Oracle Matches One Amazon AWS Capability: Bringing Order to Chaos
April 19, 2021
In 2018, I started noticing more Amazon AWS support for ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a company which uses cloud technology to help its customers manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. Amazon revealed in 2018 “How to install and configure the AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow,” the procedure which some AWS customers had mastered before the blog post gave its stamp of approval.
“Oracle Integrates ServiceNow into its Cloud Infrastructure” makes it clear that the much loved database vendor is doing what AWS did in 2018. The article reports:
Oracle has announced the integration of ServiceNow into its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The integration means enterprise customers have the ability to access and manage OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) resources via their existing ServiceNow service portal and the ITOM (ServiceNow IT Operations Management) Visibility application, which will give them a single dashboard to manage their public cloud resources from Oracle and other cloud providers.
Legacy Oracle customers like government agencies are likely to find the integration helpful. At one time, the likes of Amazon itself and Google might have been over the moon. Both of these cloud giants jettisoned Oracle technology and have moved in other directions.
A ServiceNow VP spins the Oracle move this way:
“With this integration, ServiceNow and Oracle are making it seamless for enterprises to unlock productivity for distributed teams to deliver products and services faster, access powerful business insights and create great experiences for employees, wherever they may be,” says ServiceNow’s vice president & general manager of Operations Management & Data Foundations, Jeff Hausman. Joint customers leveraging the Now Platform and OCI will get the best of both worlds, a seamless experience that maximizes the value of cloud investments and the ability to harness the power of artificial intelligence for proactive operations.”
Many buzzwords like seamless, unlock productivity, business insights, experiences which are “great”, value, proactive, and of course artificial intelligence.
The winner may be ServiceNow. For Oracle, I am not sure yet. Maybe on deck to enter the cross cloud de-chaosizing work now going on in many organizations.
Stephen E Arnold, April 19, 2021
Amazon Tactics: Entanglement at a Distance or the New Physics of Ecommerce?
April 15, 2021
Just a thought: Are two distant, seemingly unrelated events entangled? It depends on which physicist one believes and what one knows about the forces exerted by the Bezos bulldozer. I will talk about one facet of this strange influence in my Amazon lecture at the National Cyber Crime Conference. There are some attendance requirements, but I want to outline what I call the Bezos bulldozer’s strange force. This is hypothetical because like Dark Matter, no one knows exactly how to monetize it beyond snagging tenure. Nevertheless, it is an amusing notion to explore.
Here’s the first allegedly true factoid: The Wall Street Journal reports what to its intrepid “real” journalists is news. What is the nub of “How Amazon Strong-Arms Partners Using Its Power Across Multiple Businesses.” You will have to snag a dead tree version of the newspaper or pay Mr. Murdoch for some “real news.” The friendly mom and pop bookstore are allegedly using the collective presence of multiple Amazon businesses to alter the behavior of some vendors, partners, and other mostly unconnected pools of people bouncing off the blade of the Bezos bulldozer. As Mr. Murdoch’s stellar professionals have discerned:
A heavyweight in retail, cloud computing, digital advertising, streaming and smart speakers, the tech giant [Amazon] compels vendors in one market to engage with it in others.
Now shift to chilly Canada. This story is about a company touted by a media personality, NYU professor, and podcaster. “Senior Execs Forsyth, Frasca and Lemieux leaving Shopify” reports:
The departures will leave a significant gap in Shopify’s C-suite as the Ottawa firm ?– which surpassed RBC last year to become Canada’s most valuable publicly traded company ?– continues to stake its claim as a global e-commerce software leader.
What’s the connection between these two stories? One possibility is:
“Each one of them has their individual reasons but what was unanimous with all three was that this was the best for them and the best for Shopify,” Lütke said in the announcement obtained by OBJ.
Another possibility is that the vibrations or the Dark Force of the Bezos bulldozer has been sensed by those who recognize a power greater than themselves.
Connection or not? My thought is that one doesn’t need a yoda with French bulldog ears and nose to sense strange action at a distance.
As Yoda noted:
When you look at the dark side, careful you must be. For the dark side looks back.
