Security Services. Accenture will provide Security Information Event Management (SIEM) As-a-Service to clients, using Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Enterprise Security (ES) to deliver advanced threat detection, correlation, search and incident management capabilities. Additional solutions may be tailored to various business areas including digital, marketing and sales.

Hawaiian Telcom (NASDAQ: HCOM) is one of Accenture’s first clients to take advantage of its intelligent application management services, infused with Splunk technology, to help mine  business insights and expand monitoring of the company’s core IT ecosystem.

Our alliance with Splunk is another strong example of how Accenture is impacting our clients’ businesses with ‘new IT.’ By mining and analyzing machine data from back-end systems, call centers, web traffic, inventory levels, shipments and more, IT can play a greater role in influencing business performance, not just IT performance,” said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services. “We’re integrating Splunk’s platform for operational intelligence into our global application service offerings and delivery teams, bringing robust new capabilities to our clients at scale. We can also deliver this capability through our new intelligent automation platform, Accenture myWizard, to help turn data into critical insights that drive improved business outcomes.”

Accenture Technology Services adopted Splunk internally, with a focus on helping IT organizations become more business-centric. Using Splunk® Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Enterprise Security, Splunk User Behavior Analytics and Splunk IT Service Intelligence, Accenture is developing and rolling out operational intelligence solutions that span the entire software development lifecycle. Additionally, any team can build their own Splunk-based application and host it with a central app store for other teams to use. Accenture has developed numerous Splunk applications to date, spanning software development, IT operations, security monitoring and business operations.

As one of the largest global systems integrators, Accenture will help broaden access to Splunk’s platform for operational intelligence to organizations that have not yet tapped the power of machine data,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk. “By analyzing machine data, organizations gain end-to-end visibility into operations and make better informed business decisions. We are thrilled to work with Accenture and leverage its innovative best in class technological experience to further deliver operational intelligence around the globe.”

Sign up for the free insideBIGDATA newsletter.

Source: insideBigData

OpenStack Summit Returns to Austin With Much Fanfare

AUSTIN, Texas—Back in July 2010, 75 developers gathered at the Omni hotel here for the very first OpenStack Summit. At the time, OpenStack was in the earliest stages of development. In April 2016, OpenStack returned to Austin in triumph as the de facto standard for private cloud deployment and the platform of choice for a significant share of the Fortune 100 companies. About 7,500 people from companies of all sizes from all over the world attended the 2016 OpenStack Summit in Austin from April 25 to April 29. In 2010, there were no users, because there wasn’t much code running, but in 2016, that has changed. Among the many OpenStack users speaking at the summit were executives from Verizon and Volkswagen Group. While the genesis of OpenStack was a joint effort between NASA and Rackspace, the 2016 summit was sponsored by some of the biggest names in technology today—including IBM, Cisco, Dell, EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some highlights of the 2016 OpenStack Summit.

Source: eWeek

Why the HP Chromebook 13 Is Worth a Closer Look by Business Users
By Don Reisinger  |  Posted 2016-04-29 Print

Don Reisinger is a freelance technology columnist. He started writing about technology for Ziff-Davis’ Gearlog.com. Since then, he has written extremely popular columns for CNET.com, Computerworld, InformationWeek, and others. He has appeared numerous times on national television to share his expertise with viewers. You can follow his every move at http://twitter.com/donreisinger.

Source: eWeek