While not completely enterprise tech, we felt like it was necessary to cover the Twitter saga since so many of us use social media to share information and build our communities. The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk closed on Thursday after the market closed. From there, the new owner of the platform fired the CEO, CFO, and chief legal counsel. He dismissed the board of directors this week to become the sole head of the company. He also brought in a number of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX to start interviewing Twitter developers and understand how the code works for the platform. The catch? Tesla and Twitter develop in two entirely different languages. These reports come amid rumors that people are being forced to work 80 hour weeks and that there will likely be looming layoffs coming very soon. To top it all off, Elon’s grand plan to make Twitter profitable now seems to be around charging more for Twitter Blue, the premium service. The initial report was that Musk wanted to charge $20/month and include verification for the service. Many users balked publicly, including celebrities such as author Steven King. Musk backpedaled quickly and offered a compromise of $8/month, which is still almost double the current cost but users are wary of what that would entail.
0:44 | Commvault Growing In Cooling Storage Industry
Commvault has announced their tenth quarter of growth in a row this week. Revenue was up 5.8% and profits rose by $4.5 million. This comes amid a downturn in the storage drive market as previously reported here on the Rundown. Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani attributes this rise to companies needing to protect their existing data as well as the rise in ransomware. This last security challenge is something that is going to be discussed today during Commvault Connections. Nathan, is Commvault making storage work still? Or is the security aspect of the business doing the heavy lifting here?
Read More: Commvault delivers 10 quarters of growth
3:19 | VMware Shores Up Cloud Foundation Vulnerability
VMware Cloud Foundation found itself with a major exploit this week that was quickly patched. The vulnerability came in the XStream open source library leveraged by the management appliances used by Cloud Foundation and NSX. The exploit code released was so bad that VMware took the extra step of patching all relevant versions of software, even if they are no longer officially supported. The remote code execution earned a 9.8 out of 10 on the severity scale. Tom, is this something that VMware should have known about?
Read More: VMware patches vulnerability with 9.8/10 severity rating in Cloud Foundation
6:11 | Intel Cutting jobs and spending
Intel’s cost cutting measures are ramping up. The report this week is that Intel is looking to cut around $10 billion a year by 2025. The third quarter numbers did not look good for our favorite chip maker. They lost 20% of the revenue for the quarter and 85% of the profit. That comes after the previous quarter saw revenue decline of 22% as well. The downturn in the PC market has been widely discussed as Intel tries to shift their focus to other packages, such as GPUs. One bright spot came from Mobileye. The autonomous vehicle division, which is rumored to be an IPO target, showed 40% growth for the quarter. Nathan, how can Intel keep costs under control?
Read More: Intel forced to cut jobs and spending as revenue continues to decline
11:46 | Kioxia Warns of Chip Ban Costs
The US government seems to be headed toward a wide-scale ban on chips from China. The current sanctions against manufacturing tools as well as the requirement that any person traveling to China for chipmaking purposes needs to register are creating challenges for companies. One of those is Kioxia. Lorenzo Flores, vice chair of Kioxia, is warning that the Chinese government may decide to increase domestic investment in technologies such as NAND to alleviate the sanctions and reduce demand for chips from US sources. This news, coupled with the overall downturn in the flash storage market, has manufacturers concerned. Nathan, could China decide to build their own tech industry to avoid US sanctions?
Read More: Kioxia warns of potential cost of US chip policy over China
16:18 | Elon Musk purchases Twitter and Does what Musk Does
While not completely enterprise tech, we felt like it was necessary to cover the Twitter saga since so many of us use social media to share information and build our communities. The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk closed on Thursday after the market closed. From there, the new owner of the platform fired the CEO, CFO, and chief legal counsel. He dismissed the board of directors this week to become the sole head of the company. He also brought in a number of engineers from Tesla and SpaceX to start interviewing Twitter developers and understand how the code works for the platform. The catch? Tesla and Twitter develop in two entirely different languages. These reports come amid rumors that people are being forced to work 80 hour weeks and that there will likely be looming layoffs coming very soon. To top it all off, Elon’s grand plan to make Twitter profitable now seems to be around charging more for Twitter Blue, the premium service. The initial report was that Musk wanted to charge $20/month and include verification for the service. Many users balked publicly, including celebrities such as author Steven King. Musk backpedaled quickly and offered a compromise of $8/month, which is still almost double the current cost but users are wary of what that would entail.
Read More: Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
33:31 | The Weeks Ahead
Storage Field Day 24, November 2-3, 2022
Security Field Day 8, November 16-18, 2022
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