Enterprise hits and misses - diginomica on cybersecurity, SAP and Salesforce on tour
- Summary:
- In this edition: diginomica does cybersecurity, while AI alarmists meet an optimist. Salesforce has a world tour and SAP had a big show - we've got your breezy roundup. Grappling with workplace diversity is one theme this week; pizza is another. Food-related whiffs abound, with Pizza Hut asking for - and receiving - viral shaming. Finally, can AI ever make better music than the Biebs?
Lead story - the Diginomica team hits on cybersecurity implications of WannaCry and beyond:
- Who Let the Bug Out? Is the NSA Responsible for “WannaCry?” - short answer - yeah, pretty much. Jerry on why the havoc was wreaked.
- Using deep learning to thwart malware - even WannaCry - Kurt valiantly endeavors to bring hope to the beleagured and infected masses with machine learning advances that might help - in this case from startup Deep Instinct.
- Regulation and cyber attacks - a perfect storm for SaaS - Denis on the unexpected WannaCry twist: fuel for a SaaS adoption surge? In particular, cloud ERP? I would not be surprised - at least in the SMB market. What IT manager wants to keep pace with the ultra-sophisticated, state-authored attack worms documented in Zero Days?
Also see: Cath's two-fer on workplace diversity, Boy jobs and girl jobs - does 'tech' put women off a career choice? and Holding on to the best women in tech - some top tips from tech women.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style.
Salesforce World Tour London - diversity, earnings, and use cases - Salesforce doesn't pause for wee events in Orlando. The diginomica team was on hand in London for some Benioffian updates:
- Salesforce, according to Marc Benioff - Stuart's got earnings context and a Benioff state-of-Salesforce, with updates on Sales Cloud, public sector, Einstein - and office politics.
- Why Salesforce's diversity prophet doesn't need to preach to the Ohana - I'm gonna forgive Stuart's prophet punning around Salesforce Chief Equality Office Tony Prophet - this time. Eight months ago Stuart sat down with Prophet an the beginning of his "CEO" role (has a nice ring to it, eh?). Now, in a very different political climate, we have the update - and Prophet/Salesforce isn't backing down - nor for that matter is diginomica.
- Salesforce equality panel calls for reverse mentoring and local role models - more on Salesforce's diversity leadership, this time from Madeline.
- A snapshot of Canon’s use of Salesforce to replace a dying camera market - round it out with a nifty use case of market re-invention by Martin.
SapphireNow 2017 roundup - how to get your fix - we published enough content from Sapphire Now to sap even the Sappiest of Saps. I won't do the full tour; here's how to get your info:
- Diginomica's SapphireNow video playlist - from use cases to
bloviatedbrilliant punditry, we've got all your on-site views. - Diginomica's Sapphire Now article commentary - our complete collection, from previews to wraps, from indirect access to Leonardo to customer profiles, it's all here - with more to follow. The standout from videos and commentary is arguably our user group review; we brought the views of most major SAP user groups into our coverage.
A few more vendor picks, without the quips:
- Gavi’s mission with Okta to share valuable immunization knowledge - use case by Jessica
- Coupa applies the hive mind of customers to supplier risk - Phil
- MuleSoft points at the online consumer context – feel disconnected, they will walk away - Martin
Jon's grab bag - Not really a grab bag this time, more of a "hope you didn't miss Brian's opus" nudge. Brian just posted the fifth and final part of his epic cloud manufacturing ERP series, The State of Manufacturing ERP - part 5 - The Plex update. You can catch the whole series via Brian's author page, and learn why manufacturing workloads are now shifting to the cloud at a (fairly) rapid rate. Brian came in low on slides, but not so low on insight - just the way I like it.
Best of the rest
Lead story - the dark secrets of the AI cargo cultThat's me mashing headlines courtesy Esteban Kolsky, whose AI reading binge is to our benefit with selections courtesy his ThinkJar blog. In The Myth of a Superhuman AI, Kevin Kelly picks a fight with - as he admits - the smartest people on earth, including Musk, Hawking, and Gates, by deconstructing what he calls the myths of superhuman AI.
