President throws latest wrench in $10B JEDI cloud contract selection process

The $10 billion, decade long JEDI cloud contract drama continues. It’s a process that has been dogged by complaints, regulatory oversight and court cases. Throughout the months long selection process, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied accusations that the contract was somehow written to make Amazon a favored vendor, but today the Washington Post reports President Trump has asked the newly appointed Defense Secretary, Mark T. Esper to examine the process because of concerns over that very matter.

The Defense Department called for bids last year for a $10 billion, decade long contract. From the beginning Oracle in particular complained that the process favored Amazon. Even before the RFP process began Oracle executive Safra Catz took her concerns directly to the president, but at that time he did not intervene. Later, the company filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office, which ruled that the procurement process was fair.

Government denies Oracle’s protest of $10B Pentagon JEDI cloud RFP

Finally, the company took the case to court alleging that a person involved in defining the selection process had a conflict of interest, due to being an employee at Amazon before joining the DoD. That case was dismissed last month.

In April, the DoD named Microsoft and Amazon as the two finalists, and the winner was finally expected to be named some time this month. It appeared that the we were close to the finish line, but now that the president has intervened at the 11th hour, it’s impossible to know what the outcome will be.

Much to Oracle’s chagrin, Pentagon names Microsoft and Amazon as $10B JEDI cloud contract finalists

What we do know is that this is a pivotal project for the DoD, which is aimed at modernizing the U.S. military for the next decade and beyond. The fact is that the two finalists made perfect sense. They are the two market leaders, and each has tools, technologies and experience working with sensitive government contracts.

Amazon is the market leader with 33% marketshare. Microsoft is number two with 16%. Number three vendor, Google dropped out before the RFP process began. It is unclear at this point whether the president’s intervention will have any influence on the final decision, but the Washington Post reports it is an unusual departure from government procurement procedures.

Why the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI deal has cloud companies going nuts

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/president-throws-latest-wrench-in-10b-jedi-cloud-contract-selection-process/

Ninja is leaving Twitch for Microsoft’s Mixer

Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the biggest streamer ever, has today announced his intention to leave the Twitch platform in favor of Microsoft’s Mixer.

Twitch is far and away the biggest video game streaming platform on the internet, claiming 72 percent of all hours watched according to StreamElements. Mixer, by comparison, owns 3 percent, which is approximately 112 million viewership hours this most recent quarter.

Mixer is owned by Microsoft following an acquisition in 2016, back when Mixer was called Beam. Interestingly enough, Beam won the Disrupt NY Battlefield competition in 2016.

Twitch offered this statement to the Verge:

We’ve loved watching Ninja on Twitch over the years and are proud of all that he’s accomplished for himself and his family, and the gaming community. We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors.

Surprisingly quickly, Twitch took away Ninja’s ‘Partnered’ check mark, the Twitch equivalent of a verified blue tick.

Damn they snagged this mans checkmark QUICK pic.twitter.com/Br62NB8uX5

— 100T Mako (@Mako) August 1, 2019

Ninja announced the news via video:

The announcement is very light on reasons why Ninja might have moved from his longtime home at Twitch over to Microsoft. It’s possible (and likely?) that Mixer offered the streaming star an enormous amount of money to make the move, which could signal the beginning of a new wave of payouts for mega streaming stars — not unlike the current NBA free agency bonanza, which has seen the migration of superstars to marquee franchises in order to form basketball equivalents of supergroups.

It’s also worth wondering who reigns supreme in this equation: players or platforms? Luckily, we’ll find out quickly as the video game streaming space sees its biggest talent shakeup since the industry’s inception.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/ninja-is-leaving-twitch-for-microsofts-mixer/

Why AWS gains big storage efficiencies with E8 acquisition

AWS is already the clear market leader in the cloud infrastructure market, but it’s never been an organization that rests on its past successes. Whether it’s a flurry of new product announcements and enhancements every year, or making strategic acquisitions.

When it bought Israeli storage startup E8 yesterday, it might have felt like a minor move on its face, but AWS was looking, as it always does, to find an edge and reduce the costs of operations in its data centers. It was also very likely looking forward to the next phase of cloud computing. Reports have pegged the deal at between $50 and $60 million.

What E8 gives AWS for relatively cheap money is highly advanced storage capabilities, says Steve McDowell, senior storage analyst at Moor Research and Strategy. “E8 built a system that delivers extremely high-performance/low-latency flash (and Optane) in a shared-storage environment,” McDowell told TechCrunch.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/why-aws-gains-big-storage-efficiencies-with-e8-acquisition/

Microsoft Azure now lets you have a server all to yourself

Microsoft today announced the preview launch of Azure Dedicated Host, a new cloud service that will allow you to run your virtual machines on single-tenant physical services. That means you’re not sharing any resources on that server with anybody else and you’ll get full control over everything that’s running on that machine.

Previously, Azure already offered isolated Virtual Machine sizes for two very large virtual machine types. Those are still available, but their use cases are comparably limited to these new hosts, which offer far more flexibility.

With this move, Microsoft is following in the footsteps of AWS, which also offers Dedicated Hosts with very similar capabilities. Google Cloud, too, offers what it calls ‘sole-tenant nodes.’

Azure Dedicated Host will support Windows, Linux and SQL Server virtual machines and pricing is per host, independent of the number of virtual machines you end up running on them. You can currently opt for machines with up to 144 physical cores and prices start at $4.039 per hour.

