Good morning! So… Thursday. Quite the week, right?
The UK is officially no longer part of the EU. The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading almost as quickly as the xenophobia it has sparked. Oh, and Trump finally managed to turn the State of the Union address into a full-blown reality TV show.
We have prepared a whole new batch of resources and interesting reads for you to explore this week. But, first things first. Let’s see what the tech world has been up to.
A week in retrospect…
In case the Iowa caucuses weren’t complicated enough, the app designed to collect and share the vote results for the US Democratic Party went absolutely bonkers. It wasn’t hackers, though.
Apparently, someone was so excited to implement new voting technologies that they went ahead with an untested app developed by the aptly named company Shadow. No training for volunteers either. Because, you know — why. They spent the rest of the week manually counting the results. Oh, blessed be paper backup.
Meanwhile, somewhere over the rainbow…
The Cloud Wars wrapped up this fiscal year’s offensive as the big players announced Q4 earnings.
AWS retains its leadership, with Microsoft on second place and narrowing the gap. In third place, Google Cloud, which released its first official cloud earnings report earlier this week.
The FY2019 revenue table for the top 3 cloud divisions stands as follows:
- Amazon — $35 billion (37% more than in 2018)
- Microsoft — $16.4 billion (39% yearly increase)
- Google — $8.9 billion (53% spike from last year)
Also —IBM recently changed CEOs, promoting its head of cloud to the top position in an effort to catch up with the competition.
Let the 2020 race begin.
Big news for the SAP community this week — The company is extending free ECC support throughout 2027, with optional maintenance until 2030.
Looks like SAP has finally accepted an extension as inevitable if it wants more of its customers to migrate to S/4HANA. The ERP vendor has vowed to support the new iteration until 2040.
Finally, human trials of the first AI-designed drug will soon start in Japan.
Targeted at patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the new compound represents a major technological and medical achievement. While the average drug development takes about 5 years to get to trials, AI did it in just 12 months.
Let’s hope it actually works. That would mean better, faster, and cheaper medicine for all.
