Archive for RB

| March 26, 2019
Comments Off on Avaya LBO Buzz

Avaya LBO Buzz

Avaya is back in the news. Followers of the Bach Seat will recall that Avaya declared bankruptcy in 2017. Now the buzz is that Santa Clara, California-based telecommunications equipment and software firm is considering a leveraged buyout offer.

Avaya logoReports are circulating that Avaya’s (AVYA) board of directors is evaluating an offer from an unnamed private equity firm. Reportedly the offer values the Lucent spinoff at more than $20 per share, people in the know told Reuters. The private equity firm values Avaya at more than $5 billion, including $3.2 billion in debt.

Avaya is one of the world’s largest providers of telephony systems. It was spun off from Lucent Technologies Inc in 2000, which used to be part of AT&T (T). The LBO comes 15 months after Avaya emerged from bankruptcy protection, with a $8.3 billion debt legacy from a previous leveraged buyout by private equity firms TPG Capital and Silver Lake in 2007.

unified communications as a serviceAvaya has tried to shift its revenue model to focus on cloud-based communications solutions with recurring software and subscriptions fees and not its traditional hardware business. Its legacy business is becoming more commoditized and dated. Much of Avaya’s new focus involves cloud services like unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). A new Device as a Service (DaaS) offering has also surfaced.

Avaya’s contact center business has also attracted acquisition interest in the past from private equity firms, including Clayton Dubilier & Rice LLC, Hellman & Friedman LLC, and Permira Advisers LLP. Hellman & Friedman and Permira own Genesys an Avaya competitor.

As of September 2018, Avaya had about 8,100 employees worldwide, including 2,800 in the U.S.

Private equity firms have recently focused on communications businesses. Among those companies are Aspect Software, Mitel,  and PGi, each privately held by such firms. Note, too, that Polycom had been a Siris Capital property until its recent acquisition by Plantronics.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 17, 2019
Comments Off on Bespoke Coffee Maker

Bespoke Coffee Maker

Bespoke Coffee MakerIf your idea of a good coffee is frozen coffee blended with a sugary concoction picked up at the drive-thru window, move on. If you take your coffee really really seriously, this is the coffee maker for you. The Royal Coffee Maker is a balance siphon coffee brewer. Siphon coffee brewers were first seen in the 1850s. The King of Hungary wowed his guests with one during a royal banquet, transforms coffee-making into a high ceremony.

Royal Coffee MakerThe handcrafted Royal Coffee Maker could be the most extravagant coffee maker in the world. French sculptor Jean-Luc Rieutort designed this precision machine which includes 24-karat gold (or silver) and crystal and semi-precious stone. Only eight of the bespoke coffee makers are produced by hand each month. Each coffee maker takes more than 50 hours of painstaking workmanship to complete. The Royal Coffee Maker costs $24,000.

The Royal Coffee Maker is a fully automated system. It is designed to allow heat, steam, and gravity to brew the coffee at the perfect temperature. Coffee grounds are placed in the Baccarat crystal carafe, along with an optional touch of Grand Marnier or other liqueurs. Hot water is poured into the 24-karat boiling pot and the Baccarat burner vase lit. Perfectly heated water travels to the grounds before suction pulls the finished brew back into the pot. The coffee maker also comes with a matching custom-made coffee scoop. And you can have your family crested engraved on it.

 

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How 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump spends his billions 2/19 Slideshow One Page Trump's penthouse has a gold- and diamond-covered doorIntrigued? Prepare to skip your next 4,800 Starbucks to afford the most self-indulgent coffee maker on the planet. Of course, if you are going to be Trumpian about it, you might as well brew up some Kopi Luwak coffee beans in your 24-karat gold balancing siphon coffee brewer.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 9, 2019
Comments Off on Holy Sell Out Batman

Holy Sell Out Batman

Batman is being used to pump 5GThe Caped Crusader has sold out. While the full benefits of next-generation wireless – 5G won’t be realized until at least mid-2020, Batman is being used to pimp 5G.  AT&T used The guardian of Gotham to create demand for mixed-reality at last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain. The mixed-reality experience featured DC Comics Batman and the Scarecrow battling it out on the MWC show floor.

Fierce Videoaugmented reality headset reports that AT&T (T), Ericsson (ERIC), Intel (INTC), and Warner Bros., with DC, are using 5G technology and edge computing to build a location-based mixed-reality experience. For the walk-in experience at MWC, visitors put on an augmented reality headset. There they witnessed a 2 to 3-minute experience.

Ade Kushimo, director of business development, IoT, and emerging business at Ericsson told Fierce Video, “The really cool part of the experience is going to be the fact that you have this virtual, digital content being embedded into your physical space. That gives you that mixed reality experience.”

Sensorama (patented 1962) which was an arcade-style theatre cabinet that would stimulate all the senses, not just sight and sound.

Mixed reality experience with Batman

Doug Matheson, vice president of strategic business development at Ericsson, said the proof-of-concept experience demonstrated that 5G technology (both radio and core) could be combined with intellectual property to create a mixed reality experience that’s both mobile and untethered.

In order to create a good mixed-reality experience, image lag has to be kept to a minimum. Image lag will make you dizzy and ruin the experience. That means that compute power has to be pushed out to the edge of the network to reside closer to the end-user. The compute power needed to process a mixed reality experience can’t live in a centralized data center somewhere.

Cloud computingThe cloud and edge network architecture allows for heavy computing to be done away from the device. So, the goal is to shift processing to the cloud and transport it there using a 5G network. The Batman demo ran on a fully integrated 5G network using Ericsson radio base stations 5G network technology will help supply the lower latency and higher speeds and enabled by Intel Xeon processors and the Intel 5G mobile trial platform.

