By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• A survey found that 87% of Amazon employees expect their productivity to slide when they return to the office (RTO). And 45% said that even with RTO, they’ll still be in a different location than their manager. Unsurprisingly, 48% of staff are actively seeking new jobs. 
• Maybe that last stat will help with a minor detail: Locations such as New York and Atlanta don’t actually have the room for everybody to RTO. 
• Apple is using custom AI chips from AWS to power its search services. It’s evaluating the newest chip to pretrain Apple Intelligence and similar models. This could make AWS more competitive with NVIDIA. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Product design software provider Ansys and generative AI simulation platform Cognata are collaborating with Microsoft on a web-based testing solution for autonomous vehicle sensors and driver assistance systems. 
• Philips has expanded its collaboration with AWS to unify workflows for integrated diagnostics, such as bringing together pathology, cardiology, and radiology.  
• GitLab is combining its Duo AI Assistant with Amazon Q to “accelerate software innovation and developer productivity.”
• Microsoft bought 485,000 NVIDIA AI chips—twice as many as Meta. 
• Marvell—not the cool superhero franchise (that’s one “l,” Marvel), but the “leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions”—has signed a five-year deal with AWS. Marvell will supply essential silicon technologies to AWS while using the cloud company’s scalable compute capabilities to design new stuff. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Let’s start with the good news: Microsoft patched three flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps Web API. Yay! 
• Now, for everything else: Microsoft says passwords are over, and it will delete them for ONE BILLION users (say that like Dr. Evil). They’ll be replaced by passkeys that use biometrics and PINs. 
• That plan might work after Microsoft addresses weaknesses in its multi-factor authentication (MFA) process. Hackers found a way to bypass a couple flaws in the MFA alert systems and gained unauthorized access into Windows accounts. 
• AWS will not deploy Microsoft 365 for at least another year—not until Microsoft fixes all the security issues that AWS has identified. 

World domination 

• Somehow, Microsoft has become the first big tech company to receive certification from South Korea’s Cloud Security Assurance Program. Not only that, but South Korea’s public institutions—which face “constant cybersecurity threat from North Korea”—will use Azure. 
• Two French “cybercrime gangs”—ShinyHunters and The Nemesis, both of which sound like great band names—stole AWS credentials by scanning millions of websites for vulnerabilities. But they got caught after misconfiguring the Amazon S3 buckets that held the stolen data. “We’re the wet bandits! That’s W-E-T….” 
• Norwegian-owned telecom company Telenor is moving all of its TV streaming services to the AWS Cloud. 
• After moving one million 5G customers to the AWS Cloud, Telefonica Germany is working with AWS to test quantum technologies on its mobile network. Just in time: Google announced Willow, its latest quantum chip. 

New stuff 

• Quantum computing hype is starting to replace AI hype. The new AWS Quantum Embark program will help businesses learn how to use the technology when it’s ready, including pinpointing use cases and figuring out technical enablement. 
• The AWS Education Equity Initiative has committed $100M to training students in underserved communities in AI, cloud computing, and more. Oh, but don’t think a penny of this will go toward teachers—no, no. This is $100M in cloud credits. The way AWS pushes cloud credits, you’d think it’s the new dogecoin. ::Fans last spark of willpower to stay alive:: 
• Coming soon is Azure OpenAI’s o1 multimodal model, which early adopter customers say provides improved response accuracy and can fulfill complex requests, such as automating tasks for lawyers. 
• Hope you’re not thirsty! Water usage has been a big concern for data centers, especially with the advent of mainstream AI. Currently, Microsoft consumes 125 million liters per data center annually. Lucky for us, Microsoft is planning to apply a zero-water design for data centers starting in 2027. 
• AWS is also looking at resource optimization for power and cooling, such as direct-to-chip cooling for energy efficiency. 
• Azure AI Agent Service helps developers build and deploy AI agents without having to manage compute or storage. 
• AWS has created a “Buy with AWS” button that partners can add to their websites, making it easier for customers to make purchases through their AWS accounts. 
• Security, at your service: AWS launched Security Incident Response, which helps security teams resolve ransomware attacks and other security intrusions. This journalist says that the new service isn’t too different from what other incident response services have to offer, including those from AWS partners. 
• AWS customers can upload their data to physical terminals called Data Transfer Terminals. It requires a scheduled date and time at a place where there are no signs for any kind of terminal because it’s a secret mission-type thing. Seriously: Look at these pictures! 
• A total of 10 new products (via five keynote speeches) were unveiled at re:Invent (wow, they are SO edgy, starting the name with a lowercase letter). Read a summary in TechCrunch (and also here), which felt like the only news source heavily covering re:Invent this year. 
• The general availability of Trainium2 AI chip-powered EC2 instances was announced at re:Invent, along with Trainium3 chips and “UltraServers,” which allow customers to connect multiple servers to a giant one. 
• Amazon Nova is a foundational model only available on Amazon Bedrock that lowers costs and latency for generative AI tasks. 
• Amazon Aurora DSQL is a new, serverless distributed SQL database that’s four times faster than “leading distributed databases” such as Google Spanner. 
• Oracle has released a limited preview of its Oracle Database@AWS. Customers can connect their enterprise data in Oracle to the AWS Cloud. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Saifr, which provides financial compliance technology, added its AI models to Microsoft’s Azure AI model catalog. 
• New to Microsoft Marketplace: Keyless, a biometric authentication solution; DigiCert ONE, a trust management platform; and Aquant’s Service Co-Pilot, an AI model that improves troubleshooting and proactive maintenance. 
• Marchex, an AI and analytics provider for vertical markets, joined the Microsoft Cloud AI Partner Program. 
• Mirakl’s Marketplace Platform, which helps businesses manage marketplace and dropship operations, is now in AWS Marketplace. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Trazillionaire Elon Musk has upped the ante on his lawsuit with OpenAI, because he apparently has nothing better to do before he starts running our government so deep into the ground that it touches the Earth’s lava core. He claims that both Microsoft and OpenAI have prevented competition from surviving in the market—in addition to prioritizing profits over the public good. Kind of like…releasing self-driving cars that burst into flames and run people over…BUT I DIGRESS.
• The principal just walked in and asked Microsoft to step outside—the US Federal Trade Commission has its sights set on the technology company’s anticompetitive practices, which include Azure’s restrictive licensing. In a couple months, I’m sure the Department of Government Efficiency will be thrilled to help. 
• Remember all those AWS employees who were “so excited” about the return to the office (RTO)? Well, they might be surprised to hear that a bunch of “distraught” employees wrote an open letter to CEO Matt Garman being like, WTF, dude. The RTO deadline is in January, which is also when the TikTok ban starts, so I hope you like misery. 
• Between January and August of this year, Amazon cut its US advertising budget by 20%. Including its AWS arm, Amazon’s budget for all types of promotional costs has decreased by millions. 
• Increased spending on AI will slow Microsoft’s growth this quarter. Financially, the company can’t address its AI capacity constraints until the second quarter. 
• It hasn’t been announced yet, but Microsoft will use HarperCollins books to train a mysterious AI model. Authors can opt in for the low, low price of one human soul. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Amazon doubled its investment in AI startup Anthropic with another $4B in funding. Moving forward, Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models.
• This is just in time to give US intelligence the power of generative AI, along with Palantir. The press release can’t actually tell us what the CIA will do with this technology, so hats off to the author, who somehow managed to craft six paragraphs of absolutely nothing but filler text.
• On the other side of the spectrum, the press release about the expanded partnership between AWS and MongoDB tells you waaaay more than you want to know.
• Nokia will provide routers and switches for Azure datacenters in an extended agreement between the two companies. This is funny because Amazon sued Nokia a few months ago for patent grabbing. Which happened a year after Nokia sued Amazon for patent infringement—and blogged about it! Let’s all just sue each other back and forth forever until we die.
• AWS announced a Generative AI Partner Innovation Alliance that will help customers build their own AI solutions. It’s launching with nine partners, one of them being a government intelligence and weapons systems contractor, which makes complete sense because we are the worst.
• Cognizant is partnering with AWS to deliver smart manufacturing capabilities for the industrial sector. Maybe they can smartly manufacture a way for me to get out of this country.
• Technology and communications company Lumen will supply AWS with its fiber network to improve datacenter connectivity. In turn, Lumen will use AWS solutions, including those for generative AI, to modernize its systems.
• Outbrain has agreed to improve its advertising platform by scaling its operations on Azure and enhancing its services with generative AI solutions from Microsoft.
• Money launderers, we just wanna get to know ya. Is green your favorite color? AWS is partnering with Binance to help the crypto platform better screen customers using an AI integration. This comes after a shakeup in Nigeria, where one Binance exec escaped detention and left the country while another was thrown in prison for “suspicious cash flows.” But, please, focus on the customers.
• Europeans want a more compliant cloud. They’ll get one by the end of 2025, when the AWS Europe Sovereign Cloud launches, complete with regulatory-friendly partner solutions in its Marketplace.
• It’s now easier for AWS customers to extend their on-premises Nutanix environment to the cloud. Thank you, Nutanix!!!!!
• A collaboration between Microsoft and Kyndryl makes it easier for customers to extend their on-premises environment to Azure. 

World domination 

• Microsoft ran out of places to shove Copilot, so it has expanded to a larger market—the limitless universe. In partnership with NASA, “Earth Copilot” will help us collect petabytes of data from observation satellites and make it easier for the general public to access it.
• If you Google news out of Sunbury, Ohio, you’ll mostly find obituaries and an inordinate number of animal-hoarding instances (What? Why? How?). Aside from that, you’ll learn that AWS is going to open a $2B datacenter there, which will be finished in 2028.
• AWS is giving away $110M in free computing power to researchers so long as they use Trainium AI chips. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• I need to learn how to code or something for Microsoft’s bug bounty program, which is awarding $4M to those who uncover security flaws. Look, if I win this thing and go on vacation and return to work suddenly looking a decade younger, I did NOT get a facelift, I just rested…with whoever Lindsay Lohan has been resting with. And if I DID get a facelift…no I didn’t.
• As I write this, millions of personal data points are up for grabs, thanks to developers who used Power Pages to build a website without implementing proper access controls. 

