flic.kr/p/nJR5oK There’s a few stories out about Canonical, likely centered around some PR campaign that they’re seeking to IPO at some time, shifting the company around appropriately. Here’s some highlights from the recent spate of news around Canonical. Testing the Red Hat Theory, competing for the cloud-native stack Why care? Aside from Canonical just being interesting - they’ve been first and/or early to many cloud technologies and containers - there’d finally be another Red Hat if they were public.

In a brief write-up of HPE/Micro Focus from Paul Kunert: Shareholders will also be asked to approve a $500m return of value, approximately $2.09 per share," the statement to the City added. Well, who doesn’t like money? That said, performance is declining: The [HPE Software?] business has shrunk in recent years, with turnover dropping from $4.06bn in fiscal 2012 ended 31 October to $3.19bn in fiscal 2016. Profit before tax during that period slipped too.

A brief note, from William Fellows at 451, on HSBC’s use of Google Cloud’s big data/analytical services: They have lot of data, that’s only growing: 6PB in 2014, 77PB in 2015 and 93PB in 2016 What they use it for: In addition to anti-money-laundering workloads (identification and reducing false positives), it is also migrating other machine-learning workloads to GCP, including finance liquidity reporting (six hours to six minutes), risk analytics (raise compute utilization from 10% to actual units consumed), risk reporting and valuation services (rapid provisioning of compute power instead of on-premises grid).

Thus far, it seems like the large banks are fending off digital disruption, perhaps embracing some of it on their own. The Economist takes a look: “Peer-to-peer lending, for instance, has grown rapidly, but still amounted to just $19bn on America’s biggest platforms and £3.8bn in Britain last year” “last year JPMorgan Chase spent over $9.5bn on technology, including $3bn on new initiatives” From a similar piece in the NY Times: “The consulting firm McKinsey estimated in a report last month that digital disruption could put $90 billion, or 25 percent of bank profits, at risk over the next three years as services become more automated and more tellers are replaced by chatbots.

So says Ben Thompson in his newsletter today: This is why Twitter’s increased focus on securing these video deals feels like such an admission of failure: the company is basically admitting that, despite the fact it contains some of the best content — given to it for free — in the world, it simply can’t figure out how to make that into a business, so instead it is (presumably) paying to create content that it can monetize more easily.

So says Ben Thompson in his newsletter today: This is why Twitter’s increased focus on securing these video deals feels like such an admission of failure: the company is basically admitting that, despite the fact it contains some of the best content — given to it for free — in the world, it simply can’t figure out how to make that into a business, so instead it is (presumably) paying to create content that it can monetize more easily.

So says Ben Thompson in his newsletter today: This is why Twitter’s increased focus on securing these video deals feels like such an admission of failure: the company is basically admitting that, despite the fact it contains some of the best content — given to it for free — in the world, it simply can’t figure out how to make that into a business, so instead it is (presumably) paying to create content that it can monetize more easily.

Brian Gracely of Red Hat (and formally an analyst who did some of the best “cloud-native”/cloud platform work early on) has a momentum post on Open Shift. Here’s my highlights: Sizing up revenue and deal-size: [Q3, FY 2017] Also of note, we closed our second OpenShift deal over $10 million and another OpenShift deal over $5 million. And significantly, we actually had over 50 OpenShift deals alone that were six or seven figures, so really strong traction.

Brian Gracely of Red Hat (and formally an analyst who did some of the best “cloud-native”/cloud platform work early on) has a momentum post on Open Shift. Here’s my highlights: Sizing up revenue and deal-size: [Q3, FY 2017] Also of note, we closed our second OpenShift deal over $10 million and another OpenShift deal over $5 million. And significantly, we actually had over 50 OpenShift deals alone that were six or seven figures, so really strong traction.

Brian Gracely of Red Hat (and formally an analyst who did some of the best “cloud-native”/cloud platform work early on) has a momentum post on Open Shift. Here’s my highlights: Sizing up revenue and deal-size: [Q3, FY 2017] Also of note, we closed our second OpenShift deal over $10 million and another OpenShift deal over $5 million. And significantly, we actually had over 50 OpenShift deals alone that were six or seven figures, so really strong traction.