Words to ponder?
Stephen E Arnold, April 15, 2021
Federating Domains: Advancing a Tiny Google Agenda?
April 14, 2021
Years ago I documented some of Google’s aspirations in my monograph Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. The research was funded by commercial enterprises, but I was given the green light to publish some of the data my team and I gathered. One of the findings was that Google’s founders had an image of Google as the Internet. The idea was that a user would come to Google, and Google would serve “answers” without having to send the user to the source Web site. No one paid much attention to my diagram of how this would work (included in my first Google monograph) the Google Legacy and then in word form in Google Version 2.
A harmonic response occurred when I read “W3C Technical Architecture Group Slaps Down Google’s Proposal to Treat Multiple Domains as Same Origin.” The write up explains the Googley approach. I noted this statement in the source article:
The proposal suggests that where multiple domains owned by the same entity – such as google.com, google.co.uk, and youtube.com – they could be grouped into sets which “allow related domain names to declare themselves as the same first-party.” The idea allows for sites to declare their own sets by means of a manifest in a known location. It also states that “the browser vendor could maintain a list of domains which meet its UA [User Agent] policy, and ship it in the browser.”
Why?
I have no great intuition for the 2021 Google. It seems to me that this notion of using a “”virtual domain” for multiple domains is a useful functionality. User tracking, advertising applications, and making the Google infrastructure the central authority for named virtual hosts, and other operations is a good one. By that I mean “good” for Google.
The notion of efficiency is central to Google business model. Due to the scale of the company, consolidating, federating, and controlling deliver both business and technical payoffs. Speeding up Web site response or reducing the time required for DNS operations translates to money savings for the Google. When coupled with tasks such as streamlined monitoring, there are probably additional benefits.
Will the rejection of the Google idea cause the idea to go away? In my view, this type of virtualization which is semi-possible within WordPress (a Google fave at the moment) is in operation in some Googley test set ups. Cross domain tracking is more efficient when the federated targets pipe data into the monitoring subsystem.
Rejection is irrelevant in my experience. Google does what Google does with or without permission or the blessings of committees. Azure and IBM are poking around the same functionality. Amazon AWS may be ahead by two years, an estimate offered by a senior AWS manager a couple of years ago.
Each of these outfits have one thing in mind: Control, revenue, and data collection.
Will anyone care? Sure, the Google competitors, but to users and advertisers my hunch is that the play is irrelevant until it is not.
Stephen E Arnold, April 14, 2021
virtual parking
domain mapping (Cloud Run)
named virtual hosts
Search and the Bezos Bulldozer
April 13, 2021
For the last three years, I have been giving lectures about the lock in methods implemented by Amazon. I refer to the company as the online bookstore in order to remind those in my audiences that Amazon has a friendly facet. That’s exemplified by the smile logo. Amazon also has a Wall Street persona which is built upon the precepts of MBAism.
I will be talking about Amazon and its policeware strategy at the 2021 National Cyber Crime Conference. If you want a similar presentation tailored to commercial interests, let me know. I can be reached via benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. My LE and intel work are pro bono; commercial works incurs a fee.
I want to mention a subject I won’t be addressing directly in my upcoming lecture later this month. The subject is an Amazon blog post titled “Introducing OpenSearch.” I would also direct your attention to the comments submitted to the Ycombinator discussion of the announcement. You can find those interesting and varied remarks from hundreds of people at this link.
The news is that Amazon is taking quite predictable steps to recast search and retrieval so that it becomes another of the hundreds of functions, services, and features of Amazon Web Services. AWS hired people from Lucid Imagination (now LucidWorks) years ago. Many have forgotten that Amazon operated A9, a Web search system with a street view function, as well. There are other findability functions embedded in Amazon as well; for example, the “search” function in Amazon’s blockchain inventions. (Yes, I have a for fee lecture about that technology as well. Because money laundering is a growing problem, the Amazon methods are likely to become increasingly important to certain government agencies in the future.)
