Tag Archives: technology

Adobe Summit Sees World Gone Digital, From ‘Deadpool’ To Sea Of Data

Hit anti-superhero flick “Deadpool” got made with what’s been called an all-Adobe workflow . No wonder  Adobe Systems ( ADBE ) CEO Shantanu Narayen sounds a fan. In a keynote address kicking off the Adobe Summit 2016 digital marketing conference Tuesday, he used the cheeky comic book movie to illustrate how the content world’s gone digital. Adobe, of course, makes the Creative Cloud digital tools, such as Photoshop and Premiere Pro video editing software, and the Adobe Marketing Cloud tools used to track online content popularity and to power advertising decisions. The company gets a near-top IBD Composite Rating of 97, and the stock hit a new high in high volume Friday, after Adobe beat analyst views in its first-quarter earnings report and lifted its annual sales and earnings guidance. After February’s market dip, Adobe stock is back where it was in early January. How ‘Deadpool’ Went Digital “Last year one of the biggest media companies in the world decided to make an unknown superhero as big as Captain America without the usual big media and TV spots,” Narayen said in a livecast keynote  from the event in Las Vegas that he said drew more than 10,000 attendees. “Deadpool, a brash antihero most people had never heard of, wove his way into their lives through using one of the most innovative digital and social media campaigns ever.” “Deadpool,” by film folks at Twenty-First Century Fox ( FOX ), “shattered all box office records and is on the way to becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie in film history,” Narayen said. He went on to talk about how MasterCard ( MA ), too, had moved to “pivot” a bit from traditional ad strategy toward online and social forms, exemplified by its #Priceless Surprises campaign that included things like winning a trip to the Grammy Awards. “Businesses must re-imagine how they interact with customers in a digital-first and digital-enabled world,” Narayen said, adding that “getting content to the right person at the right place at the right time takes data” — that is, the ability to analyze and target. Adobe Summit 2016 Debuts Adobe made several announcements in conjunction with its annual Summit show, including these three Adobe Marketing Cloud enhancements , among others: Adobe Certified Metrics , which standardizes some digital page and video viewership data that’s tracked in the Marketing Cloud. That will allow measurement partners, such as ComScore ( SCOR ) and Nielsen ( NLSN ), to “provide a complete view of total digital audience engagement across TV and digital,” which could boost ad-revenue opportunities. A new developer portal , Adobe.io. A TV recommendation engine called Adobe Primetime Recommendations, based on how the majority of U.S. households watch streaming TV and movies. It could be used by media companies and other kinds of firms to power what Adobe calls ” the next generation of TV recommendations.” TV Ratings For Digital Ad-Buying After viewing migrating away from the television itself toward online viewing via devices such as mobile phone screens and tablets, some online video viewing is now “going back to the living room,” Jeremy Helfand, Adobe’s vice president of video solutions, told IBD. “Over 20% of ‘TV Everywhere’ viewing is happening on connected devices — Apple ( AAPL ) TV, Roku or ( Sony ( SNE )) PlayStation or ( Microsoft ( MSFT )) Xbox, which is quite remarkable.” Historically, he says, “there was one currency — it was Nielsen — that’s what was used in order to purchase advertising,” Helfand said, “largely through upfronts and some residuals — that’s how advertising was bought and sold.” But tracking how many people are watching what these days, across a bunch of devices and websites, hasn’t been easy and that has hampered online video monetization efforts. Adobe Certified Metrics, which involves a developing partnership with ComScore following last year’s link-up with Nielsen, is one way that Adobe aims to make audience measurement easier and more standardized. “You’ve seen ComScore merge with Rentrak trying to bring digital and linear together just as Nielsen is,” Helfand said. “And you’re also seeing some media companies build their own definitions of who their audiences are, and go out to (ad) buyers and say ‘here’s my audience’.” The partnerships and platform development further Narayen’s goal of Adobe products and services being able to “make, monetize and measure” the digital experiences that people have in today’s world of content. The hope is that in turn will make Adobe software more crucial across a breadth of industries. In its Q1 report last week, digital marketing segment revenue at Adobe reached $406.2 million, which Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brendan Barnicle said, in a research note, was “better than the expectation of $402.7 million.” He added that the Summit event this week was “likely  to  provide  additional  positive  announcements  on  the marketing business.” Adobe added 798,000 new subscribers for its Creative Cloud businesses last quarter, and Barnicle noted that 30% of them were new to Adobe. He sees more CEOs driving adoption of Adobe products. “Like Salesforce.com ( CRM ) and Workday ( WDAY ), Adobe is seeing more CEOs make purchasing decisions,” he wrote. “In the 2016 Pacific Crest CFO Survey, both CIOs and CMOs saw a decline in the portion of the IT budget that they control. We believe that CEOs are making more IT decisions than ever before. They are looking to move their businesses to digital and to the cloud, and Adobe is one of several beneficiaries.” The Adobe Summit runs through Thursday, with actor George Clooney among speakers listed for the event — albeit most come more from the tech side than from Tinseltown. San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe has offices around the globe, including in Diegem, Belgium. It’s just outside Brussels, where terrorist attacks hit the airport and a subway station early Tuesday. Narayen started his talk with condolences, and despite its Summit event @Adobe said it was keeping its Twitter account silent for the day, in light of the Brussels situation.

