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Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Tesla Teams with Hot Wheels for RC Toy Cybertruck
Tesla’s electric pickup – Cybertruck will cost you nearly $40,000 when it goes on sale. Thankfully, Hot Wheels has teamed with Tesla to make a radio-controlled Cybertruck for the rest of us. The Mattel (MAT) versions include a deluxe and a smaller HotWheels version.
The deluxe Cybertruck version is a limited-edition 1:10 scale model. This model features, functioning headlights and taillights, a tonneau cover, and a telescopic tailgate that fold out as a loading ramp. It has a pistol-style remote to control the all-wheel drive with “Chill” or “Sport” driving modes that can get up to 250 mph scale speed.
Deluxe Cybertruck
The 1:10 model even comes with a reusable “cracked window vinyl sticker” that mocks the fail at the launch event. It also includes a plastic body that can be removed to see the model’s interior, the battery, and the drivetrain. The large truck has a 9.9-v, 3300-mAh rechargeable battery, and the run-to-charge time is 1:1. The deluxe Mattel version is 1/100th of the cost of the full-sized Telsa version at $400.
The traditional scale HotWheels version of the Tesla Cybertruck fits on the classic orange Hot track. The 1/64th scale RC car has a gaming-style remote control, two-wheel drive but has Chill or Sport driving modes. Hot Wheels says the 1:64 car can get up to 500 mph scale speed. This version will cost you $20.
How to order a Cybertruck
Hot Wheels already offers the Tesla Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, and Roadster as traditional Hot Wheels, so it no surprise that they added the CyberTruck to the stable. Just like real Tesla’s, the time between order and actually taking delivery of the purchased product is extremely long. Mattel says not to expect deliveries until mid-December 2020. The 1/10 version can be pre-ordered here and the 1/64 version can be per-ordered 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.
The Future for Avaya is Cloudy
Back in 2017 former telephony giant Avaya (AVYA) declared bankruptcy. Since then there has been a number of attempts to break up the firm. Extreme bought the Avaya network division in 2017. In 2019 there were rumors that Mitel was going to attempt a leveraged buyout of Avaya.
Eventually, Avaya made a deal with Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) vendor RingCentral (RNG) to save its bacon. With the deal, RingCentral will pay Avaya $500M and will be Avaya’s exclusive provider of UCaaS solutions. The two firms announced the “strategic partnership” in October 2019.
It’s February 2020 and the Avaya – RingCentral collaboration will start to show some results – next quarter. The beleaguered vendor announced at its Avaya Engage love-fest that beginning March 31, that in the U.S. the unimaginatively named Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral (ACO) will be identical in features to the product RingCentral sells today. The rest of the world will have to wait – because RingCentral UCaaS is only available in seven countries.
It is reported that a few additional Avaya features will creep into the offering through 2020. The first two are targeted for release this summer are bridged appearance, and call park and page. Bridged appearance lets two desk phones maintain separate and shared lines, a feature typically used between assistants and their bosses. With call park and page, when a person places a call on hold, the system will automatically send a page to another department or user to pick up the call. The feature is particularly useful to retailers.
Towards the end of 2020 or later, the vendor expects to deliver features that include line appearance, call appearance, hotdesking, and support for the venerable Avaya Audix voicemail service.
Initially, Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral will only work with three models of Avaya’s J series desk phones: 139, 169, and 179. Avaya will work with RingCentral to certify B series conference room phones, L series headsets and the CU360 video conferencing system. However, most IP Office customers are likely using older devices, given that Avaya launched the J series only one year ago.
Avaya is also developing software to automate the process of migrating settings and users from its legacy gear to the cloud, although that tool won’t be available until later in 2020.
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No Jitter points out that faced with the threat of its large installed base that goes back to legacy Nortel platforms, dumping Avaya – Avaya needed to do something.
To me this looks more like a win for RingCentral. For a relatively small investment ($500M on a market capitalization of $10.5B), RingCentral becomes the preferred UCaaS provider for the large Avaya installed base (100M+ seats) likely planning on a move to the cloud. Meanwhile, Avaya picks up a fully developed UCaaS to sell – if it can execute. Which has been its problem all along.
Can Avaya hold on long enough to develop the promised automation tools move complicated things like CMS to a cloud interface? – we will see.
Related article
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.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2020, Audix, Avaya, Cloud computing, Mergers and Acquisition, Nortel, Ring Central, Telephony, UCaaS
RSA Sold
The rumor mill was again right. During the holidays I wrote about Dell Technologies selling its RSA cybersecurity business. The encryption pioneer is being purchased by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group Partners (STG). The STG consortium includes the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board and AlpInvest Partners.
STG is based in Palo Alto, CA, and was founded in 2002. According to its website, the VC firm focuses on data, software, and analytics. STG entered the cybersecurity arena in April 2019 when they bought RedSeal, a cyber risk modeling firm in a $70M deal.
RSA Sold for $2B
The deal is expected to close in the next six to nine months. Financial terms were not disclosed, but multiple sources peg the all-cash deal at $2.08 billion.