New stuff 

• It was a party at Ignite, starting with Microsoft’s unveiling of a custom AMD processor for virtual machine instances and two Microsoft-made chips, which is very demure and mindful of them.
• Azure AI Student has been packaged with other services and rebranded as Azure AI Foundry.
• Azure Local is a new cloud computing platform that allows companies to extend Azure to their on-premises and edge environments.
• Microsoft launched not one, but two infrastructure chips, meant to accelerate AI adoption and increase security.
• Leaving no stone unturned and no career unthreatened, Microsoft is building AI agents for lots of specific tasks, from real-time translations using your voice to processing invoice approvals and customer returns. Does Microsoft know that we, uh, need to like, buy food and stuff? To live? Pretty please, may we?
• It also introduced new AI models for industry. It has been building these pre-trained, fine-tuned models with big partners such as Siemens and Bayer.
• Fabric Databases, an addition to Microsoft Fabric, provisions autonomous databases in seconds.
• Redis can now be fully managed by Azure.
• Not on my 2024 bingo card (then again, neither was the CEO of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation becoming the head of education), but AWS will make it possible for Amazon Q to integrate with Microsoft Office 365.
• AWS App Studio is now generally available. It uses generative AI to build enterprise-grade apps. 

Professional Pivots 

AWS has hired Julia White (who killed Mr. Body in the library with the candlestick) as the company’s new chief marketing officer and VP. She previously spent 20 years at Microsoft and several years at SAP. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Splunk’s security observability and security platform is now available on Azure. 
• AI governance company Saidot can now integrate with Azure AI. 

New to Azure Marketplace 

• IBM subsidiary Apptio’s Targetprocess solution, which helps finance teams plan and manage budgets
• DataChant’s BI Pixie, which sounds like a little booster for Power BI
• Awardco, for employee recognition and rewards
• Shift Technology offers several products for property and casualty insurers
• Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux AI, a foundation model platform
• Cribl, which is too close to an offensive term for my comfort, is a data engine for IT and security
• IntelePeer’s SmartAgent and SmartOffice, which offer AI-powered communications automation 

New to AWS Marketplace 

• Jitterbit, which is also now an AWS Partner, a SaaS service that solves “hyperautomation issues”
• SugarCRM’s Sugar Sell and Sugar Market
• AttackIQ, which provides breach and attack simulation solutions
• Coder, an open-source platform for self-hosted development environments 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• This month, Satya Nadella was like “Stoppppp giving me money” but the Microsoft board was like “Shut uppppp here are some cash wads to dry your tears.” Yes, it’s true: After asking for a pay reduction, Nadella instead got a 63% raise totaling $79.1M. It would have been $5.5M higher but he lost that incentive because of the company’s security issues. 
• AWS CEO Matt Garman said employees who don’t like the return to the office (RTO) mandate should make sure the door doesn’t slam their booties on the way out. 
• The response to “Well, then just quit” was “OK”: The company’s VP of AI dipped, along with a top exec in telecom for AWS. And a survey found that 73% of employees are thinking about leaving. Nah-uh, says Garman, who insists, in a conveniently leaked transcript, that 90% want—nay, are excited about!—RTO. 
• While Amazon is recalling people to the office, Microsoft EVP Scott Guthrie says don’t worry lil babies, I gotchu…with one caveat: Productivity must not drop. If it does, the floggings will continue until morale improves!!! 
• A flogging is exactly what Google is asking the EU to issue Microsoft, claiming that the cloud provider is giving Windows customers a choice between buying Azure or facing a 400% markup. 
• OpenAI will release its next-gen AI model, Orion, on Azure by December 2025. The model is expected to have 100 times more power, and be an “ultra-advanced model that approaches Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).” 
• That’s great and all (Is it, really?), except Azure’s CTO says the company is about to hit the power grid limit, tee hee. AI demands so much energy that the company may need to connect multiple data centers if it wants to train these advanced models. Energy needs underlie Microsoft’s nuclear energy efforts and its new virtual machines optimized for AI. 
• Meh, OpenAI is going full honey badger and doesn’t care—the company is telling Microsoft to move faster or move out of the way, and will start “lining up data centers and AI chips” outside of Microsoft. The New York Times says the bromance is starting to fray. 
• Despite this activity, some analysts think that interest in AI will dwindle as market demand corrects itself, forcing OpenAI to sell to Microsoft in the next three years. Or is this already happening? A Wall Street analyst with Oppenheimer lowered his projections for Microsoft in 2025 because Copilot sales fell below expectations. 
• Oh, look, exactly what I said would happen is happening. Researchers found that Whisper, OpenAI’s transcription tool that’s used by some medical centers, is whispering a whole bunch of CRAP. Eight out of every 10 audio transcriptions contained completely made-up chunks of text that were never spoken, including “racial commentary, violent rhetoric, and imagined medical treatments.” 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• When the military industrial complex says it’s too expensive, you know it’s too expensive. Yes, we’re still stuck on the Microsoft Goggles that cost $80,000 each. The Army said the price has to come down mucho if it’s going to order 121K of them. A deal would earn Microsoft $22B over a decade, also known as Satya Nadella’s next totally unwanted bonus that he absolutely must accept despite his protests. 
• Solutions provider Presidio signed a “huge deal” with AWS, applying its consulting services to the implementation of advanced AWS technology such as ML and AI. The duo will also develop industry-focused solutions. 
• Digital Domain has moved to AWS so it can build industry-specific Autonomous Virtual Humans. Because autonomous real humans must do pesky, work-disrupting things such as eat, sleep, shower, and feel feelings. 
• Smartsheet is partnering with AWS to connect with Amazon Q Business. This will let businesses answer queries on projects and other Smartsheet-related data. 
• Microsoft and NetApp collaborated with Tessell, a database-as-a-service platform, to create Copilot for Cloud Databases. 
• In China, now only enterprises, not individuals, can subscribe to OpenAI, which this article says will affect independent developers in the country. 
• Oncology technology company Ontada is collaborating with Microsoft using Azure AI to process unstructured oncology document components. I love document components! 
• Rezolve AI, which offers AI-powered solutions for commerce and retail, is using Azure to support its Brain Suite, helping increase digital customer engagement. 
• When the Beatles wrote you say you want a revolution, what they were REALLY talking about was Microsoft’s partnership with Medline to design a healthcare supply chain resiliency solution.
• AWS and SentinelOne are building on their existing partnership to improve AI-powered cybersecurity using the cloud provider’s AI infrastructure and SentinelOne’s Purple AI solution, which sounds like Prince invented it. 
• Databricks is using AWS Trainium AI chips so users can develop custom LLMs with Databricks’ Mosaic AI platform. 
• Behavioral health technology provider Kipu Health is using AI services from AWS to reduce customers’ administrative workloads through transcription note-generation and chart summaries. 
• Omnichannel payment solutions provider Valor PayTech migrated to AWS. 
• To address the lack of diversity in cybersecurity, AWS and the NFL are collaborating to provide more support and inroads for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. 
• Smarsh, a communications data and intelligence platform, is working with AWS to bring AI to financial services for risk detection and compliance automation. Wow, that solved my insomnia right away. 

World domination 

• The US Department of Defense awarded a $7.2M contract to AWS for a “zero trust pilot” of AWS Virtual Private Cloud for the Pentagon. 
• The UK government signed a five-year agreement, or 1,825 tea times, with Microsoft to bring AI to the public sector as part of a broader modernization push. In Italy, Microsoft will invest 4.3B Euros over two years in regional AI infrastructure, but it must do so at top volume while fervently gesticulating its hands. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

Whoopsies! Microsoft lost a month’s worth of security logs for some of its customers. Which means there’s nothing to return to for…idk…root-cause analysis. 

New stuff 

• When it comes to nuclear power, mini meltdowns sound so much cuter than full-scale meltdowns. In an agreement with Dominion Energy, AWS will spend more than $500M to build small modular reactors that, with any luck, will be run by leprechauns (who will hopefully be piss tested every morning). 
• In a bid to capture some of Salesforce’s market share, Microsoft launched 10 ready-for-use autonomous AI agents for Dynamics 365. This comes just weeks after Salesforce announced its own autonomous agents, part of “the third wave of AI” that will move businesses beyond chatbots. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (who looks like a hitman nearing retirement in this picture) slammed Microsoft’s new product, calling it “Clippy 2.0” and claiming “it doesn’t work.” In lieu of these pre-built agents, organizations can now create their own using Copilot Studio. 
• As Microsoft and Salesforce beef up their autonomous agents, AWS has added capabilities for Amazon Q in Connect. The big reveal? Companies can customize smart assistants’ responses to brand guidelines, womp womp. Things don’t stop there—how about some Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect? This keeps joint customers from having to do the integration themselves and allows them to use one platform for both solutions. 
• Meanwhile, Google signed a $2.7B deal with Character.AI to drive forward its own agentic AI line of business. Google is basically paying a lot of money to hire the notable AI brainiacs leading Character.AI and to license the company’s technology. 
• Microsoft is coming to rescue us from AI’s bad side with new product capabilities that will correct hallucinations in real time. 
• Drasi is Microsoft’s new event-driven platform for data processing. It helps businesses track data activity to better understand changing needs. 
• IT admins can now use AWS Chatbot to manage AWS accounts from third-party apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. 