Red Hat Q4 Earnings Beat Views, But Q1 Profit Outlook Merely Meets

Leading Linux software provider Red Hat ( RHT ) late Tuesday reported fiscal Q4 earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street expectations and helped ease fears of tech spending softening, but its EPS outlook for the current quarter merely met views. Shares were down 4% in after-hours trading, after the earnings release. In Tuesday’s regular session, Red Hat stock rose 1.1% to 75.71. Shares had touched a 15-month low below 60 last month after hitting a 16-year high above 84 in December. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company posted earnings per share minus items of 52 cents, up 21% from the year-earlier quarter. Sales for the quarter that ended Feb. 29 rose 17% to $544 million. Both numbers beat the consensus estimate. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters on average had expected the cloud vendor to report EPS ex items of 47 cents on revenue of $537 million. For its fiscal Q1, Red Hat guided EPS ex items at 50 cents on revenue of $558 million to $566 million, vs. 44 cents and $481 million in the year-earlier quarter. Analysts had modeled 50 cents and $554.6 million, so while the sales outlook beat, the EPS outlook merely met. Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian White called Q4 “another strong quarter” with a “strong revenue outlook” in a research note after the earnings release. Red Hat revenue comes from subscriptions that customers pay for support, training and integration services in using the open-source version of its Linux operating system. The platform includes applications, middleware, desktop domains and an operating system. Red Hat was founded 23 years ago. “The fourth quarter marked our 56 th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, contributing to Red Hat’s first fiscal year crossing $2 billion in total revenue,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said in the company’s earnings release. “The fourth quarter was a strong close to the year as our results exceeded our guidance. “We maintained a high level of execution throughout the fiscal year, which contributed to greater than 20% constant currency revenue growth in each quarter.” Red Hat Reports Record Year-End Backlog Of $2.13 Billion Red Hat said that it had ended the year with a record backlog of $2.13 billion, up 15% year over year. The company has made a strategic shift to cloud computing, a fast-growing tech field dominated by Amazon.com ( AMZN ), Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Alphabet ( GOOGL ). Red Hat has been able to carve out a share of the pie. It focuses on hybrid cloud services, which partly use the low-cost public cloud and partly provide the privacy of private cloud services. “Investors have asked whether the public cloud is a positive driver for Red Hat,” Whitehurst said on the company’s earnings conference call. “We firmly believe that it will be a hybrid cloud world where applications will run across all four footprints — physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud. “We are providing technologies that enable choice and consistency across all four environments, and we enhance this value with application development technologies, storage and management.” In November, Red Hat announced a partnership with Microsoft, which made the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. As part of the deal, Red Hat will provide Microsoft with its enterprise version of Linux for use as the “preferred choice” on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services. Microsoft, formerly a rival, has been rolling out other Red Hat products, including its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Gluster Storage and platform-as-a-service product OpenShift. In a research note Monday, Drexel analyst White said that the movement toward open-source software and the momentum to cloud computing “will provide enough of a tailwind to offset any macro softening.” White rates Red Hat stock a buy, with a price target of 98. “We believe Linux will continue to gain market share in 2016 as next-generation applications are developed on RHEL, while we look forward to development of the Microsoft partnership,” White wrote. In a research note last week, Deutsche Bank analyst Karl Keirstead raised the issue about competition from Amazon, which offers a free Linux open-source operating system and support via its cloud-based Amazon Web Services platform. He concluded that the number of migrations from RHEL to Amazon Linux remains quite modest and mostly confined to small enterprise customers. “Larger RHEL-centric customers have only a small mix of workloads on Amazon Web Services, they value operating system consistency across their hybrid infrastructures, they prefer support from Red Hat and/or view the cost savings of a switch as being too modest to be worth the hassle,” Keirstead wrote. He reiterated a buy rating on Red Hat stock, with a 95 price target. Image provided by Shutterstock .  

Google Cloud Chief Ignites Expansion To Catch Amazon, Microsoft

Alphabet ( GOOGL ) will open data centers in Oregon, Japan and elsewhere before the end of 2017 to support its cloud infrastructure and app platforms and take on Amazon.com ( AMZN ), the industry’s current leader, according to a news report Tuesday. Google has three “cloud regions” now and plans to add another 10 cloud regions over the next 12 to 18 months, either as facilities leased from other providers, or built and operated by Google, according to the Bloomberg report. “Cloud region” is the Google term for a data center equipped with computers and software that customers can rent over the Internet. Google’s new cloud chief Diane Greene – who also sits on the Alphabet board – will oversee the expansion, Bloomberg said. Greene co-founded VMware in 1998. “There was a pretty darn good vision in place and now I’m just bringing everybody together so that we all know what we’re doing,” Bloomberg quoted Greene as saying. “The cloud is a revolution, I mean it’s rivaling the industrial revolution, and it’s pretty fun being this involved.” The openings will increase the number of “cloud regions” run by Google to 15, according the Bloomberg report. Amazon currently has 12 regions and plans to open another five. Amazon unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now the biggest provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where customers rent computer servers and data storage systems accessed via the Internet. Microsoft ( MSFT ) ranks second, while Alphabet unit Google ranks third. Cloud computing, an increasingly popular way for companies to run their IT operations. That’s a $20 billion-a-year business forecast to grow 35 percent over the next year, according to Gartner Inc. Google is also working on tools that can broaden its corporate user base to include less technically savvy customers, and it’s embarked on a hiring spree aimed at selling and explaining these new products, according to the report. The Internet company is set to hold a conference in San Francisco for cloud customers starting Wednesday. Amazon stock rose 1.2% to close at 560.48 on Tuesday. Microsoft stock rose a fraction to close at 54.07. Alphabet stock fell a fraction to close at 760.05.