In a prepared statement about the deal, William Chisholm, managing partner at Symphony Technology Group, said:
We are excited and fully committed to maximizing the power of RSA’s talent, expertise, and tremendous growth potential and continuing RSA’s strategy to serve customers with a holistic approach to managing their digital risk.
Rohit Ghai, president of RSA wrote:
Symphony Technology Group … independent configuration, we expect to be in an even better position to accelerate innovation, ensure customer success with our portfolio…
Dell Technology’s chief operating officer and vice chairman Jeff Clarke wrote in the post announcing the deal:
The strategies of RSA and Dell Technologies have evolved … different go-to-market models. The sale of RSA gives us greater flexibility to focus on integrated innovation across Dell Technologies.
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CRN notes that the purchase price for the STG deal is nearly identical to the $2.1B EMC paid to buy RSA back in 2006. RSA then moved to Dell Technologies in 2016 when Dell purchased EMC for $60B. But why did Dell sell RSA?
- Dell seems to be sinking a lot of money into Secureworks.
Dell’s VMware just bought CarbonBlack, why not RSA?- RSA was founded “way back in 1982.” And being a “legacy security firm” RAS may be seen at VMware as being part of VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger’s “Security is broken” talking point. Can companies face age discrimination too?
- Maybe Dell just needs the cash.
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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.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2020, Dell, Mergers and Acquisition, RSA, Security, Symphony Technology Group
Blackberry is Dead – Long Live Blackberry
Last week BlackBerry (BB) tweeted that they were letting their agreement with the Chinese electronics group TCL Communication lapse at the end of August 2020. This most likely is the end of the BlackBerry smartphone. TCL had been manufacturing BlackBerry smartphones since the Canadian company stopped making its name-sake phones in 2016 amid an attempt to re-shape itself into a cyber-security company.
BlackBerry’s preceded the iPhone and Android in important ways. How did the Blackberry phone go from world domination to last week’s announcement?
Blackberry history
March 1984: Research in Motion (RIM) was founded in Canada.
October 1997: RIM went public with an IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange which raised $115 million.
July 1998: The RIM 850 the initial BlackBerry device offered something all its competitors couldn’t touch at the time – access to emails on the go (no voice).
1999: RIM joined NASDAQ as RIMM.
November 2001: Patent holding company NTP sued RIM for patent infringement RIM lost and was forced to settle for $612.5M in 2006.
March 2002: BlackBerry 5810 released, with both voice and data support. It ran on a 2G network and came with a color screen. It became the device of choice in corporate America due to its enterprise-level security.
2005: RIM launched a proprietary mobile instant-messaging application BlackBerry Messenger. BBM came at a time when other mobile messaging options — like SMS messages — were subpar.
March 2007: The company “restated” $250M earnings relating to a “backdating” stock options scandal. RIM executives changed the date of stock sales to a low share price date to make money on their stock options. The scandal cost RIM’s co-CEOs Balsillie and Lazaridis and others their jobs at RIM and a total of C$77M in fines.
January 2007: Apple launched its first iPhone, opening the market to full touch screen phones.
June 2007: BlackBerry had some 8 million customers.
October 2008: First Android-powered smartphone is released.
November 2008: BlackBerry launched the ill-fated Storm, its first full touch phone in reaction to iPhone.
September 2009: BlackBerry hits 20.7% worldwide smartphone market share in Q3. iPhone is at 17.1% and Android at 3.5%.
April 2010: Apple released the original iPad.
April 2011: RIM released the PlayBook tablet as a knee-jerk reaction to the success of the Apple iPad. Contributing to the PlayBook’s poor sales was the dumb decision to not offer email services without a BlackBerry smartphone.
July 2011: 10% of RIM workforce (2,000 workers) laid off.
October 2011: RIM had a global failure of its infrastructure – users are left without service for four days (Oct 10-13).
June 2012: RIM announced 5,000 layoffs.
January 2013: The company changed its name from Research in Motion to Blackberry and goes from RIMM to BBRY on the NASDAQ.
September 2013: BlackBerry peaked with 79 million global users and 4,500 employees are laid-off (40% of staff).
November 2013: John Chen becomes CEO and starts to pivot BBRY from a phone maker to a security firm.
September 2015: BlackBerry launched the Priv, the first Android-powered BlackBerry smartphone. BlackBerry acquired mobile security provider Good Technology for $425M and integrated it into the BlackBerry Enterprise Mobility Suite, for its enterprise customers.
September 2016: Blackberry becomes Blackberry Limited and stops making smartphones and outsource all hardware development and manufacturing.
May 2017: The number of BlackBerry users plummets from 80 million to 11 million.
October 2017: BlackBerry Ltd moved from NASDAQ as BBRY to BB on the NYSE.
November 2018: BlackBerry Limited purchased security firm Cylance for $1.4B.
May 2019: BBM for consumers is shut down.
The Blackberry Limited tweet marks the end of a line of devices that revolutionized mobile productivity for the enterprise. For the uninitiated (those under 30) in its heyday, Blackberry set the bar for mobile innovation. BlackBerry smartphones or “crackberries” as many referred to them helped set the stage for many of the mobile features we rely on today.