Professional pivots 

• It may have lost some, but AWS also won some: Pilar Schenk, formerly a COO at Cisco, is now VP of sales operations. And Jon Jones, formerly VP for GTM at AWS, is now VP and global head of AWS Startups. 
• OpenAI yoinked Microsoft’s VP of GenAI research. The company is being transparent about the fact that this move is focused on furthering AGI efforts. 

Best friends forever 

It was like Chrismukkah for the AWS Partner network this month. 

• Insight, which helps businesses migrate to the cloud, achieved AWS Premier Tier Service Partner status. 
• Matellio, a custom software-engineering studio, and Cloudtech, a cloud-modernization services firm, both achieved AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status. 
• Kasada, which helps defeat automated cyber threats, earned its AWS Security Competency. 
• Education technology company Everspring and appointment scheduling platform Coconut Software are now AWS Partners. 
• Cloudelligent, a managed services provider, achieved AWS Migration Competency status. Not to be confused with CloudHesive, which had its WAF validated by AWS (why does that sound inappropriate?). 
• Observability and OTel provider Embrace has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program and is also slapping its goods in AWS Marketplace. 

New to AWS Marketplace 

• Zoom’s Contact Center, so you can say “Sorry, I was on mute,” but now you can say it on AWS 
• Arduino Cloud, an all-in-one platform for building IoT applications 
• Zimperium, a mobile security provider 
• StackGen’s Generative Infrastructure from Code, which eliminates developer bottlenecks 
• Finzly’s FedNow Service, an instant payment service 

New to Azure Marketplace 

• Addlly AI, a customizable, zero-prompt AI playground that simplifies content generation 
• Ascendion AVA+ GenAI Core Platform, which helps businesses customize AI for use cases
• SqlSafeKeep, a compliance solution for developers and data scientists
• Mattermost, which offers secure collaboration and communication for government and other critical sectors 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• It’s a big deal, literally: In a multi-billion-dollar co-investment, Intel has agreed to produce a custom AI chip for AWS. Following the news, Intel stock rose 14%. 
• On the brink of a history-making election and a world war, you know what we need? More dormant nuclear power plants to start back up. Despite a meltdown in 1979, Microsoft has entered a new energy-sharing agreement with Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island to produce clean energy that will power datacenters for AI. 
• You know what else we need? To never, ever let go of the HoloLens headsets for the Army. Even though it’s been an expensive, years-long failure, I say we keep going—and Microsoft agrees. It recently partnered with Palmer Luckey, an American entrepreneur who makes interesting facial-hair choices, to embed new software into the system that will “enhance soldiers,” much like “Starship troopers,” because war is a funny ha-ha movie. 
• SaaS log analytics platform Sumo Logic is strategically collaborating with AWS to enhance its services with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Security Lake. Also, Sumo Logic went full overachiever and earned three competencies in Cloud Operations for education, retail, and government. 
• Vodafone is unleashing the raw power of Microsoft 365 Copilot to help 68,000 employees get more work done. 
• AWS is the last of the three big cloud providers to say uncle to Oracle. Now, AWS customers can access Oracle’s databases on AWS infrastructure with zero-ETL integration. The companies will co-market the offering. 
• NetApp has signed an agreement with AWS to expand and accelerate generative AI efforts. This will increase AWS Marketplace purchases and make it easier for AWS customers to implement NetApp solutions. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• No single entity can fund the compute power AI needs, like, ruhl soon. So, conspiracy theory subject fan-favorite BlackRock has partnered with Microsoft to launch the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP). The program wants to raise $30 billion for datacenters and related energy infrastructure to power hungry, hungry hippos AI. NVIDIA will serve as an advisor for the initiative. I’m wondering if the first thing they’d advise is to have THOUGHT ABOUT THIS YEARS AGO before AI was forced into every Microsoft app imaginable, but maybe not. 
• After all, not everybody is down with this AI-in-everything approach. Customers testing Microsoft’s AI-shoving in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint have had a “lukewarm response” due to performance and cost issues. 
• Nonetheless, Microsoft says, ACTUALLY you’re wrong, people love us. People want to BE us—just look at these gains.
• And then Marc Benioff was like, that’s great, but no. The Salesforce CEO said that Microsoft’s AI products and strategy have “disappointed many customers,” then pivoted to why we should buy his sh*t instead, so…sounds like a bias-free assessment to me. 
• Will Amazon see a mass employee exodus after demanding a return to the office? A memo from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that everyone must come back in person, five days a week, by January 2, 2025, or GTFO. The company is also eliminating some management positions and bringing back assigned desks. 
• Companies that want to do new, shiny things with AI will need to cut budgets elsewhere if they hope to afford true transformation, says Microsoft’s VP for Azure. He also said some things that led his PR team to spontaneously combust, such as warning customers that there’s a risk AI could “do something unpredictable” and that organizations are encouraged to review their content because of Microsoft’s lack of transparency around data use. Finally, some honesty around here. 
• In 2024, more job postings require Azure skills and fewer are requiring AWS skills, compared to 2017. 
• Gartner named Microsoft a Magic Quadrant leader for container management and named AWS a Magic Quadrant leader for AI code assistants. 
• On-prem is back, baby! So says AWS. AWS customers are increasingly returning to on-premises infrastructure, which includes 29% of all cloud customers (not just AWS) in the UK. In EMEA, more than half of companies want to deploy workloads on legacy infrastructure. 
• Some rando in Forbes who keeps referring to “we” predicts Microsoft Azure will reach $200B in revenue in the next three years. Good thing you can use wads of cash to plug leaks in nuclear power plants. 
• Microsoft isn’t the only cloud computing company going nuclear—AWS is looking to hire a principal nuclear engineer for its datacenters. In March, the cloud provider acquired an entire nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. 

World domination 

• South African gold-mining firm Gold Fields is moving to AWS. I’d expected the press release to give it a greenwashing spin, but it was good enough to spare us the bullsh*t. 
• Brazil is getting even more datacenters after AWS pours $1.8 billion into expanding infrastructure. 
• AWS announced that it will invest more than $10 billion into AI infrastructure in the UK through 2028. 
• Oooooooo, high-speed Japanese trains! The Central Japan Railway Company is using AWS for its Yamanashi Maglev Line. The transportation company will use IoT, AI, and ML technology from AWS to reduce maintenance costs and improve operations. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Lots of people didn’t have their precious apps for nearly eight hours when a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack hit Azure. Even the UK’s Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service went down, leaving judges to sit in their wigs for HOURS with nothing to do! Microsoft said Azure’s defense response made it worse. 
• To prevent a repeat of the CrowdStrike debacle, Microsoft held a closed summit with its security partners and government officials about better collaboration for testing and deployment. Actions will include investments in anti-tampering protections, such as hiring a dad who can hear you turning up the thermostat from a different room. 
• Microsoft released a progress report six months after its promise to make security a priority across the board, which include improved audit logs, a security skilling academy, and reduced token access. Good thing it hasn’t reduced tokin’ access, or I’d be super sad. 

New stuff 

• New upgrades to Copilot include agents that you can boss around, an upgraded LLM, meeting summaries, and more.
• AWS is offering more value to partners through its new Global Passport Program. A select number of international ISVs will participate. The program includes guidance, strategic support, and resources, such as market-evaluation workshops and multi-region deployments. 
• You’ll be interested to know that Amazon Connect now supports AWS CloudFormation. JK, you won’t be interested to know. 
• Azure Advisor Well-Architected Assessment is in public preview. It provides tailored guidance to optimize cloud infrastructure. 
• Is it Fashion Week? Because Microsoft launched three new models for its open-source Phi 3.5 series to help developers with multilingual processing and video analysis, among other tasks. 
• AWS announced Parallel Computing Service, which lets customers set up and manage high-performance computing clusters. 

Professional pivots 

• Carolina Dybeck Happe has left GE to become Microsoft’s new executive VP and COO. The real question is: How legit is her LinkedIn picture? It does not disappoint. 
• Thierry Pellegrino has become the global head of advanced computing at AWS. 

Best friends forever 

• The NFL is using AWS to build a bunch of stuff for the most boring game outside of golf. Tackle Probability is an AI-powered tool that analyzes some boring game stuff. The game giant also developed Digital Athlete to improve player safety, but player safety seems like it starts with not having two 300-lb men slam into each other at top speed for the 100th time in their careers. But I’m no doctor. 
• Digital transformation solutions provider Trianz has integrated its Concierto platform with AWS. Concierto is a zero-code SaaS platform that enables “lightning fast migrations to the cloud.” I’ll forgive the hyperbole only because this had me imagine a company putting its computers in a DeLorean…then it drives really, really fast toward the clock tower…then it’s the future and it has migrated. 
• Cisco has started offering its AppDynamics application management suite as part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
• Polarin by Lightstorm, which for some reason sounds like the sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas in my weird brain, is in Azure Marketplace. It’s a cloud network infrastructure platform, which is def not as fun as my sequel.
• Kong, which develops API technologies and isn’t that giant rubber toy you hide dog treats in, has made its Dedicated Cloud Gateways available for Azure.
• Australian biz-tech provider Brennan earned its Azure Data Warehouse Migration Specialization. 
• Our friends at Pinecone have made the company’s serverless vector database available on Azure. 
• Project-management tech provider LoadSpring Solutions now integrates with Microsoft Azure. 
• Belden has integrated its CloudRail software with AWS IoT SiteWise.
• AI development platform Kore.ai’s XO Automation and Contact Centre AI is now in AWS Marketplace.

