Tag Archives: msft

Amazon Alexa Seen Topping Apple Siri, As Voice Commander

Siri, the virtual assistant Apple ( AAPL ) released nearly five years ago, may be topped by  Amazon.com ( AMZN ) and its own spin on said tech, Alexa, an analyst says. MarketWatch cites analyst James Cakmak of Monness, Crespi & Hardt as saying that Alexa could overtake Apple’s assistant Siri because of its integration with Amazon’s Echo speaker that takes voice commands, and its integration with other home brands. Cakmak sees Alexa increasingly looking headed toward industry-standard position, the report says, especially with the opening of third-party device interoperability. On Jan. 4, Cakmak had  downgraded Amazon from a buy to a neutral rating, citing competitive pressure in 2016. Amazon.com stock was up more than 1%, around 565, in afternoon trading on the stock market today . The company has an IBD Composite Rating of 73, where 99 is the highest. The stock touched a six month low of 474 on Feb. 9, but has since rallied nearly 20% since. Amazon Echo’s Killer App: Alexa Amazon’s Alexa is able to hail rides from Uber, play music, set timers, and manipulate smart devices in homes, such as the Nest thermostat from the Google unit of Alphabet ( GOOGL ), among other functions. On Friday, Capital One Financial ( COF ) announced that it was adding a “skill” — what Amazon calls features — to Alexa, that would let its customers interact with their financial information with voice commands. Capital One said in a statement emailed to reporters that their customers can do things like check their credit card balance, and make payments via Alexa. Several Amazon devices offer Alexa : the original Echo speaker, the smaller Echo Dot with a scaled-down speaker, and the Amazon Tap that requires pressing a button before Alexa can respond to requests. Google and Microsoft ( MSFT ) also offer voice-controlled virtual assistants. Speaker Rival Sonos Slashes Jobs Faced with rising competition from Amazon, Wi-Fi streaming speaker maker Sonos is cutting staff and pivoting to work on voice-controlled features, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Sonos is a partner to Apple and other music providers. “ We’re fans of what Amazon has done with Alexa and the Echo product line,” Sonos CEO John MacFarlane said in a blog post Wednesday. “Voice recognition isn’t new; today it’s nearly ubiquitous with Siri, OK Google and Cortana. But the Echo found a sweet spot in the home and will impact how we navigate music, weather and many, many other things as developers bring new ideas and more content to the Alexa platform.” He called Alexa/Echo the first product “to really showcase the power of voice control in the home” and said Sonos will “invest what’s required” to bring voice-controlled music experiences into the home and to market “in a wonderful way.”

If Arista Networks ‘Superbly Positioned,’ What Drove Down Stock?

Needham issued a glowing report on Arista Networks ( ANET ) Thursday, but it fell 4.1% to 61.11 in the stock market . And Arista’s No. 1 switching rival  Cisco Systems ( CSCO ) closed down 0.8% to 27.38. On a trading day when indexes started out on an up note, declined and ended mixed, a fractional slip for Cisco after its 2.1% gain Wednesday can be taken in stride. However, both stocks saw rather wide trading ranges Thursday — especially Arista — coming off its 3% gain Wednesday. There “could be confusion on SONiC,” Needham analyst Alex Henderson told IBD. SONiC stands for “software for open networking in the cloud,” free software-defined networking (SDN) that makes Cisco’s high-speed switches less needed. Microsoft ( MSFT ) announced this contribution to the Open Compute Project at the OCP U.S. Summit in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday. “SONiC will enable cloud operators to take advantage of hardware innovation while giving them a framework to build upon an open source code for apps on the network switch and the ability to integrate with multiple platforms,” posted Kamala Subramaniam, principal architect of Azure Networking, on a Microsoft blog Wednesday. “SONiC is not just prototyped software but deployed today and planned to run at scale in the future.” Arista is part of Microsoft’s team that created SONiC, along with Broadcom ( AVGO ), Dell and Mellanox Technologies ( MLNX ). Broadcom stock closed up 1.7% to 144.42. But Microsoft stock fell 1.5% to 52.05 Thursday and Mellanox slipped 0.6% to 48.42. As for Arista, SONiCally confusing or not, the company is “superbly positioned” to grow, Henderson wrote in a research note issued Thursday. “We like to think we are pretty technology savvy, but we always feel humbled when we go into Arista and delve into the technology landscape in detail,” Henderson said. “We hit a number of key issues including the 10G to 25G transition, the quality of the Broadcom Tomahawk, the opportunities in storage, the potential of the Jericho chip in the Edge router market, and the advantages Arista has in the SDN market. “This last point is particularly punctuated by the Microsoft contribution of . . . SONiC to the Open Compute Foundation. We come away convinced that ANET has multiple avenues of growth, and we expect continuing share gains.” He reiterated Needham’s buy rating and 105 price target. Henderson noted that “Cisco has been questioning the quality of the Tomahawk chip” but Arista, which made the Tomahawk chip set available in its switches in September, “argues the bugs in this first pass are minor and easily worked around in software” and has “good traction in the market already.” He said Arista “seems to be seeing accelerating conversion of storage area networks (SAN) to storage over IP as “major customers drive to a single unified architecture over IP.” He also observed a “solid ramp,” starting in the second half of this year, for Arista’s 25G/50G/100G speed transition and learned that “Arista thinks some portion of that (Edge router) market can be addressed with much lower-cost switches.” Arista’s “Linux-based, open, programmable and merchant silicon-based products are winning, and the trends continue to increase its advantage,” Henderson said. “We expect ANET to continue to outperform Cisco.” He probably means Arista should outperform Cisco’s growth rate. In the fourth-quarter, Arista grew adjusted earnings per share by 51% to 80 cents, on revenue up 42% to $245 million. In Cisco’s last quarter, ended in January, it grew adjusted EPS by 8% to 57 cents on flat revenue of $11.9 billion. In the current quarter, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect adjusted earnings to grow 22% for Arista and 2% for Cisco. Image provided by Shutterstock .