The little secret about open source software, which many overlook, is that the strongest supporters of FOSS and community supported code are large companies. I did a series of reports for the IDC outfit, and I am not sure what that now dismantled organization did with the data. A couple of chapters were sold on Amazon for $3,000, but the topic was not a magnet when we assembled the information six or seven years ago.
Since Amazon is engaged in a battle for one part of the “enterprise” with Microsoft, the online bookstore is actively seeking ways to attract large organizations as customers, lock them in, and then implement the tactics which benefit from Amazon’s knowledge of its customers’ behavior. The use of the “retail” tactic watch, duplicate, and leverage house brands is documented in the reports from vendors who have had their toes nipped by the bulldozer’s steel caterpillar traction system.
Why’s this germane to “search”? Here are the reasons:
- Search and retrieval is an essential utility for modern work. Amazon wants to generate revenue and other business benefits by having a “better” and (if possible) community supported software base. Search will become part of the lubricant for other Amazon enterprise services; for example, locating tax avoiders.
- Search becomes the glue and the circulatory system for information analysis and use. No search; no high value outputs. Machine learning is little more than a supporting technology to finding needed information. Many disagree with me, but marketing clouds many experts’ thinking. Search is a core function and requires many subsystems and technical methods.
- Once users become habituated to search, change is difficult. Amazon is one of the few outfits to have undermined Google search. Product searches are increasingly under Amazon’s control. The ElasticSearch “play” is going to become the vehicle for a broader utility attack.
I have quipped that Amazon has targeted Elastic and the ElasticSearch “system” because it has the same name as some of Amazon’s services. If Amazon is successful in its search maneuver, Shay Banon’s findability play will be marginalized.
There are larger implications quite beyond a comment made to elicit a laugh at a reception at an enterprise search conference. These include:
- Seamless integration with SageMaker and other advanced functionalities available from Amazon
- A lever for technical and financial leverage for innovators who use Amazon as the plumbing for their start ups, not Microsoft technology
- A model for Amazon and maybe other companies to use for shifting open source software into a variation on the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) approach to closing deals. The mantra could become “Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS.”
For the companies generating scorecards for enterprise search vendors, significant change is likely. The numerous vendors of proprietary enterprise search will have to make some changes in their approach to Amazon. Many of these Elastic alternatives use AWS for certain functions. What happens if the pricing structure, the legalese, or the access to certain AWS services “evolve”? What will start ups and Amazon partners do if access to search functions becomes free or requires contributions to the AWS version of open source?
Worth watching, right? The answer is, “Nah, you are way off base.” Yep, just as I was in my analysis of Google for BearStearns many years ago. I have a track record of getting thrown out as I head for second base.
Stephen E Arnold, April 13, 2021
Microsoft Adds Semantic Search to Azure Cognitive Search: Is That Fast?
April 9, 2021
Microsoft is adding new capabilities to its cloud-based enterprise search platform Azure Cognitive Search, we learn from “Microsoft Debuts AI-Based Semantic Search on Azure” at Datanami. We’re told the service offers improved development tools. There is also a “semantic caption” function that identifies and displays a document’s most relevant section. Reporter George Leopold writes:
“The new semantic search framework builds on Microsoft’s AI at Scale effort that addresses machine learning models and the infrastructure required to develop new AI applications. Semantic search is among them. The cognitive search engine is based on the BM25 algorithm, (as in ‘best match’), an industry standard for information retrieval via full-text, keyword-based searches. This week, Microsoft released semantic search features in public preview, including semantic ranking. The approach replaces traditional keyword-based retrieval and ranking frameworks with a ranking algorithm using deep neural networks. The algorithm prioritizes search results based on how ‘meaningful’ they are based on query relevance. Semantics-based ranking ‘is applied on top of the results returned by the BM25-based ranker,’ Luis Cabrera-Cordon, group program manager for Azure Cognitive Search, explained in a blog post. The resulting ‘semantic answers’ are generated using an AI model that extracts key passages from the most relevant documents, then ranks them as the sought-after answer to a query. A passage deemed by the model to be the most likely to answer a question is promoted as a semantic answer, according to Cabrera-Cordon.”