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Reports of slowing Azure growth following Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report, plus “light sales guidance,” led the stock to dip 5%. Even though earnings grew 10% YoY and cloud sales grew 30% that growth is smaller compared to the previous quarter’s growth. In particular, Intelligent Cloud “missed expectations.” Capital expenditure in early AI is also detracting from profitability. 
  • In response, Microsoft is going to change how it reports numbers for its business segments, kind of like when I tell my husband I put money into savings this month but leave out the part where I bought a $50 concealer (IT GOT RAVE REVIEWS AND I NEED IT, OK?). 
• Regardless of how Microsoft structures its earnings, it should be fine as long as I keep overconsuming TikTok. As of March, the platform spent $20M per month on Azure OpenAI Service through Microsoft—a whopping 25% of the revenue Microsoft was generating through that business. Is an OpenAI rep on their way to Washington, DC to beg Congress not to ban TikTok as I type this? 
• Amazon earnings were bright, with AWS as the driving force behind a quarterly profit of $13.5B—a 19% increase YoY and above expectations. But all this demand isn’t necessarily a great thing, because AWS has “a titanic backlog” for its services. It’s unclear if that’s why AWS closed some of its services to new customers, such as Amazon S3 Select, or whether they plan on retiring those services down the road.  
• Meanwhile, The demand for AI is more than Microsoft can accommodate, so the cloud giant is spending billions to use third-party centers while it builds out more of its own.
• Like Microsoft, AWS is spending a significant amount on capital ($16.4B for Q2!), which includes building new data centers instead of refurbishing old ones. Next up: Hyderabad, India. 
  • Investments also include the race to create AI chips that are cheaper and faster than NVIDIA’s.
• In a leaked internal fireside chat, the AWS CEO told the company’s software developers that they need to find other skills because AI is going to start coding for them. “Upskill and learn new technologies” was the depth of the direction they received. Are you feeling left out? Don’t—the CEO said most white-collar jobs will look completely different in five to 10 years. Time to upskill and learn new technologies!!!!
• Microsoft wasn’t the only cloud provider to experience at outage at the end of July—AWS had connectivity issues for a day, preventing customers from accessing storage, databases, and other services. The guest contributor who wrote this article asked if this dependency on two clouds calls for a plan B, and lucky for him, he’s a man and doesn’t have to think about equitable access. OH YOU MEAN THE OTHER PLAN B…right right, yes, let’s get on that. 
• Where was Microsoft’s “the customer is not always right” mentality when I was a waitress? Delta’s CEO, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike exchanged some WORDS over July’s outage. Microsoft and CrowdtSrike are blaming Delta for its slow recovery, saying the airline refused Microsoft’s help. Delta is like “We don’t need your help, also, we hate you and this is your fault.” 
• Last year, Nokia and AWS decided to collaborate. Well, they collaborated a little too hard because now AWS is suing Nokia for stealing patented intellectual property. I almost never say this, but this article about the conflict is great from start to finish, and involves rowing teams beating each other with oars, a “criminal pivot” for a business strategy, and German indifference. Thanks Iain Morris.  

World domination 

• The US government is doing its darndest to keep advanced chips and other AI capabilities out of the hands of China, but as Jeff Goldblum’s character states in Jurassic Park, nature finds a way—and that way is AWS. They are exploiting a loophole in which Chinese companies can access technology like NVIDIA A100 chips through cloud providers who are fully allowed to operate in the country (or, through intermediary companies). But this velociraptor has figured out how to have babies y’all. 
• Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service achieved FedRAMP certification, which means some federal agencies now have permission to use it for sensitive datasets. The IRS started with the prompt, “Show me everyone who is not paying their taxes,” which yielded a list of extremely wealthy individuals. So, they adjusted the prompt to say “Compile a list of poor souls who make under $30k a year and were late filing by two days so we can rain hellfire upon them without fear of them being able to afford an accountant.” 
  • That FedRAMP certification came just in time for Microsoft and Palantir to sell cloud-enabled AI and data analytics to US defense and intelligence agencies. 
• AWS is talking to UK regulators like they lied about doing their homework. The cloud provider is “disappointed in [the investigation]” of the AWS-Anthropic relationship, claiming it is in no way anti-competitive, along with calls to “end the probe” like it’s being abducted by a UFO or something. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• A hacker group is exploiting vulnerabilities in Azure subdomains to spread disinformation on Android phones via push alerts that lead users to fake news sites. My favorite part about this story is that the fake news was about—wait for it—Harry Connick Jr. Don’t they want people to actually click on the links? No offense to HCJ, but WGAF? 
• Just two weeks after the famed CrowdStrike update outage, Microsoft experienced another global outage due to a cyberattack that affected Outlook, Azure, and Minecraft. Office workers and middle school nerds everywhere were distraught. The 10-hour downtime was the result of a DDoS attack and Microsoft’s “failure to properly defend against it.” Does everybody remember the recent Microsoft announcement that executive bonuses would be tied to security performance? Looks like you’re not getting that boat this year, David. 
• At its annual conference in Vegas, Black Hat discovered six critical vulnerabilities (they didn’t get the memo that that should have stayed in Vegas). Is AWS trying to be like Microsoft with all these security headlines? AWS, just be yourself. You don’t need to Single White Female your competitor, it’s OK, we like you for YOU. 
  • But then, attackers were able to grab AWS keys and access tokens in a data extortion campaign, as uncovered by Networks’ Unit 42 arm. 
• Is there anything more ironic (or, iconic) than an infected health bot? Privilege escalation flaws in Azure’s cloud-based AI Health Bot Service allowed unauthorized access to customers’ resources via a malicious attack. When users asked what they should do about a health problem, such as a rash, the health bot responded “Put a bird on it” 100% of the time (that was for my fellow Portlandia lovers only). A research engineer at cybersecurity firm Tenable says this is what happens when AI development is rushed. 

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• AWS is going to power GE HealthCare’s generative AI models via Amazon Bedrock, with the aim of improving patient care. Honestly, the bar for good healthcare is so low in this country that you could put an extra garbage can in the exam room and I’d call that improving patient care. 
• I guess Leeds Teaching Hospital in England wants to put a bird on everything now that it has moved entirely to Azure.
• Telecoms company Lumen Technologies is using Azure to drive AI adoption and innovation. In return, Microsoft will use Lumen’s Private Connectivity Fabric to strengthen connectivity capabilities among Microsoft data centers. 
• More than half of Y Combinator startups are accepting Microsoft’s cloud credits initiative, which aims to get promising young companies to build on Azure. 

New stuff  

• As AWS wins new clients in the public sector, it has decided to expand its cohort of government tech suppliers. The AWS Champions Program highlights vendors and public agencies who use AWS for civic advancement.  
• Microsoft Teams has a new app that unifies your personal and work accounts. Sounds…like…a great…idea… 
• Mithra, which sounds like some angry Greek goddess, is the newest platform from AWS. The CIO went on to explain what it does “in simplest terms” but it was not, in fact, the simplest terms, so figure it out for yourself. 
• Oracle has an official partnership with Microsoft but doesn’t yet offer its MySQL Heatwave for Azure. However, Oracle just announced it has made the database service available on AWS despite no official partnership with the cloud provider. MySQL Heatwave itself runs on AWS. 

Professional Pivots 

• Microsoft welcomed its new AI Transformation Officer, Pamela Maynard, formerly CEO of Avanade. 

Best Friends Forever 

New to Azure Marketplace: 

• Ivanti, which sounds like a cheap clothing brand that’s trying to pass for Italian high fashion, will help Microsoft customers break down barriers between IT and security. 
• iiDENTIFii, a company that apparently never wants to be Googled properly, is bringing its biometric identity authentication to Azure Marketplace. 
• Lumifi has added its managed detection and response services 
• Pathlock Cloud, which offers identity governance solutions, is on Azure Marketplace 
• Mobile device management company Jamf became a Microsoft Partner and will enter Azure Marketplace later this year.’

New to AWS Marketplace:  

• MicroStrategy ONE for Government, a managed SaaS solution for data security and governance 
• Versium’ REACH APIs (dang, y’all don’t have to yell), a data enrichment and cleansing tool 
• Veritone’s enterprise AI solutions for media and entertainment companies 
• LastPass, a password and identity management solution 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• You win some, you lose some: Xerox is moving its legacy data-center workloads to Azure, which unfortunately doesn’t involve photocopying body parts and leaving the prints for other attorneys to discover (like when my dad used to take us to his office as kids: “It’s making people very uncomfortable, you have to stop”). Meanwhile, the Broad Institute at MIT is not renewing its Azure contract, with a TBD on where it goes next. 
• Microsoft has stepped down from its non-voting observer seat on OpenAI’s board. So, it gave up its role of doing nothing but getting the tea. Speculators say the OpenAI seat will go to an Apple executive following a recent deal between the two companies. And this might sting a little, but OpenAI is selling more of its AI models than Microsoft is. 
• That’s OK because Microsoft is busy making its own deals—starting with Adept, a young AI startup. I went to Adept’s website and I still have no idea what the company does. DM me if you can explain it like I’m five years old.
• Microsoft led a $40M investment in Armada, which provides off-grid, satellite-connected modular centers that customers can buy through Azure. Is this like the prepper of the tech world? 
• Criteo is collaborating with Microsoft Advertising. TL;DR: they’re using and selling each other’s products to retailers.
• Deloitte will use Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker in its products to help clients “augment their workflows.” Does anyone want their workflows augmented? I don’t. 
• After agreeing to essentially contract out its cloud services so Microsoft can keep offering generative AI, wouldntyaknowit, Oracle’s Autonomous Database has become available on Azure.
• Digital mapmaker TomTom signed a long-term deal with Microsoft to bring its maps and traffic data to Azure Maps and other Microsoft products. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• AWS is investigating whether or not Perplexity AI has been “scraping” websites that have tried to block the practice. Scraping, which in this case is not about cleaning out your bong with an unbent paper clip, is the act of extracting data for things like market research or content analysis. And it’s forbidden by AWS. Because Perplexity is an AWS customer, it must adhere to the cloud provider’s rules. Do as I say, not as I do, I guess.
• AWS, Google, and Microsoft are among several tech companies calling for industry-wide adoption of Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), a statement of greenhouse gas emissions that’s verified by a third party. 
• This is funny because some Amazon and AWS employees past and present are calling the company’s sustainability claims cap. (See how familiar I am with the lingo of today’s youth? How sigma of me). There have been walkouts and accusations of “creative accounting.” (I know someone who creatively accounted 34 times, but I’ll tell you about it later.) 
• Microsoft is scrapping the underwater data center it started in 2013, and in the same breath the spokesperson was basically like, “It worked, but also it didn’t work.” That last part I could have told you for free. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• By now, you know the details of the CrowdStrike/Microsoft debacle that affected almost nine-million devices—and ruined vacations, halted flights, stopped surgeries, paused banking, and crapped on emergency services. If you don’t, then you’ve been living under a rock, and I suggest you return to that rock because things are rough out here. 
• After advising customers to reboot at least 15 times to solve the issue, Microsoft and CrowdStrike realized that they’ll need to write some very large checks. (On top of the $22M settlement it paid to EU regulators for something else…. And also the $14M settlement it paid to California after penalizing workers who took medical or family care leave.) But, more importantly, the “blue screen of death” is looking like a solid Halloween costume right now. 
• It wasn’t just the faulty CrowdStrike update that caused problems: Azure and Microsoft 365 customers experienced a separate outage stemming from the Central US region, which greatly affected airlines. Let’s pour one out for anyone who had a plane ticket this past week. 

