Good morning, Data Sheet readers. I’m writing from Phoenix, where I’m holed up at a conference about corporate sustainability and environmental strategy. Hence, you can count on my morning timing to be somewhat sporadic this week.
Where to start after the long weekend? IBM will invest $1 billion in its storage software over the next five years. Plus, sophisticated hackers from China, Europe and Russia may have stolen $300 million in one of the biggest bank heists ever.
Forward this newsletter to technophiles, and tell them to sign up! Did you miss one? Here’s an archive of past editions.
TRENDING
Driverless cars, maybe. Autonomous drones? Not so much. I’ll bet Amazon isn’t happy with the FAA’s proposed guidelines for commercial drone use. The draft published over the weekend requires “pilots” to maintain a visual connection—no night-time applications allowed. That sure puts a crimp in Amazon’s proposed Prime package delivery service.
Biggest bank heist ever? Talk about remote collaboration. Over the past 18 months, a group of hackers working across China, Russia and Europe may have stolen $300 million from more than 100 banks worldwide without threatening a single teller. Their accomplice: software used to spy on employees, record common tasks, and then mimic those activities. “That way, everything would look like a normal, everyday transaction,” one investigator, from cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, told The New York Times. The same report suggests similar "implant" techniques are used by the NSA in China, Iran, Russia and Pakistan.
Few surprises at last week’s cybersecurity summit. Everyone expected President Obama to “order” more public-private cooperation in the fight to protect data more effectively. He did. One technicality: not enough people to pull this off. Fortinet CEO Ken Xie told eWeek after the White House summit last Friday: “The biggest obstacle is that our industry is extremely shorthanded: It's estimated we can only fulfill one in every 20 technology positions needed in the cyber-security space. Who will mitigate the threat? Where and who are the cyber-SWAT teams? Who will train the responders? Answers to these questions remain unanswered.”
Credit-card crackdown. Visa, Mastercard are spending millions to bolster security, through biometrics and embedded chips. The motivation? Pretty obvious.
Who needs Google Glass? Sony started shipping its own version of smart eyeglasses so people can start dreaming up applications. Not only is the design more stylish, but it costs about half the price.
The scary side of planned technology obsolescence. Are we innovating too fast when it comes to data storage? Internet pioneer Vint Cerf worries that future generations might not be able to see, read or hear our digital memories if we don't create some universal method of preserving them.
SCUTTLEBUTT
Does Apple have Tesla envy? The highly secretive company works on plenty of prototypes that never see the light of day. Apparently, one of those concepts is an electric vehicle, according to a Wall Street Journal report that surfaced over the weekend. It’s a minivan no less.
Sexy, maybe not, but there were roughly 530,000 sold in 2013 (the last year for which I could find complete data). Plus, maybe the uniqueness factor will counteract Tesla’s ability to poach key Apple employees. And, heck, the iGeneration will eventually have iOffspring. So think of this as a long-term investment.
By the way, Apple design guru Jonathan (Jony) Ive doesn’t think much of modern cars that sacrifice style in the name of fuel economy. After all, everyone else on the road has to look at them, the driver just sees the road ahead. “Elegance in objects is everybody’s right, and it shouldn’t cost more than ugliness,” he told the New Yorker in an extensive profile.
Google cofounders plan $4.4 billion stock sale. Over the next two years, Larry Page and Sergey Brin each intend to sell approximately 2 million shares (each) of Class B common stock (converted into Class A common stock) and non-voting Class C capital stock. Right now, the two own approximately 13.1% of Google’s outstanding Class A and Class B shares, along with 54.6% of all shareholder voting power. After the sales outlined in an updated SEC filing, they will own 11.9%; their votes will count approximately 52%. The plan is basically an extension of their existing trading plans, so there's no apparent intrigue here over than evolving personal investment strategies.
Alibaba scrutiny. The SEC is investigating the e-commerce giant’s interactions with a Chinese regulator. It’s cooperating, and disclosing, but not really commenting.
A parting of the ways. Because of growing competitive concerns (my interpretation of the motivation), Intel Foundation is selling its 4.9% stake in graphics chipmaker Imagination Technologies.
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
Optimize this. Indian tech outsourcing firm Infosys is paying an estimated $200 million for Panaya, which specializes in making sure changes made to SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce software work properly. The acquired company just raised $20 million in early January; total funding before the acquisition was $59 million, according to Crunchbase.
Take down this name. Even though it wasn't actively looking for funding, a profitable Dutch file-sharing startup called WeTransfer just snagged $25 million from Highland Capital Partners. Its rivals include Box, Dropbox and the like.
UP-AND-COMERS
Bookings double for Actifio. Anyone who has saved over a document, presentation or another file by accident can appreciate the role of backup copies. They’re a necessary evil: they’re also one big reason corporate storage and data archiving budgets quickly spiral out of control.