By Microsoft’s reckoning, the semantic search feature represents hundreds of development years and millions of dollars in compute time by the Bing search team. We’re told recent developments in transformer-based language models have also played a role, and that this framework is among the first to apply the approach to semantic search. There is one caveat—right now the only language the platform supports is US English. We’re told that others will be added “soon.” Readers who are interested in the public preview of the semantic search engine can register here.
Cynthia Murrell, April 9, 2021
HPE Machine Learning: A Benefit of the Autonomy Tech?
April 8, 2021
This sounds like an optimal solution from HPE (formerly known as HP); too bad it was not available back when the company evaluated the purchase of Autonomy. Network World reports, “HPE Debuts New Opportunity Engine for Fast AI Insights.” The machine-learning platform is called the Software Defined Opportunity Engine, or SDOE. It is based in the cloud, and will greatly reduce the time it takes to create custom sales proposals for HPE channel partners and customers. Citing a blog post from HPE’s Tom Black, writer Andy Patrizio explains:
“It takes a snapshot of the customer’s workloads, configuration, and usage patterns to generate a quote for the best solution for the customer in under a minute. The old method required multiple visits by resellers or HPE itself to take an inventory and gather usage data on the equipment before finally coming back with an offer. That meant weeks. SDOE uses HPE InfoSight, HPE’s database which collects system and use information from HPE’s customer installed base to automatically remediate infrastructure issues. InfoSight is primarily for technical support scenarios. Started in 2010, InfoSight has collected 1,250 trillion data points in a data lake that has been built up from HPE customers. Now HPE is using it to move beyond technical support to rapid sales prep.”
The write-up describes Black’s ah-ha moment when he realized that data could be used for this new purpose. The algorithm-drafted proposals are legally binding—HPE must have a lot of confidence in the system’s accuracy. Besides HPE’s existing database and servers, the process relies on the assessment tool recently acquired when the company snapped up CloudPhysics. We learn that the tool:
“… analyzes on-premises IT environments much in the same way as InfoSight but covers all of the competition as well. It then makes recommendations for cloud migrations, application modernization and infrastructure. The CloudPhysics data lake—which includes more than 200 trillion data samples from more than one million virtual machines—combined with HPE’s InfoSight can provide a fuller picture of their IT infrastructure and not just their HPE gear.”
As of now, SDOE is only for storage systems, but we are told that could change down the road. Black, however, was circumspect on the details.
Cynthia Murrell, April 8, 2021
GitHub: Amusing Security Management
April 8, 2021
I got a kick out of “GitHub Investigating Crypto-Mining Campaign Abusing Its Server Infrastructure.” I am not sure if the write up is spot on, but it is entertaining to think about Microsoft’s security systems struggling to identify an unwanted service running in GitHub. The write up asserts:
Code-hosting service GitHub is actively investigating a series of attacks against its cloud infrastructure that allowed cybercriminals to implant and abuse the company’s servers for illicit crypto-mining operations…
In the wake of the SolarWinds’ and Exchange Server “missteps,” Microsoft has been making noises about the tough time it has dealing with bad actors. I think one MSFT big dog said there were 1,000 hackers attacking the company.
The main idea is that attackers allegedly mine cryptocurrency on GitHub’s own servers.
This is post SolarWinds and Exchange Server “missteps”, right?
What’s the problem with cyber security systems that monitoring real time threats and uncertified processes?
Oh, I forgot. These aggressively marketed cyber systems still don’t work it seems.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2021
No Joke: Amazon and Social Media
April 1, 2021
A change at the top and Amazon gets wonky. Coincidence or just a new crew of social media advisors? Who knows. “Amazon Wanted Twitter Warriors with Great Sense of Humor, Leaked Doc Shows” reveals some allegedly accurate information about the humble online bookseller.
The write up states:
Amazon sought out warehouse staffers with a “great sense of humor” to build a squad of Twitter warriors to knock down criticism of its fulfillment centers, a leaked document reveals.
Yep, warehouse workers with the skills of a tweet master like the real Borat.