World domination 

• Microsoft is offering Chinese businesses a loophole to get around OpenAI’s exclusion of Chinese customers (even those using VPNs). But the US won’t allow China to access this advanced technology for long, because we can be next-level savage like that. 
• In the meantime, Microsoft is worming its way into Hong Kong schools by incorporating OpenAI into education services.
• Chile will soon have more than one of the world’s largest swimming pools—it will brag about a second AWS data center in 2026. And in Australia, AWS is building a high-security data center for the down-under government in a $2B, 10-year, top-secret project. This means nobody knows the location, except we do: it’s in the Outback, because where else would you secretly build a data center? 
• To get more public agencies on board with generative AI, AWS is doing what it does best: throwing money at it. The company announced a $50M investment in its Public Sector Impact Initiative, which is mostly about giving promotional credits to the government to use solutions like Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Q. 
• Remember that $1.5B investment Microsoft made in G42, an United Arab Emirates–based AI company? Republican lawmakers want to know what’s up with that. They demand info and they demand it NOW. Microsoft is all like, CHILL OUT we care about security…can’t you tell? 
• Google is giving off some big Pick Me energy, per my last leaked memo. In a 500M Euro effort to lure European cloud companies away from Microsoft, the companies stuck with Microsoft anyway. Google’s incentive was offered on the condition that the companies held their ground on the anti-trust allegations against Microsoft. Does anyone have some soap, because this is DIRTY. 

New stuff 

• AWS Graviton4 Cloud Processors for EC2 R8g are now generally available; AWS claims the combo is more energy efficient and more powerful—and they have receipts. AWS is also developing an even more powerful AI chip, Trainium3, which will compete with NVIDIA’s family of Blackwell chips. AWS is preparing its data centers for increased demand—such as using liquid-cooling and cold-plate technology. So much for net-zero by 2040. 
• Amazon Q can provide customer service agents with step-by-step guides on how to handle customer calls, and never in my life have I wanted an AI to hallucinate in any given scenario. “Step 3: Tell customer your butt itches and to please hold while you scratch it. Step 4: Hang up.” 
• AWS is also throwing credits at startups, again, to win market share away from Microsoft. 
• Welcome, App Studio! It’s the newest generative AI solution from AWS that promises to build you an app based on a written prompt. Why do I feel like this will be used for evil? 
• Avoiding all hyperbole, Automation Anywhere is “automating the impossible” using Azure OpenAI Service. Does that mean it will automate Elon Musk’s donations to food banks? 

Professional pivots 

• NVIDIA hired Howard Wright, formerly AWS VP and Global Head of Startups, to lead its startup ecosystem.
• Google has hired two executives away from competitors: Saurabh Tiwary, formerly of Microsoft’s Copilot arm, and Raj Pai, formerly of the EC2 arm at AWS. They’ll help lead Google’s cloud-based AI business. 

Best friends forever 

• AWS, Microsoft, Intel, Google, and other puppeteers of humanity have joined the Fintech Open Source Foundation, which aims to “enhance the financial service industry’s technology ecosystem through open-source initiatives.” (Because what banks need is more free shit.) In partnership with financial institutions, the foundation will set common standards. 
• I scream, you scream, we all scream for ISVs! Browse Microsoft’s 2024 Partners of the Year. 
• SourceFuse earned AWS Premier Tier Services Partner status. 
• CCL, a provider of IT and hybrid cloud services, is the first launch partner for Microsoft’s New Zealand cloud region.
• Soracom, a provider of advanced IoT connectivity, has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate program. 
• Telco Systems’ Edgility platform passed the AWS Foundational Technical Review validation for AWS IoT Greengrass and has joined the AWS Partner Network. 
• New to AWS Marketplace: Observo AI, which creates security and observability data pipelines. 

Additions to Azure Marketplace 

• Raffle AI, which specializes in chat assistants and search technology. 
• Adaptive’s Aeron, a suite of low-latency messaging tools for financial traders. 
• NIQ’s Activate platform, which provides insights for retailers and CPG companies.
• ClickHouse Cloud, which gives Azure customers options for deploying and managing their analytics workloads.
• SureImpact Nonprofit, which helps charities measure outcomes. 
• Forescout’s Risk and Exposure Management Solution. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• NinjaTech AI, which seems like a not-OK name for a company in 2024, is using machine learning chips from AWS for its new service, Ninja. (Wow, they’re really leaning into this.) Ninja can plan and execute (as ninjas sometimes do) everyday tasks such as scheduling meetings, conducting research, and completing coding tasks. I’ve heard humans also do this, but who needs them anymore! 
• HashiCorp and AWS are expanding their strategic collaboration to do stuff like create policy about architecting and configuring Terraform on AWS. You can count me out of that one. I’d rather blow-dry my eyeballs. 
• Will AT&T actually work in my neighborhood now that it’s moving its 5G to Microsoft? Microsoft is acquiring AT&T’s Network Cloud Technology and staff “to eventually handle all of the wireless carrier’s 5G traffic.” It’s worth noting that both AWS and Microsoft are competing for huge telecom clients as the industry deploys new 5G networks, but so far those deals “aren’t yet generating substantial revenue.” 
• MediaTek, a Taiwanese chip designer, is designing an ARM-based chip that will run Microsoft Windows OS. MediaTek stock has risen following this news, and I am willing to bet Nancy Pelosi—I mean her husband—conveniently bought some of that stock on a total whim, just total dumb luck, the week prior. 
• SAP has committed to using three types of AWS chips to support its SAP HANA Cloud. 
• To ensure capacity meets the demands of OpenAI users, Microsoft will run some of its workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.🤯 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OpenAI are facing an antitrust investigation in the US. The goal is to determine if the arrangements among these companies are meant to shut out competition in the AI industry. Apparently, that isn’t plainly obvious and we need a whole investigation for it. 
• Microsoft is cutting around 1,000 jobs in its Azure and HoloLens divisions. It needs to free up resources for AI initiatives. 
• AWS re:Inforce 2024 had a big security theme—what timing, given Microsoft’s highly public flailing and floundering in the space. The cloud provider announced it will push multi-factor authentication and hosted many sessions around security best practices. 

World domination 

• If the government wants to monitor Microsoft’s AI dominance, then the company will just go to Sweden, which has better meatballs anyhows. Microsoft is investing $3.2B to expand its AI infrastructure in places like Staffanstorp, which sounds like one of the houses in Harry Potter. 
• Is AWS the next Eurovision contestant? Break out the mullets and costumes that make you feel weird inside, because the cloud provider is setting up (more) shop in Italy, Spain, and Germany. After dedicating 15.7B Euros to its Spain Region, Germany is ponying up 8.8B Euros to scale its Frankfurt Region and will either expand its Milan data center or build a new one somewhere else in the boot. This is like my semester abroad, but without the absinthe and space brownies!! And without the data centers. Even I had limits. 
• AWS is also launching a Region in Taiwan. This is…a choice that interests me (although, Warren Buffet can be wrong). 
• French telecom provider Orange is partnering with AWS to offer cloud computing in Morocco and Senegal. Orange will use the AWS Wavelength platform and rely on its own data centers to provide services, since these are the only two places on earth that AWS hasn’t stomped on with data centers. YET. 
• Norwegian-owned telecom Telenor Group is using AWS technology to create a sovereign cloud environment. Together, they’ll offer customers security and sovereignty solutions. Also, these dudes look chill and nice, just hangin’ outside corporate HQ talking about Norwegian things like Vikings and fjords. I bet they do cool sovereign stuff. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Summer is the perfect time for grilling out, and I don’t just mean on the BBQ—Microsoft president Brad Smith was part of a good grilling from the House of Homeland Security Committee following cyberattacks on the federal government. A ProPublica investigation found that Smith and co. ignored important warnings that could have, if heeded, prevented the breach. The government was like Will you PRETTY PLEASE stop doing that shiz and Smith was like YES ALL EMPLOYEES WILL CARE NOW, I PINKY PROMISE. 
• Probably the biggest drama this past month was Microsoft’s “embarrassing” backpedaling of its Recall software on Copilot Plus PC, which can screenshot everything someone does on the new Qualcomm-powered laptops. Researchers labeled it a “security disaster” (Microsoft broke its pinky promise!!) because it makes stealing information a piece of cake for hackers. Microsoft rolled it back “in secret” and is now testing it. Can we just love the fact that a product named “Recall” was recalled? Like, immediately? 
• Well, just cut off that pinky because a researcher found a bug that allows hackers to spoof real Microsoft corporate emails, which means they can send phishing emails using real people’s email addresses. It only works when sending to Outlook addresses, which is only a few hundred million people, so…. (At the time of reporting, the bug hadn’t been patched.) 