To do this, Microsoft is offering two different processors to power these machines. Type 1 is based on the 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2673 v4 with up to 3.5 gigahertz of clock speed, while Type 2 features the Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 with single-core clock speeds of up to 3.7 gigahertz. The available memory ranges from 32GiB to 448GiB. You can find more details here.

As Microsoft notes, these new dedicated hosts can help companies reach their compliance requirements for physical security, data integrity and monitoring. The dedicated hosts still share the same underlying infrastructure as any other host in the Azure data centers, but users have full control over any maintenance window that could impact their servers.

These dedicated hosts can also be grouped into larger host groups in a given Azure region, allowing you to build clusters of your own physical servers inside the Azure data center. Since you’re actually renting a physical machine, any hardware issue on that machine will impact the virtual machines you are running on them, so chances are you’ll want to have multiple dedicated hosts for your failover strategy anyway.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/microsoft-azure-now-lets-you-have-a-server-all-to-yourself/

Amazon says U.S. government demands for customer data went up

Amazon said the U.S. government asked more data from the company during the first-half of 2019 than on the previous six-month period.

The latest figures landed in the company’s transparency report, published quietly on its website late Wednesday, said the number of subpoenas it received went up by 14% and search warrants went up by close to 35%.

That includes data collected from its Amazon Echo voice assistant service, its Kindle and Fire tablets, and its home security devices.

Amazon turned over some or all data in about four out of five cases, the figures show.

But the number of other legal demands Amazon received were down slightly.

The company’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services — which makes up the bulk of Amazon’s annual operating income — also reported separately a 77% increase in the number of subpoenas it received for cloud-stored customer data, but a decline in received search warrants.

Per reporting rules set out by the Justice Department, Amazon said it received between 0 and 249 national security requests, for both consumer and cloud services.

Amazon was one of the last major tech companies to issue a transparency report, despite mounting pressure from privacy advocates. The company eventually buckled, releasing its first set of figures several days after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked highly classified documents which revealed mass surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and its global intelligence counterparts.

The company said at the time and continued to maintain until recently that it “never participated” in the NSA’s so-called PRISM program, which allowed the government to obtain data from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and several other tech companies.

But TechCrunch noticed that Amazon removed that wording from its transparency report pages several weeks ago.

When reached, an Amazon spokesperson said that the change was “simply because it was a somewhat dated reference.”

Smart home tech makers don’t want to say if the feds come for your data

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/amazon-prism-transparency-data/

TikTok-parent is getting into mobile search

China’s ByteDance, which owns popular video sharing app TikTok, is already working to enter the smartphone business and the music streaming space. It appears the world’s most valued startup also has ambitions about developing its own search engine. Kind of.

A company spokesperson told TechCrunch on Thursday that it has introduced a search function in ByteDance’s Toutiao news app.

“The function is in line with Toutiao’s mission of ‘information creates value.’ Users can try the function in the app and provide feedback and suggestions on the new function,” the spokesperson said.

The search function gleans information from both content on Toutiao as well as the entire world wide web, TechCrunch understands.

From the looks of it, ByteDance’s current search functionality is more alike WeChat’s in-app search function than local giant Baidu’s or Google’s offering.

On WeChat, when a person looks up a keyword, they see news articles about that topic, followed by mentions of it from their friends. This is followed by random articles about the subject. When a user clicks on any of these article or news links, WeChat serves them the page through its in-app browser, giving them no option to leave the walled-garden.

The idea is to change the way people think about — and use — a search engine altogether. And in China, where apps such as WeChat and TikTok have gained gigantic reach on mobile, it seems logical to add all new functionalities within those apps.

ByteDance’s interest in a search engine became public on Wednesday after it published a recruitment post on its WeChat account. The startup said its “search engine” is aimed at “hundreds of millions of mobile users in China.”

“We will build a universal search engine with a better user experience from 0 to 1. Only you don’t want to search, there is no [info] you can’t find, because we can search the whole network,” the company said in the post.

According to the description in the listing, ByteDance has already hired people from other search engines such as Google, Baidu, Bing, and 360.

An analysis of LinkedIn listings by TechCrunch found more than 100 people from Google, Microsoft, and Baidu, many of whom worked around search divisions at the previous companies, have joined ByteDance in recent quarters.

ByteDance following Tencent’s WeChat model to create its alternate search business may add more worries to Baidu, which currently holds more than 75% of the search engine market in China, according to third-party web service StatCounter Global Stat. Microsoft’s Bing is also operational in the country though its market share remains in the low-single digits. Google currently does not offer its search feature in China — though it has attempted to change that in recent months to no luck.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/01/bytedance-toutiao-search/

Living in surplus

In our culture, it’s easy to choose to live in deficit.

To spend just a bit more than you make, so that you’re in debt.

To need to drive just a bit faster than the prevailing traffic, so you can push every interaction.

To measure yourself against someone (there’s always someone) who has more (there’s always more) than you do.

If this habit of becoming ‘behind’ is the fuel you need to do your best work, it’s difficult for an outsider to argue against.

But consider that it’s also possible to choose to live in surplus.

To spend a bit less than you make, so you’re never worried about paying the rent.

To drive with the flow of (metaphorical) traffic, because not only is it safer, it frees you up to dream.

And to measure yourself against no one but yourself. Raise your standards as often as you can, but not because someone else you chose out of the lineup of success is somehow ahead of you.

When you live in surplus, you can choose to produce because of generosity and wonder, not because you’re drowning.

 

PS Tomorrow’s the early decision deadline for the altMBA October session. This is our last session of the year, and the last at this tuition. Worth a leap.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/605120524/0/sethsblog~Living-in-surplus/