Archive for March 22, 2018

Malcolm Gladwell and Billy Beane join OpenText in Toronto for Enterprise World 2018

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 22, 2018 by itnerd

OpenText which is a leader in Enterprise Information Management (EIM), today announced that Malcolm Gladwell, author of five New York Times bestsellers and Billy Beane, legendary baseball executive will be keynote speakers at OpenText Enterprise World 2018. These world-class speakers join Mark J. Barrenechea, Vice Chair, CEO and CTO, OpenText on the Enterprise World stage, where he will address the future of technology, and the intelligent and connected enterprise.

Barrenechea will open Enterprise World 2018, and be joined on the first day by award-winning author Malcolm Gladwell, who brings his unsurpassed ability to be both entertaining and challenging to the Enterprise World stage. Gladwell is a much sought-after speaker, who took the business world by storm with his books The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.

Day two of the Enterprise World program features Billy Beane, one of the most progressive and talented baseball executives in the game today. Beane is credited with molding the Oakland Athletics into one of baseball’s most consistent winners by implementing a statistical methodology that has come to be known as the “Moneyball” philosophy. His compelling story was told in the best-selling novel and Oscar nominated film – Moneyball.

With over 90 industry experts delivering more than 200 breakout sessions, Enterprise World will provide both inspiration and professional development over the course of the three-day program.

  • Insight from top OpenText executives: Muhi Majzoub, EVP, Engineering, and Patricia Nagle, SVP, CMO, will offer insight on OpenText’s progress against its roadmap and provide their take on the evolving world of business, AI, and automation.
  • Industry-relevant sessions: The Enterprise World program features 10 tracks covering the wide range of EIM and Industry solutions. Each session is aligned by focus – Business or Technical – ensuring that attendees can garner actionable insight.
  • The OpenText Women in Technology Summit – July 12: The summit brings together prominent leaders for an important conversation about increasing, promoting and supporting women in technology to create an inclusive business environment. The day-long event will feature inspiring keynote speakers, including Megan Smith, Third Chief Technology Officer of the United States (2014–2017), CEO of Blendoor Stephanie Lampkin and Jodi Kovitz, CEO and Founder of #MoveTheDial. The summit will also feature interactive panel sessions and multiple networking opportunities.
  • Developer and Innovation Labs: The popular innovation and developer labs are returning to Enterprise World this year, where attendees can interact with the technologies that will help drive customer experience and enterprise automation. Attendees can see first-hand how cutting-edge low-code applications can transform their business.
  • Training course and workshops: Attendees can maximize their investments in OpenText solutions with informative and engaging training sessions on best-practices on use, implementation and administration.
  • Enterprise Expo: The exhibition hall at Enterprise World will feature in-depth information and resources from across OpenText’s pillars, as well as representatives from 20+ OpenText partners.
OpenText Enterprise World takes place July 10-12, 2018 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Ontario.

Registration for OpenText Enterprise World is now open and early-bird pricing is available.

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PC Optimum Issues Continue With The Mass Theft Of Points

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 22, 2018 by itnerd

It seems that the problem plagued PC Optimum program that is being rolled out by Loblaws has a new and serious issue to deal with. According to the CBC, points are being stolen and then the thieves go on a shopping spree:

CBC News interviewed eight people across Canada who say they’ve each had more than 100,000 points stolen from their accounts after Loblaws merged its two rewards programs — PC Plus and Shoppers Optimum — to form PC Optimum on Feb. 1.

The reported thefts are just one more problem plaguing Loblaws, which is already dealing with technical glitches with PC Optimum, and fallout from a bread price-fixing scandal, including related fallout over asking some people to send ID to collect a $25 gift card as compensation for the overpriced bread.

In the theft cases CBC News investigated, many of the stolen points were redeemed for products at Loblaws-owned stores in Quebec.

All the complainants reported what happened to PC Optimum, but they told CBC they were having difficulty getting their cases resolved. After CBC News contacted Loblaws this week, almost everyone quickly got their points back.

Despite the fact that Loblaws has “strong security measures in place”, there’s clearly an issue. And it isn’t the first time as Loblaws has been pwned before. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Loblaws needs to give whatever “strong security measures” that they have a very quick rethink as clearly they aren’t strong enough and haven’t been for a while now.

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Best Buy In The US Dumps Huawei Phones

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 22, 2018 by itnerd

Both CNBC and CNET are reporting that Best Buy will be parting ways with Huawei and won’t be selling their phones in their stores. This comes after AT&T and Verizon backed away from dealing with the Chinese phone maker.

This continues a pattern of pressure from the US government to keep Huawei out of the market due to spying concerns. And you know that this will really hurt as Best Buy is everywhere in the US and not having access to their stores will make it difficult for Huawei to get any traction in the US. But it also brings up another question. Huawei has a presence in Canada both on the retail side, and with telcos buying their gear. One wonders if that will start to change if the US continues to go down this path.

 

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Why Mark Zuckerberg’s Statement On Facebook’s Data Breach Is A #Fail

Posted in Commentary with tags on March 22, 2018 by itnerd

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence yesterday via a statement posted to his Facebook page, and by doing an interview with CNN. Now I’ll let you look at the statement and see his interview on CNN for yourself. But here’s why I think this response is a #fail:

  1. It’s late: This story broke almost 6 days ago and the leader of a company that has two billion people using his product was nowhere to be seen or heard from. That lead to #WheresZuck trending on Twitter (ironically). If people are to trust the leader of a company in a crisis, that leader needs to be seen and heard from in real time and not days later. Otherwise their credibility as a leader takes a serious hit. No to mention the credibility of the company. Not to mention that the delayed statement from Zuckerberg is now a story that’s almost as big as the data breach.
  2. The statement can be seen as disingenuous: If you read it, the statement sounds like it was written by his lawyer and not by Zuckerberg. It sets out some specifics about how the breach occurred and offers some vague solutions for preventing it from happening again. The bottom line is that it reads as if it is meant to cover Zuckerberg’s posterior rather than to own up to the mistakes that his company made.
  3. The apology was slow in coming: Zuckerberg never apologizes in the statement that he posted to Facebook. The closest he comes to that is to say “I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I’m responsible for what happens on our platform.” Though to be fair, he does say that he’s “really sorry” later on CNN. But you’d think that he’d be using the words “I’m sorry” on every platform that he has access to starting with his own as that would make people believe that he is truly remorseful about what has happened.
  4. It brings up the ghosts of crises past: One of the things that the statement that he posted on Facebook made me think of was that Zuckerberg himself once said people who willingly hand over their personal data “dumb f—-.” And that many of the same excuses that he used at that time are in play here. Which implies that he hasn’t learned anything from the past. Which means that we have question if he is serious about fixing this going forward.

The bottom line is that Zuckerberg and company come out of this sounding like they are more sorry about the $50 billion in market cap that Facebook stock has lost, and all the unwanted attention that they’re now getting from various governments and regulatory agencies rather than the data breach and how their users feel about that. By the time this is over, this will go down as the textbook case study as how not to handle a crisis. And if Zuckerberg is particularly unlucky, his #fail of a response to this crisis may result in the moment that Facebook jumps the shark because their users feel that they have no choice but to quit Facebook.

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