The story adds:
While Amazon wanted the workers to speak for themselves, the memo shows company officials wanted a standardized format for their Twitter handles and usernames. They mulled adding an emoji to the username to “give personality, for example a small box emoji…
A happy Amazon worker surrounded with positive tweets is running with an “emergency necessary bottle” from the automated Bezos bulldozer and its business processes.
The write up includes what may be an April Fool joke:
“| work for Amazon and not sure about other facilities but I’ve never felt pressured to pee in a trash can,” one trainee wrote in a draft tweet. “My managers understand when you gotta’ go you gotta’ go.”
You can read the allegedly accurate document at this link.
Stephen E Arnold, April 1, 2021
High Tech Tension: Sparks Visible, Escalation Likely
March 25, 2021
I read Google’s “Our Ongoing Commitment to Supporting Journalism.” The write up is interesting because it seems to be a dig at a couple of other technology giants. The bone of contention is news, specifically, indexing and displaying it.
The write up begins with a remarkable statement:Google has always been committed to providing high-quality and relevant information, and to supporting the news publishers who help create it.
This is a sentence pregnant with baby Googzillas. Note the word “always.” I am not certain that Google is in the “always” business nor am I sure that the company had much commitment. As I recall, when Google News went live, it created some modest conversation. Then Google News was fenced out of the nuclear ad machinery. Over time, Google negotiated and kept on doing what feisty, mom and pop Silicon Valley companies do; namely, keep doing what they want and then ask for forgiveness.
Flash forward to Australia. That country wanted to get money in exchange for Australian news. Google made some growling noises, but in the end the company agreed to pay some money.
Facebook on the other hand resisted, turned off its service, and returned to the Australian negotiating table.
Where was Microsoft in this technical square dance?
Microsoft was a cheerleader for the forces of truth, justice, and the Microsoft way. This Google blog post strikes me as Google’s reminding Microsoft that Google wants to be the new Microsoft. Microsoft has not done itself any favors because the battle lines between these two giants is swathed in the cloud of business war.
Google has mobile devices. Microsoft has the enterprise. Google has the Chromebook. Microsoft has the Surface. And on it goes.
Now Microsoft is on the ropes: SolarWinds, the Exchange glitch, and wonky updates which have required the invention of KIR (an update to remove bad updates).
Microsoft may be a JEDI warrior with the feature-burdened Teams and the military’s go to software PowerPoint. Google knows that every bump and scrape slows the reflexes of the Redmond giant.
Both mom and pop outfits are looking after each firm’s self interests. Fancy words and big ideas are window dressing.
Stephen E Arnold, March 25, 2021
Microsoft: Losing an Appetite for Chinese Take Out?
March 16, 2021
I read “Microsoft Claims They Are under Attack by China.” Last month, Microsoft was under attack by Russia. In this most recent round of finger pointing, the Giant Freakin Robot states:
Microsoft says this hack actually began months ago, maybe as early as January with the hackers masking their efforts along the way and prying deeper into the base systems that stand up these email servers. Once it was noticed in early March, the company worked on a fix.
The bad actors have done significant harm. Attributing the attack to a nation state suggests that companies based in the US and deploying software and services worldwide are targets of value.
Several questions come to mind:
- With an attack which began months ago, why weren’t existing cyber security systems able to discern the breach and issue alerts?
- How long is “months ago”? What if the Exchange breaches occurred three, six, a year or more before being detected? Microsoft “defender” should have defended, but what about third party cyber security systems?
- Will the patches remediate the problem? Microsoft issued a Windows 10 update which caused some print functions to fail? Are Microsoft’s “fixes” introducing new vulnerabilities?
Net net: The bad actors (whether kids in McDonalds) or trained cyber warriors in bunkers may not be the actual problem.
What’s the problem?
Microsoft’s core business processes maybe?
The move to the cloud, background updates, flawed quality checks, and an eagerness to blame others could be contributing factors to the Redmond giant’s spate of woes.
What countries will be blamed for attacking Microsoft? I think Liechtenstein looks suspicious, don’t you?
Scrap the Chinese lunch order for today too.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2021
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