Professional pivots 

• Now settled in his new position as CEO of AWS, Matt Garman shared some important details on sales team structure and executive changes. Settling out is Bratin Saha, a former AI general manager at AWS who has worked on Amazon Bedrock and other AI products. He‘s now the chief product and technology officer at DigitalOcean, a nascent but promising cloud competitor, according to analysts. 
• The director of Amazon EC2 product management, Chetan Kapoor, also told AWS peace out after eight years with the company. Nobody knows where he’s going—oh Chetan, you feather in the wind, you. 

New stuff 

• AWS introduced two new AI certifications for professionals who want to serve the AWS overlords build a career in AI. These free or low-cost training courses (Machine Learning Engineer and AI Practitioner) are meant to provide the “lack of expertise” businesses need to deploy and monitor models. 
• Microsoft announced some updates to Microsoft Fabric at Build 2024 that include customized workflows, a new module called Real-Time Intelligence, and the availability of Copilot for Power BI. 
• SAP has integrated its AI Core with foundation models in Amazon Bedrock, which it claims will help businesses improve their ERP platforms by driving efficiency. Gotta drive efficiency—otherwise, why are we on this rock? 
• Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model is now available in Amazon Bedrock. I was going to throw a party but instead decided to get a cup of water from the kitchen. 
• After I hydrate, maybe I can plan something special to celebrate the fact that Amazon Connect now has an Analytics Data Lake. CAN YOU IMAGINE THE INSIGHTS!?! I want to get hired as a data center analyst so I can create charts that show how many times a day angry customers use the phrases “This is bullshit” and “I’ve been on hold for 40 goddamn minutes” and stuff like that. First stop on the resume train: American Airlines. 
• As we descend into the eighth circle of hell, you’ll find AI-driven contact centers, where tortured souls wait forever to speak with someone but never will. Microsoft is taking Copilot to call centers to help chatbots scan manuals so they can better answer questions and field customer calls. 
• Not that anyone cares, especially me, but it’s now easier to manage the entire machine learning lifecycle if you’re a developer on AWS with the fully managed MLflow on Amazon SageMaker. 
• There are two new previews from Microsoft: a flex consumption plan for Azure Functions and a premium version of Azure Bastion virtual machine. Truly, truly life-changing. 

Best Friends Forever 

• An expanded collaboration between Microsoft and product design software provider Ansys will allow customers to deploy Ansys Access on Azure through the Azure Marketplace. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• “Stop drinking Cokes, Jane,” they say…but how can I when Microsoft has entered the chat? Coca-Cola signed a $1B, five-year deal (partially funded by me) to use Microsoft’s cloud computing and AI services. “But how can this poisonous drink get any better?” you may ask. Don’t worry, the amazing taste that lights up your entire brain and sends your pancreas into a tailspin won’t change—they’ll just be summarizing emails and whatnot. 
• Telefonica Germany is moving one million 5G customers to AWS. This is the first time an existing mobile operation has switched its core network to a public cloud. I bet the AWS person who led that deal gets drunk at bars and screams at locals, “DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I AM? I GOT THE TELEFONICA DEAL…IT’S THE FIRST…YOU PEOPLE DON’T KNOW…you don’t know….” ::sobs into melty gin and tonic:: 
• And what timing: AWS signed a multi-year deal with Mavenir—a cloud-native network infrastructure provider for networks—“to create a new telco-grade deployment model.” I still miss the good old days of Bananaphone. (Tell me that won’t be in your head for the next week.) 
• Like AWS, Microsoft is going heavy on industry. It recently developed copilot templates, integrations, and capabilities for areas such as manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and energy. Several industry players have announced deals this past month: Anglian Water in the UK is moving several workloads to Azure; Hexagon, a German manufacturing intelligence company, is rolling out applications using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service; and UK electrical retailer Currys is moving to Azure. 
• In an article written by a journalist who ignored 50 out of my 50 pitches while I worked in the depraved world of PR, we learn that News Corp has made a deal worth $250M with OpenAI. Per the five-year agreement, ChatGPT will use content from the empire that brought us Alex Jones. Reddit has a similar deal with ChatGPT, so fasten your seatbelts! 
• Bright Machines, a software and robotics company serving the manufacturing industry, is collaborating with Microsoft to create a software-defined manufacturing environment that spans the entire manufacturing lifecycle. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about this and I got: It’s like giving your factory a software upgrade—now it can finally stop asking for a break every five minutes! 👀👀👀 
• MongoDB and Microsoft announced an alliance with its MongoDB AI Applications Program, a “one-stop shop” for businesses wanting to build generative AI solutions. 
• Media and technology company Axel Springer is working with Microsoft “to support independent journalism around the world” (sureeeee) through AdTech and other AI-driven experiences for users, once referred to as “readers.” In the meantime, news publishers are concerned that Google’s new AI-powered search will be “catastrophic” to their website traffic. 
• If Broadcom dumped AWS, then AWS is out at the club with IBM taking selfies and posting them on Insta to make Broadcom jealous. The two have taken their relationship to the next level by “streamlining access to AI and hybrid cloud solutions.” How? IBM’s software products will be available in 92 countries through AWS Marketplace. Analysts view this as a “significant development” in the cloud industry. 
• AWS and CrowdStrike are speeding up their cybersecurity consolidation. AWS will integrate CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform for advanced security while CrowdStrike will leverage AI tools from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, to develop generative AI capabilities for its solutions. 

World domination 

• In a huge commitment to France, Microsoft will invest $4.3B in the country’s AI sector (which includes datacenter infrastructure and renewable energy). The goal is to attract foreign investment and establish an AI skilling initiative to train one million French peeps by the end of 2025. 
• Coming to Germany by 2025: an AWS “sovereign cloud,” which will be “physically and logically separate” from AWS regions. This will help AWS customers meet the country’s comparably stricter data-residency requirements, and hopefully persuade reluctant public agencies to move to the cloud. 
• When I visited Wisconsin, the best thing I saw was Katy Nally. The second-best thing I saw was a 12-person, 5-foot-tall beer bong, followed by a 50-pound cheese wheel. I guess Microsoft realized these advantages when it decided to invest $3.3B in a regional cloud-computing and AI hub (ChatGPT, show me how to set up this bong. Include the number of beers I’ll need to fill it.). Some money will also go to a manufacturing-focused AI Co-Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. 
• Microsoft is collecting datacenters like Pokémon cards. In a continued spending spree/unhinged datacenter obsession, Microsoft purchased more land outside Columbus, OH; is launching an Azure cloud region in Queretaro, Mexico; and is opening Thailand’s first regional datacenter. (But Microsoft is closing its Africa Development Centre in Lagos…without providing a reason.) 
• Amazon is spending almost $9B to expand its cloud infrastructure in Singapore, part of its larger investment in the Asia-Pacific region. 
• AWS has launched datacenters in Israel and plans to invest $7.2B through 2037. This will allow the Israeli government to migrate workloads to the cloud, run applications, and store data using in-country datacenters. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• After Uncle Sam essentially issued an ultimatum to Microsoft about its AI and cloud-computing base in China, Microsoft has asked nearly 1,000 of its China-based staff, who are largely Chinese engineers, to relocate to the US, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand. Since New Zealand is utopia, I have a plan: My husband and I will stack two-high in a trench coat and then travel to China to romance one of these engineers, who will then marry me (but kind of us; he’ll find out later), and then we can all get New Zealand citizenship! FLAWLESS PLAN. 
• Broadcom, which now owns VMware after a $61B deal, is moving its VMware workloads to Google Cloud—AND decided that it will take over sales of its VMware cloud product on AWS (among other policy changes that make me think Kendall Roy has taken over). This uber pissed off AWS, which sells a VMware Cloud on AWS service. As a result, AWS is incentivizing users of its own VMware Cloud on AWS service to move. This is a juicy drama and something I can get behind. I’m invested in this hot mess, and I’m ready for the next punch to be thrown between these two, because I’m a suburban working mother over 40 and I need this. 
• Meanwhile, Microsoft is also offering incentives to VMware customers that migrate and run their workloads using the Azure VMware Solutions service. 
• Last quarter, Microsoft brought in $26.7B in revenue (from cloud alone). Microsoft saw a 20% rise in share price…before announcing these figures at the earnings call. When you have that much money, you can afford to build a datacenter out of 50-pound cheese wheels. I’m just saying, you know, ideas. 
• On its quarterly earnings call, Amazon announced 17% revenue growth YoY for its cloud unit. 
• Is there…hope? Microsoft banned US police departments from using its Azure OpenAI Service for facial recognition via its terms of service. As someone who lives in a state where face masks could soon be banned in public FOR ANY REASON without exemption, I appreciate this solid, Microsoft. 👊
• Eight newspaper publishers are suing Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement. The papers, which include the Chicago Tribune and the NY Daily News, claim that the tech companies reuse the papers’ articles without permission and incorrectly attribute inaccurate information to them. 
• The Storytelling team at 2A is growing to love Perplexity AI, a search engine that reduces the work of Googling. But Microsoft has banned its employees from using the platform (which also happens to be a huge Azure OpenAI customer). Here’s why. 