Boston-based Actifio’s alternative to disaster recovery services or bloated backup storage arrays (called “copy data management”) virtualizes those files, so they’re easier to track and don’t take up as much space. Its argument has inspired more than $208 million in venture backing at a valuation of $1.1 billion, which makes the software company one of the closely watched enterprise storage unicorns.
That promise has won over companies like Cardinal Health, CenturyLink, and Sun Gard. When I caught up last week with founder Ash Ashutosh, he told me more than half of Actifio’s customers (65%) are considering his software as part of strategic cloud computing investments.
Indeed, bookings for the company doubled to $90 million in 2014 (a figure Ashutosh will share with attendees of its summit on cloud migration strategy this week). As of Jan. 31, Actifio was managing more than 12 exabytes of customer data. (The common way of explaining this volume, as of 2009, used to be that it would take 5 exabytes to store every word every spoken.) Actifio’s latest service launched last week can restore both data and entire applications.
What’s holding businesses back from redesigning their backup and business continuity strategies? “They need to unlearn the way they’ve been doing things, which made a whole lot of sense for vendors, but not for their customers,” Ashutosh said. “Still, that’s a big behavioral change.”
FOR YOUR INNER TECHNOPHILE
IBM wields R&D muscle, dedicates $1 billion to storage software. I don’t have to tell you big businesses are sick of paying for new storage hardware, especially when they’re not sure if the capacity they already own is used to best advantage. That’s why IBM just got even more serious than it already was about software-defined storage: it just disclosed a plan to invest another $1 billion-plus in related research and development over the next five years.
The next-generation technology, branded under the name IBM Spectrum Storage, automates where information is saved using business-defined parameters such as how quickly documents must be retrieved or where files can be archived most economically. Notably, it will work across either on-premises storage hardware or multiple cloud services (you knew there had to be a cloud hook, didn’t you?)
One company already benefiting from IBM’s evolving software is Netflix: it managed to consolidate 16 existing storage systems into three from IBM, speeding database transactions and freeing up data center space.
IBM’s competition in software-defined storage ranges from the usual suspects such as EMC (which got into the game with its acquisition of ScaleIO in July 2013) and startups such as Nutanix, Maxta and Nexenta.
MY FORTUNE.COM BOOKMARKS
Microsoft is buying startups people love. Yahoo? Not so much. by Erin Griffith
Can you get a tech job coming from a totally different field? by Anne Fisher
Now that Apple has ‘filled the pantry’ with iPhones, what next? by Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Why Africa may be on the verger of an Internet boom by Jake Bright
Could these 5 big data projects stop climate change? by Shalene Gupta
Apple’s ban on marijuana social networking app goes up in smoke by Tom Huddleston, Jr.
The software ‘unicorn’ that will never go public by Dan Primack
ONE MORE THING
War of words, and much, much more. The rivalry between LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics is so fierce that a top executive for the former was just officially indicted for “damaging” washing machines manufactured by the latter. It makes the verbal barbs exchanged in Silicon Valley look like playground insults.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
IBM Interconnect: Cloud and mobile strategy. (Feb. 22 – 26; Las Vegas)
Gartner CIO Leadership Forum: Digital business strategy. (March 1 – 3; Phoenix)
Microsoft Convergence: Dynamics solutions. (March 16 – 19; Atlanta)
IDC Directions 2015: Innovation in the 3rd Platform era. (March 18; Boston)
Cisco Leadership Council: CIO-CEO thought leadership. (March 18 - 20; Kiawah Island, South Carolina)
Technomy Bio: The big picture on transformation. (March 25; Mountain View, California)
Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit: Crossing the divide. (March 30 – April 1; Las Vegas)
Knowledge15: Automate IT services. (April 19 – 24; Las Vegas)
RSA Conference: The world talks security. (April 20 – 24; San Francisco)
Forrester’s Forum for Technology Leaders: Win in the age of the customer. (April 27 - 28; Orlando, Fla.)
MicrosoftIgnite: Business tech extravaganza. (May 4 – 8; Chicago)
NetSuite SuiteWorld: Cloud ERP strategy. (May 4 – 7; San Jose, California)
EMC World: Data strategy. (May 4 - 7; Las Vegas)
SAPPHIRE NOW: The SAP universe. (May 5 – 7; Orlando, Florida)
Gartner Digital Marketing Conference: Reach your destination faster. (May 5 – 7; San Diego)
Annual Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference: JP Morgan’s 43rd invite-only event. (May 18 - 20; Boston)
HP Discover: Trends and technologies. (June 2 - 4; Las Vegas)
Brainstorm Tech: Fortune’s invite-only gathering of thinkers, influencers and entrepreneurs. (July 13 - 15; Aspen, Colorado)
VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco)
Dreamforce: The Salesforce community. (Sept. 15 - 18; San Francisco)
Gartner Symposium ITxpo: CIOs and senior IT executives. (Oct. 4 - 8; Orlando, Florida)
Oracle OpenWorld: Customer and partner conference. (Oct. 25 - 29; San Francisco)