5G – What is it

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Mobile Marketer says that 5G will have a huge impact on AT&T’s mobile network. Its data traffic has grown more than 470,000% since 2007, with video making up half of the mobile data. Video may expand its share of data traffic to more than 75% by 2022, according to the company’s estimates.

Batman now works for AT&T following its acquisition of Time Warner who owned Warner Brothers, which owned DC Comics, the home of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Oswald Cobblepot, and the Flash.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 1, 2019
Comments Off on VMWare Crossing the Streams

VMWare Crossing the Streams

The Ghostbusters warned us. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) warned us not to cross the streams. You should not cross the streams because as Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) explained it would cause total protonic reversal. Despite the warning, VMware is crossing the streams.VMWare Crossing the Streams

Rumors have it that Dell/EMC/VMware and Microsoft (MSFT) are crossing their streams with a VMware Cloud NSX on Microsoft Azure partnership could be coming soon.

VMware NSXVMware’s (VMW) multi-cloud approach combines the core VMware technology stack with services delivered through partnerships with other service providers including Amazon (AMZN) Amazon Web Services (AWS) Google Cloud and IBM Cloud. As well as an emerging development environment centered on the open source Kubernetes container orchestrator. Chennele2e hypothesizes,

The two companies are jointly developing software that will let their customers more easily run computing jobs, which rely on VMware software, inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service … could be announced … in the coming weeks … move computing chores from their own private data centers, where VMware’s software is a critical ingredient, to Microsoft’s “public” cloud service.

In the past, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger described a range of cross-platform work — including:

  • Azure: NSX and VDI with more VMware management products for Azure are on the way.
  • Google Cloud Platform: VMware has partnered with Google and Kubernetes. Also, Android- and  Chromebook-related offerings.

As the slide below shows, the deal with Microsoft links VMware to most of the enterprise VM’s in the cloud. What impact will the VMware-Microsoft deal impact the VMware-AWS relationship? Will AWS continue to enjoy “most favored nation” status in VMware’s public cloud partner ecosystem?

The number of virtual machines in the cloud - Enterprise based on Right Scale estimates

The Redmond Channel Partner points out that former VMware executive Ray Blanchard, who was in charge of the VMware partnership with AWS joined Microsoft a year ago.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| February 17, 2019
Comments Off on Volunteers Take Down 124K Malware Sites

Volunteers Take Down 124K Malware Sites

Volunteers Take Down 124K Malware Sites CircleID reports that abuse.ch, a non-profit cybersecurity organization based in Switzerland kicked off a volunteer-based information sharing project called URLhaus in March 2018. URLhaus collects and shares URLs identified to be distributing malware. Since its start up, URLhaus has proven to be quite effective in taking down over 124,000 malware distribution sites.

Abussubmitted in average 300 malware sitese.ch’s URLhaus project allows anyone to sign up with a Twitter account to report malicious URLs. The system will download and analyze the site’s payload and try to identify it before submitting it to Anti-Virus vendors and blacklist providers such as Google Safe Browsing, Spamhaus DBL, and SURBL, according to the blog post.

CircleID reports that 265 security researchers located all over the world have identified and submitted on average 300 malware sites to URLhaus each day. The article said URLhaus succeeded beyond the infosec community; the project also managed to get the attention of many hosting providers which is not an easy task, especially for large hosting providers that have tens of thousands of customers and hence a significant amount hijacked websites in their network that are getting abused by cybercriminals to distribute malware.

The chart below produced by abuse.ch shows the number of active malware distribution sites tracked since the launch of URLhaus.

malware distribution sites tracked since the launch of URLhaus.

abuse.ch reports that the US or China hosts 2/3 of the top malware hosting networks. The overall average malicious site take-down time is 8 days, 10 hours, 24 minutes. The three top Chinese malware hosting networks have an average abuse desk reaction time of more than a month!

That’s more than enough time to infect thousands of devices every day.

 

Top malware hosting networks

The top malware hosting networks, hosting active malware content identified by abuse.ch as of January 2019.
RankASNCountryAverage Reaction TimeMalware URLs
1AS14061 DIGITALOCEAN-ASN - DigitalOcean, LLCUS6 days, 12 hours, 56 minutes307
2AS4134 CHINANET-BACKBONE No.31,Jin-rong StreetCN1 month, 9 days, 19 hours, 22 minutes256
3AS4837 CHINA169-BACKBONE CHINA UNICOM China169CN1 month, 23 days, 8 hours, 41 minutes163
4AS48815 CRITICALCASEIT21 hours, 58 minutes151
5AS46606 UNIFIEDLAYER-AS-1 - Unified LayerUS2 days, 11 hours, 54 minutes127
6AS53667 PONYNET - FranTech SolutionsUS13 days, 3 hours, 37 minutes105
7AS16276 OVHFR5 days, 22 hours, 6 minutes104
8AS60144 THREE-W-INFRA-AS -- TRANSIT --NL9 days, 10 hours, 37 minutes83
9AS13335 CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc.US13 days, 7 hours, 5 minutes67
10AS37963 CNNIC-ALIBABA-CN-NET-AP Hangzhou AlibabaCN1 month, 2 days, 0 hours, 1 minutes66
11AS8342 RTCOMM-ASRU10 days, 8 hours, 9 minutes63
12AS36352 AS-COLOCROSSING - ColoCrossingUS16 days, 9 hours, 57 minutes53
13AS3462 HINET Data Communication Business GroupTW17 days, 6 hours, 19 minutes51
14AS23650 CHINANET-JS-AS-AP CHINANET jiangsu provinceCN3 days, 11 hours, 50 minutes51
15AS3462 HINET Data Communication BusinessTW17 days, 6 hours, 19 minutes51

 

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abuse.ch offers the URLhaus black list for free to help protect your networks and users from malware. You can get more details from abuse.ch here.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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