New stuff 

• Microsoft launched Phi-3 Mini, the first of three “lightweight” AI models the company plans to release. What makes it teeny? It’s trained on a comparatively smaller data set than its bigger GPT cousin. In this case, it learned from children’s bedtime stories—but hopefully not that creepy one, Love You Forever, where the elderly mother straps a ladder to her car and drives to her fully adult son’s house in the middle of the night so she can climb through his window to cradle him. Anyway, these models are appealing because they’re cheaper to run and perform better on personal devices. Microsoft also released the new iteration of its ChatGPT offering, GPT-4o. It supports text and image, shifting how the model interacts with multimodal inputs. 
• Amazon Q Developer is now generally available. In a jargon-ridden post that would endlessly frustrate Forsyth Alexander, AWS announced this game-changing reimagining of the software development lifecycle. Amazon Q in QuickSight is also available and offers generative business-insight capabilities, such as answering questions the dashboard doesn’t explain and generating reports and executive summaries. 
• Don’t forget Amazon Q Business, which helps employees access company data, view summaries, and gain other business information by connecting to enterprise repositories. 
• Google thinks it can get more customers with honey than vinegar, so it has announced that it will support Azure and AWS clouds, letting businesses manage their security solutions across clouds. 
• After partnering with NVIDIA on integrations, the cloud giant is offering customers an AMD alternative for AI chips. AMD and NVIDIA are competitors, and this contentious move from Microsoft resulted from difficult-to-obtain (and costly) GPUs from NVIDIA. Perhaps this chip polyamory will be short lived once Microsoft starts selling its custom Cobalt 100 chips, which it directly compared to AWS Graviton chips. 
• Users can now import their own custom AI models into Amazon Bedrock. It’s only in preview, but tbh, I don’t know anyone who needs this today, so we’re good. 

Professional pivots 

• For no obvious reason (unless I’m dense), AWS CEO Adam Selipsky is leaving AWS and will be replaced by Matt Garman, SVP of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services. And Baskar Sridharan, formerly an engineering VP at Google Cloud, is now VP of AI/ML services and infrastructure at AWS. 
• Jason Taylor went from Meta to Microsoft. As corporate VP and deputy CTO, Taylor is responsible for pushing forward the next set of AI systems. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• Two congressmen on the House Homeland Security Committee have requested Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft, to testify at a public hearing—part of the government’s investigation of historic nation-state attacks. Anyone wanna play a drinking game where you take a shot every time Brad says, “I don’t recall”? (Or do you want to live?) 
• Internally, Microsoft will hold senior leadership accountable for cybersecurity moving forward, tying performance on security milestones to pay. 
• The company just released new Zero Trust guidance for its Department of Defense customers…. Weird, that’s the same amount of trust I have in the DoD! (I was a military wife, so I get a free pass on this statement.) 

Best Friends Forever 

• Siemens has expanded its partnership with Microsoft to make the Siemens Xcelerator as a Service portfolio of industry software available through Microsoft’s cloud and AI platform. 
• Cloud-computing services provider Rackspace Technology’s Foundry for AI has gained several new Microsoft specializations, including Analytics on Azure and AI and Machine Learning. 
• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will work with AWS to offer generative AI solutions to customers. But first, TCS must learn how to do that, LOL. That’s why AWS will help train “25,000 TCS employees [on] the latest cloud and GenAI skills.” 
• Generative AI copilot provider Moveworks has partnered with Microsoft, bringing its copilot to Microsoft Marketplace and integrating with Azure. 
• Platform engineering company Xoriant earned its Analytics on Microsoft Azure Advanced Specialization. 
• NVIDIA Healthcare integrated with Amazon SageMaker and AWS ParallelCluster to streamline ML model deployment and management. NVIDIA customers can also access prebuilt pipelines on AWS HealthOmics. (Don’t worry, if you’re a woman, doctors will still just tell you it’s “stress.”😒) 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

World domination 

• Microsoft is investing $1.5B in Abu Dhabi-based AI group G42, and according to this photo, the signing involved a Sheikh wearing sunglasses indoors. Style versus function debates aside, this continues the trend of private tech deals also acting as public geopolitical policy, whether it’s revoking licenses for Russian businesses or moving chip manufacturing away from China. This particular agreement only came after G42 severed ties with Chinese hardware providers, and is a bet on the strength of the US-UAE relationship. 
• Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman is like I DON’T NEED YOUR SUNGLASSES FRIENDS I CAN MAKE MY OWN SUNGLASSES FRIENDS. So he’s wooing Fortune 500 companies at three of his big city offices, pitching corporate applications of the technology. The company says that 92% of Fortune 500s already use the consumer version of its chatbot, ChatGPT. 
• Of course, Microsoft is doing this, too, starting with Copilot’s coding assistant, which is saving engineers hundreds of hours of coding per month. Soon Copilot will save engineers from all hours of coding, ifyouknowhatImean.  
• Side note: Google just launched Gemini Code Assist and CodeGemma. While they are marketed as “assistants” to engineers, they can write code on their own. 
• Deloitte is launching AWS Centers of Excellence (or, Centres, if you like crumpets, tea, and irrelevant monarchies) around the world to help businesses in emerging markets move to the cloud. 
• In February, AWS announced a $15B investment in Japan to support AI and cloud infrastructure. Microsoft is now coming in a distant second with a $2.9B investment in the country for the same reasons, plus skilling people. I hope the skilling sessions are held in cat cafes and everyone is in cosplay because we need more of that right now. 
• Microsoft is launching an AI hub in London, which will focus on product development and research led by the newly hired Mustafa Suleyman.  

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• What is the AWS plan for AI? Andy Jassy says the company has a three-layer strategy—a tiramisu of tech, if you will. 
• But third parties view it a little differently. This reporter provides an in-depth analysis of where AWS will fit in the competitive AI landscape. For now, it will help businesses support and scale AI, making it more accessible. But an interesting advantage for AWS is simply the current disadvantage of Microsoft: security, which taps into businesses’ number one hurdle to AI adoption. 
• Interestingly, software company Appian is working with AWS to bring generative AI to businesses, which involves combining Amazon Bedrock with Appian’s data fabric and large language models (LLMs). This “private AI” approach gives companies more control over their own data. 
• It is evident, though, that a major part of the AWS strategy is to lean on what partners can offer joint customers—particularly, AWS partner Anthropic.  
• First, AWS just announced that Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus is now available on Amazon Bedrock AI foundation models service, which will help AWS better compete with the two cloud providers that ARE offering their own generative AI capabilities. 
• Next, ZenDesk is collaborating with AWS and Anthropic to bring more speed, accuracy, and efficiency to its AI offerings. ZenDesk will use Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of LLMs and Amazon Bedrock to build and scale it. 
• And to get more startups to use Amazon Bedrock for AI, as well as Anthropic’s AI models, AWS is giving away up to $500K in credits per startup. This is a five-fold increase in giveaways since the year prior, and tops what Microsoft and Google are offering to startups. 
• Agilix Labs is collaborating with AWS for K-12, which is really just Agilix saying it operates on AWS. Thanks, that was definitely a must-know for me. 
• Super-fast computing that can make scientific calculations which would otherwise take millions of years to complete today is being used to solve the climate crisis…j/k it’s for businesses that want to make more money. Microsoft and Quantinuum say they’ve made a breakthrough that brings the futuristic tech closer to the commercial sector. I can barely contain my joy.  
• Is your business selling to other businesses? Do tornados and hackers have you feeling risky? Then you need the newest B2B risk management software from AWS and AXA, like, yesterday. 
• OctoAI is collaborating with AWS to help developers build and deploy AI models quickly and efficiently. 

Personnel Pivots 

• Formerly the president of web services in Japan for AWS, Tadao Nagasaki has moved over to OpenAI as president. I wish more people had LinkedIn photos like his, just adorable. 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• Amazon you little sneak, sneakin’ secrets and hitting that copy + paste—now you owe $525M. A court found AWS GUILTY AS CHARGED for stealing patented data storage technology from Kove to create Amazon S3. Did you know that, with Amazon S3, you only pay for the stolen secrets you use and it’s highly elastic so you can scale all your stolen patents seamlessly? 
• Microsoft has data center fever. Leaked documents reveal the company is going to use its additional IT capacity to expand—and indeed it is. Following the purchase of a big plot of land in Atlanta, the company acquired land in Johor, Malaysia. The deal is expected to be completed in 2042, only four years before an asteroid the size of a football field could hit Earth, with 1 in 600 odds. Look, I’m not weird, this is real and I don’t make the rules. Take it up with Neil deGrasse Tyson. 
• Meanwhile, Microsoft is reportedly undergoing a reorg to transfer people from Teams to Copilot as part of its continued AI push. 

New stuff  

• AWS has partnered with nonprofit Educause to develop a new tool that will help higher education institutions determine how ready they are to adopt generative AI (which of course must happen before they figure out how to save adjunct professors from applying for food stamps). The more you read the article, the more this tool sounds like a BuzzFeed survey but I’M SURE IT’S AMAZING. 
• Twist my arm, why don’t ya: AWS has typically been the cloud service provider most steadily distributing ARM chips, but now Google has entered the chat. Axion is not a body spray for men—it’s Google’s first ARM-based CPU designed in-house—and allegedly performs 30% faster than the leading ARM CPU. 
• Microsoft has updated its Azure AI Search to include more storage capacity, faster speed, and improved performance, all essential for application scalability. 
• Deadline Cloud, the newest shiny thing from AWS, is a fully managed service that helps customers set up, deploy, and scale rendering projects in minutes. 
• AWS has released a more cost-friendly version of its Amazon Aurora database that eliminates I/O charges. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

Microsoft announced its unified security operations platform for public preview which is a little LOL because:  

• The Midnight Blizzard attack is still ongoing, and at the same time, the government released a scathing federal report that says Microsoft could have fully prevented the Chinese state-linked hack last year that compromised many US agencies. 
• After being dubbed a national security threat, and following recent headlines like “The US Government Has a Microsoft Problem,” the tech company remediated a record 149 security flaws in April—just after it resolved a major security threat in Azure which was, of course, discovered by…not them. 
• Even Microsoft has had enough of its security problems and is embarking on the biggest security reboot in 20 years. Dubbed the “Secure Future Initiative,” the company’s program will use AI to detect cyberthreats and vulnerabilities—including in Microsoft products. Just so I have this straight, the plan is to use an emerging technology we still can’t fully control to solve a major cultural and technical security issue within one of the world’s largest companies. Am I right? Is that right? Just want to make sure I’m right. 