I'm hanging on the dark side with Hawking, for example the inevitable rise of the robocop gives me the weebeejeebies (a very scientific term indeed). Kelly brings this back to the applied AI those of us with enterprise day jobs should be focused on anyhow:
To be useful, artificial intelligences have to be embodied in the world, and that world will often set their pace of innovations. Without conducting experiments, building prototypes, having failures, and engaging in reality, an intelligence can have thoughts but not results.
We get a dose of that practicality in a 2016 piece, Understanding the four types of AI, from reactive robots to self-aware beings. Even this April piece on the dark secret at the heart of AI is more of a warning that algorithms shouldn't be trusted when we can't fully understand how some of them get results. Fine - I don't trust most of my Uber/Lyft drivers but they get me from A to B. Short-sighted or not, I think that's how most people view algorithms.
More Sapphire Now gnoshing:
If you're not done chewing the gristle from Sapphire Now perhaps these morsels will do the job:
- Event Report - SAP Sapphire 2017 - All in on Leonardo, but wait there is more... - Holger Mueller brought his red shoes and his thinking cap to Orlando. And his Storify Twitter collection also - plus more concerns than usual, including his Hadoop beef with Hasso Plattner.
- SapphireNow 2017 – My 2 cents - The view from an IBMer who knows more about SAP than most people who work there.
Honorable mentions
After publishing a series of research agendas so foolhardy intimidating ambitious I had to take a Facebook break, the aforementioned Esteban Kolsky returns with fruits of concerted effort in Knowledge Summary: The Next Decade in Digital Transformation. Wish I had more time to ventilate pontificate expand on this one, but let's just say it's one of the better pieces on digital transformation I've seen this year.
- Rimini Street merges with investment firm, will be publicly traded - intriguing/savvy looking move.
- ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It - when the co-founder of the self-styled online "town hall" (Twitter) says the Internet is broken, that's a concerning statement indeed. Rooting for EV and his "thoughtful content will win" mantra but I worry it ain't so.
- Everybody Lies, But Google May Know the True You - another feel good piece on the privacy we risk for convenience.
- Start Up on the Right Foot — Build a Customer Advisory Board - yep, though be careful with those surveys. Every time I set foot in a hotel I am already anticipating my freaking "How was your stay?" survey.
Whiffs
Folks, I let you down. The exact same week I got crusty with Stuart for his series of pieces on pizza, Pizza Hut earned its rightful way into the whiffs column for its ill-advised viral foray into Middle Eastern politics. Queue the social spank tunnel and hand-wrung, corporate-crafted apology: Pizza Hut Apologizes for Ad Mocking Palestinian Hunger Strike Leader. I hope they also cancelled their "leveraging droughts and famine" ad campaign. Then there's this lonely dude:
Texas man sues his date for texting during movie @CNNI https://t.co/H24yfsmruq -> I feel ya bro but I think we're losing this battle
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) May 19, 2017
Alas he's already dropped his nuts the case and settled, pun intended. Oh, and as for this from Could AI Algorithms One Day Make Better Art than Humans?
They don't have to beat Beethoven, they just have to beat Justin Bieber.
Yeah, well, to get on my playlist AI will have to do a damn sight better than the Biebs. Keep dreamin' dude - let me know when AI starts to catch up with a bad Bob Seger song, then I'll sound the hundred year alarm.
Nudging closer to the enterprise, love The New Stack, but they nab linkbait title of the week "honor" with the absurdly-titled Corn-Tracking Robot May Save Us from Starving in the Future, which is a sonic distortion of the early stage innovations described in the article. Backtracking from the already tentative title begins immediately in the first two sentences.
We already know how to reduce world hunger: switch to insects as our protein source (and maybe some beans/grains for delicious variety, vegan style). No fancy AI crop sniffers of the future - nothing more from tech is needed. Once again it's our will - not our tech - that is lacking. And yep, I do include myself.
If that's a downer, there's comfort: reading this was easier than giving your cat a pill. Shall we let Chris Cornell, one of the finest singers in rock history, close it out this week? Yeah let's. RIP man. Tough pick but I'll go with his surprising acoustic cover of Billie Jean. See you next time. Over to you, Clive.
This is a truncated "Jon feels the road burn" version of hits and misses, which by definition excludes some worthy content - from diginomica and beyond. If you read an #ensw piece that qualifies, let me know in the comments as Clive always does.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.