The company made its own hardware which included a QWERTY keyboard. Qwerty keyboards that made it easier to fire off emails and instant messages. BlackBerry smartphones were the best way to stay connected without a laptop.
BlackBerry Mobile Services provided business users with quick encrypted end-to-end email over a low bandwidth connection. BMS also provided users access to not only their contacts, calendar, and email, but connected enterprise apps and data.
Back in the day when I was sharing technical services we even stood up a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for our customers to link their BBeries to Exchange. BES was sold as a highly secure BES platform that ensured the content was always encrypted and uncrackable.
Holger Mueller, the principal analyst at Constellation Research, pointed out to TargetTech the irony of BlackBerry’s fall.
That’s the irony — users and CIOs got rid of [their] BlackBerrys despite email volume being up … Business users went from being productive on the go to [becoming] lurkers and [doing] email at night.
Tuong Nguyen, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, told TargetTech the BlackBerry smartphone relevance disappeared well before this week’s announcement.
By the time the company stopped making its own phones, its global smartphone market share was well under 1% .. In fact, they had started dipping under the 1% threshold [around] 2013-2014.
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I think the market has space for a productivity-oriented company that respects its users. But to unseat Apple, that firm would have to excel at something else, like folding screens, projection, AR/VR.
The original BlackBerry company — BlackBerry Limited — now focuses on security software. This is ironic since the Snowden papers revealed that the NSA has access to user data on BlackBerry devices.
In the end BlackBerry, just like Nokia, Palm and Microsoft underestimated the challenge from Apple Perhaps BlackBerry needs to be done with phones.
Related article
- BlackBerry’s transition to a cyber security company, its 2020 goals and the importance of trust (Information Age)
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.
VMware Had a Bad Week
VMware (VMW) had a bad week last week. First, a jury in the U.S. federal district court for the District of Delaware ruled that the virtualization giant infringed on two patents owned by Densify. Densify is a Toronto-based startup that makes cloud and container resource management software. The ruling will cost VMware about $237 million dollars. Of course, VMware will appeal.
In an emailed statement, to sdxcentral VMware wrote, “VMware intend[s] to vigorously pursue all legal remedies that are available to us to prove that we are not liable here.”
Next, it was announced that over 200 VMware employees will lose their jobs as part of a “workforce rebalancing.” TargetTech noted that IBM has historically used the same term to describe its periodic layoffs.
In addition to workers losing their jobs, the VMware executive suite has undergone purging too. Reports are that
Chief Customer Officer Scott Bajtos, an 11-year VMware veteran who oversaw VMware’s global services team which includes customer success, technical support, professional services support, and customer advocacy.- Mark Ritacco, VP of operations and customer intelligence, after almost 11 years,
- Kate Woodcock, VP of customer advocacy, after almost eight years.
- Scott Bajtos – global chief customer officer, is leaving after 11 years.
- Alexa Erjavic, senior director of global services strategy.
VMware acquisitions
Could it be buyer’s regret? Not even cutting a handful of executive salaries can cover the billions VMware has spent on acquisitions over the past 2 years.
In 2018 VMware bought:
E8 Security for machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for cybersecurity intelligence and analytics.- CloudCoreo to manage cloud configurations and identify risks when deploying public clouds to prevent breaches and compliance violations.
- EMC Service Assurance Suite for monitoring telco network health, performance, and root cause analysis.
- CloudHeath for multi-cloud management platform across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for $500 million.
- Heptio VMware plans to use Heptio assets to enhance Kubernetes life-cycle management $550 million.
In 2019 VMware bought:
AetherPal for remote IT support software to remotely view, control, troubleshoot, and fix devices and applications.- BitFusion to support Artificial Intelligence and machine learning-based workloads on graphics processor units (GPUs) (no acquisition price announced).
- Uhana for 5G mobile network optimization.
- Intrinsic for secure serverless functions on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Bitnami brings simplified app development with a curated marketplace for VMware customers.
- Veriflow for network monitoring software for multi-cloud management.
- Avi Networks for multi-cloud application delivery to enhance performance, resource utilization, automation, and scalability.
- Pivotal for multi-cloud application software strategy across AWS, Azure & GCP for $2.7 billion. and;
- Carbon Black to provide an enterprise-grade security platform to protect workloads, applications and networks from device to cloud for $2.1 billion.
Already in 2020 VMware bought:
- Nyansa to provide network traffic analytics that covers the SD-WAN and the wired and wireless LAN.
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While the hyper-scale cloud vendors AWS, Azure, GCP, and the Chinese giants battling it out for cloud supremacy. Most enterprises have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. VMware is in the incumbent position as it competes with IBM, maybe Cisco, and HPE to be the glue that binds private and public clouds as well as owned data centers into an enterprise multi-cloud strategy. This is a long-term play.
In the near term – all of the acquisitions since 2018, VMware does not have a lot to show for it financially. VWM has been basically flat. VMW spiked to $150.00 in January 2018, hit a peak of $203.64 in, 2019 and has settled back to $157.50 in February 2020.
Related article
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.