Best Friends Forever 

• Volumez, which sounds like a 90s brand that makes headphones (on which you can listen to Jock Jams, naturally. I had all the volumes, believe it) has joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program. 
• New to AWS Marketplace: DeepScribe, a clinical documentation solution; b.well, which unifies data across healthcare systems; Prove, a digital identity solution; and Wing Security, which comes in honey BBQ, buffalo, and garlic parmesan.  
• AWS and Salesforce continue to expand their partnership, this time by making select Salesforce products available in AWS Marketplace in the UK. 
• Drata is the first compliance automation platform to achieve the AWS Security Competency. 
• Cloud4C, an application-focused, cloud-managed services provider, has achieved AWS MSP status. 

Miscellany 

• Last Cloud cover, I mentioned that Microsoft was putting Azure IoT Central to bed without a transition plan, to the upset of Azure IoT Central die-hards. Psyche! Turns out, that was a faulty message. I suppose as far as faulty messages go, it could have been worse. 

By Jane Dornemann

Image by Suzanne Calkins

Wheelin’ and dealin’ 

• Accounting tech firm Sage, which serves SMBs, has partnered with AWS to build a domain-specific large language model using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Lex. What I really want is a collaboration with Sage that has them making things with SageMaker so we can say Sage is a maker of SageMaker stuff. And then Sage can turn around and do a big deal with McCormick spices, specifically in their sage-making department, so Sage can sell SageMaker to the world’s No. 1 sage maker. 
• AWS, Accenture, and Anthropic have formed a partnership to help businesses in regulated sectors, such as finance and healthcare, access advanced AI models using Bedrock from AWS and Claude 3 from Anthropic. Accenture will train its engineers to use these tools so they can offer implementation support.  
• This is part of the AWS plan to run the world’s “biggest AI playground,” starting with Bedrock. 
• There’s a leadership shakeup at Microsoft, starting with its hire of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection, who is now EVP and CEO of Microsoft AI. The company has also hired Karén Simonyan, another Inflection co-founder, as chief scientist. Pavan Davuluri is the new head of Windows and Surface. And it’s unclear if Mikhail Parakhin, who was the head of advertising and web, is staying with Microsoft or not. Microsoft also promoted Azure VP Girish Bablani to president. 
• After peeling off Inflection’s top two people, Microsoft agreed to pay the company $650M in cash to bring its AI models to Azure—and use most of its staff. So, basically this is what Mustafa’s new browsing history looks like.
• Inflection and OpenAI have to share the spotlight with others. Microsoft invested $16M in Mistral, a French AI company, to bring Mistral’s newest AI model to Azure. Geez, Azure is getting more models than NYC Fashion Week (I get one dad joke per newsletter). 
• This is part of Microsoft’s strategy to partner with many different AI companies. Microsoft will rely on these partners to enhance AI offerings while it focuses on building AI-essential infrastructure. 
• ALSO having entered a partnership with Microsoft, Mistral AI is providing AWS with its foundation models for tasks like code completion and text summarization. 
• And it’s wasting no time! Microsoft and OpenAI have plans to launch a $100B data center by 2028, which will include an AI supercomputer dubbed “Stargate.” Microsoft is largely footing the bill, which is about 100 times more than some of the biggest data centers, or about the same as my new health insurance deductible.  
• After entering a major partnership with Microsoft, NVIDIA is now partnered with AWS to bring its Blackwell GPU platform to the cloud provider, which will offer it with EC2 instances. The goal is to accelerate generative AI capabilities. Chuckin’ chips to all the big clouds…NVIDIA has major rizz and serious player energy and I am here for it. 
• E tu, Granicus? The “government experience” software and services provider is partnering with AWS to offer “engagement solutions” to the public sector. This will help the public sector do things like “customize citizen interactions.” In other words, it will help the government capture and correlate billions of our digital interactions. Should be fantastic, can’t wait. 

World domination 

• Kries from the Kremlin? In step with Amazon and Google, Microsoft has limited or removed access to more than 50 of its cloud products in Russia. Many Russian companies will find their keys for Dynamics 365, Azure, and other major platforms invalid. (However, this doesn’t address the Russian companies that had used foreign accounts to bypass any future restrictions.) While it seems like the private sector’s version of sanctions, these tech companies may be doing the Russian government a favor—the dictator, I mean president, wants to steer Russian businesses toward domestic solutions. I dunno, though…have you ever been on a Russian elevator? 
• Meanwhile, Chinese officials are telling government departments to stop using Intel, AMD, and Microsoft; they also want to drive domestic software and hardware production. They should make a TikTok about it… 
• AWS will launch an Infrastructure Region in Saudi Arabia by 2026. As part of its long-term commitment to the Kingdom, AWS will invest $5.3B there—a measly one-third of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s net worth. “Why don’t you take me to dinner first before you insult me,” I imagine Talal saying to Jeff Bezos. “Take me out on your quaint little sailboat Jeff and tell me about this cheap infrastructure plan, it amuses me,” he’d say.  
• More in our neck of the woods, AWS plunked down $650M to buy Talen Energy’s 1,200-acre data center campus in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Um, more interesting than that are the local news stories, forever my favorite. What’s going on in Luzerne County, you ask? A few things, like the installation of a toilet drop box for your ballots, an unruly hospital patient pulling the fire alarm, a drunken man kicking a state trooper, and a talent show!!! The data center will fit right in.  
• AWS will also open a new Direct Connect location in Hawaii, allowing businesses to establish a private, physical network connection between AWS and their data centers or offices. 
• Government agencies in the U.S. West region can use AWS Wickr, an encrypted communications service, following its FedRAMP authorization. Is there, like, a reason why the U.S. East can’t use it? Or will it just be approved in three hours because of the time difference? 

Gossip (for nerds) 

• AWS laid off hundreds of people, primarily in sales, marketing, and store technology teams. This is sad news for us over at 2A, and we hope to see those people we’ve enjoyed working with do big things wherever they go. 
• Microsoft will have to change how it markets its Teams and Office products following antitrust pressure from the European Union. The company has agreed to unbundle the two solutions, which makes Slack very happy. In the last decade, Microsoft has paid more than $2B in EU antitrust fines.  

New stuff  

• There is now an AWS Generative AI competency that businesses can earn, and the cloud giant claims it is the first to offer such a competency to partners.  
• Generative AI data company DataStax has achieved the new, totally hot and totally coveted Generative AI Competency. Crayon, an IT services company, has also colored itself competent. And so did Loka, a full-stack consultancy.  
• Microsoft designed a new safety feature that can better detect when AI is hallucinating and block malicious prompts. Prompts Shield will (try to) protect against indirect and direct attacks, in which users manipulate the AI to do something or use it to carry out a malicious attack, respectively. Here are some other safety tools. 
• This didn’t stop a self-described whistleblower at Microsoft from sounding the alarm on the harmful imagery Microsoft’s Copilot Designer can, and does, produce—even from benign requests.  
• Teams update: Microsoft has improved the AI features in Teams to offer message generation and smarter meeting summaries.  
• Businesses can move their data to other cloud providers for free, says AWS—and don’t think it’s out of the goodness of AWS’ heart. The company had to do this to comply with the European Data Act. 
• New capabilities are out for Amazon Connect, including a self-service, drag-and-drop tool to create Live Chats, along with some new plug-ins.  
• Copilot Pro is now available worldwide. Customers can use it to build their own copilots and embed them in Office apps.  
• Copilot is also ready for cybersecurity prime time, says the company that’s always getting hacked.  
• And Microsoft is developing a specialized strategy for bringing Copilot to finance teams, but its success depends on how customers use their data sources to generate results. 

Ma’am, I’m going to have to call security 

• To get even less work done, congressional staff are no longer allowed to use the Microsoft Copilot chatbot because of security concerns. This comes after limitations on ChatGPT usage.  
• YOINK! AWS has won Gee Rittenhouse away from his position of CEO at Skyhigh Security, after only two years there. Rittenhouse will join AWS as VP of enterprise security.  

Best Friends Forever 

• Box has integrated Azure OpenAI Service with its selection of AI tools, but remains committed to its terrible user experience.  
• Veeam, a data backup and restore software company, is adding Microsoft Copilot and AI services to offerings. 
• Cognizant is going to work more closely with Azure by creating a special platform for Azure.  
• Tidal, a SaaS platform that helps with cloud migration and application management, is now part of Microsoft’s Azure Landing Zone Accelerator program.   
• Philips and AWS are collaborating to bring better diagnostic capabilities, including improved digital pathology, to healthcare companies.  
• Leidos, a company that—and I quote—“addresses the world’s most vexing challenges,” has entered a multi-year strategic agreement with AWS to solve famine…oh wait, no, to accelerate innovation in the commercial market. My bad. The world is pretty short on innovation, though… 
• Danske Bank, which is Danish but not like the kind you have for breakfast, I mean like the country, is migrating all its stuff to AWS.  
• Cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf has made its entire portfolio available in AWS Marketplace. 
• Keeper Security, a cloud-based zero-trust software provider, has joined the AWS Partner Network.