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November 6, 2020
Reality sank in this week for software developers who built applications using Docker containers over the past few years: The free ride is over.
Earlier this year, Docker announced that it was going to impose new limits on how free users of its Docker Hub service would be able to access public container images stored in that repository, and those changes started rolling out Monday. The move comes almost exactly a year after Docker sold the enterprise version of its software business and 75% of its employees to Mirantis, leaving a much smaller company behind.
Developers had time to prepare, but many — especially users of the Kubernetes container management service — were still caught off guard this week by the new limits. In response, several vendors offered tips for getting around the issues involved, and AWS announced a plan to offer its own public container registry in the near future.
Containers were a huge step forward for modern software development. They allow developers to package all the building blocks needed to run an application into, well, a container, which can be deployed across a wide variety of cloud or self-managed servers. Docker raised more than $300 million in funding after it created a developer-friendly way to use containers in the mid-2010s, but despite wide use of its container format, the company has struggled to find a business model.
Container images are essentially blueprints for the container, and they are usually stored somewhere readily accessible for developers to grab when they are updating their applications with new code. Developers can store their images in private if they prefer, but over the past few years lots of developers and companies opted to publish public container images to boost adoption and awareness of their software products. The convenience of those building blocks of code being publicly available meant that many people built applications using them.
Docker builds its own certified images for Docker Hub users to employ, along with certified images published by third-party developers and a trove of community-generated images. When it was a fast-growing enterprise tech unicorn, Docker offered those services for free, but the company can't afford such largess at this point in its history.
That entire repository is pretty big — over 15 petabytes worth of container images — and storing that much data is not cheap. Earlier this year Docker said it would delay a plan to delete inactive images after a community uproar, but as of Nov. 2 it imposed new limits on how many times free users of Docker Hub could grab images over a six-hour period, given that the bandwidth costs associated with serving those images are also not cheap.
The rise of automated continuous integration services provided by companies like CircleCI and JFrog exacerbated the problem, said Donnie Berkholz, vice president of products for Docker. Those services automatically check container images for updates when deploying changes to software, which is great for their users but a load on Docker.
"On the order of 30% of our traffic was coming from 1% of our users, and that's not sustainable when those users are free," Berkholz said.
Users of Docker's paid services — which also include features designed for teams and large software organizations — will not face the rate limits, and Docker worked out a deal that will lift the limits for most of CircleCI's customers, too.
Deep-pocketed cloud providers see a different opportunity. Microsoft's GitHub announced plans for its own free public container registry in September, and on Monday AWS announced vague plans for a public container registry that it will likely outline during its upcoming re:Invent virtual conference.
The storage and bandwidth costs associated with hosting container images are rounding errors for companies such as Microsoft and AWS, and developer goodwill is a valuable commodity. AWS will likely encourage users of its public container service to run those containers on AWS, and while GitHub still operates at an arm's length from Microsoft, similar suggestions for Azure users wouldn't be surprising.
In the end, Docker's move is a signal that a relatively permissive and free-wheeling era of cloud computing is winding down as it becomes an enormous business. It also highlights the importance of the software supply chain: Modern software applications pull code from a wide variety of places, and disruptions to those supply chains can have profound effects on application performance or availability.
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Tom Krazit
Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET and paidContent, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.
Protocol | Fintech
Jack Dorsey is so money: What Tidal and banking do for Square
Teaming up with Jay-Z's music streaming service may seem like a move done for flash, but it's ultimately all about the money (and Cash).
Jay-Z performs at the Tidal-X concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2017.
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
March 4, 2021
It was a big week for Jack Dorsey, who started by turning heads in Wall Street, and then went Hollywood with an unexpected music-streaming deal.
Dorsey's payments company, Square, announced Monday that it now has an actual bank, Square Financial Services, which just got a charter approved. On Thursday, Dorsey announced Square was taking a majority stake in Tidal, the music-streaming service backed by Jay-Z, for $297 million.
<p>If there's a theme around the moves, it's control. Having its own bank gives Square more purchase in the financial world. And if Square does something with Tidal, which promised to give artists a bigger cut of the money produced by streaming, it will likely be about giving musicians more control over the revenue streams they create. </p><p>It also suggests Dorsey wants to diversify Square far beyond its original smartphone-swipe business. Already, he talks about Register and Cash App as two distinct businesses within Square. (Caviar was another, until Square sold it to DoorDash.) Now Tidal joins the portfolio.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"Dorsey is flexing his muscles and expanding his tentacles into banking, crypto, and now the Jay-Z Tidal deal," Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives told Protocol. Ives compared Dorsey to Tesla's Elon Musk in the boldness of his ambitions.</p><p>Some disagreed: There was chatter that the deal was about Dorsey's habit of hobnobbing with celebrities. He was famously photographed with Beyoncé, who is married to Jay-Z, last year. Square plans to name Jay-Z, a.k.a. Shawn Carter, to its board.</p><p>But Square's push into banking is not about "white pillars in front of buildings and marble," as Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, put it. Financial services are becoming a "lifestyle choice" for a new generation of consumers, he said.</p><p>It helps, then, that Cash App is part of the cultural lexicon of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-venmo-iggy-azalea-cash-app-rules-rap-11565191206" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hip-hop</a>. "One of the things Square has captured is the consumer business for a long time," Harris said. "Their customer acquisition strategy for a long time has been urban. And Tidal is just a further step. A somewhat radical further step."</p><p>Veteran tech analyst Michael Dortch of DortchOnIT saw the deal as more straightforward: Square can offer valuable services to musicians and artists in what has become a more complex entertainment market, and let them avoid "exploitation and bad treatment" from the major labels, he said.</p><p>Artists often don't get paid for three to six months after a song is streamed, because they have to wait for their label to get paid first. Square has experience, but it's not the only one that could address this problem.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"Maybe there's an argument that Square will get in the middle of that to simplify payments so creators get paid more quickly," said David Pakman, partner at Venrock. "That's interesting and a bunch of people have tried to do that. But Spotify could do that on their own."</p><p>Square's bet on Tidal is unlikely to shake up the streaming world in the short term. Tidal has not released any subscriber numbers for some time, but data shared by digital music wholesaler CD Baby suggests that the service is little more than an also-ran. CD Baby, which distributed the music of 800,000 independent artists, received 40% of its digital revenue from Spotify, with Apple Music accounting for 18%. Tidal, Deezer, Napster and other third-tier services together made up just 8% of CD Baby's digital revenue.</p><p>Dorsey and Jay-Z both said Thursday that the Tidal link-up went well beyond streaming.</p><p>"Square created ecosystems of tools for sellers and individuals, and we'll do the same for artists," Dorsey wrote in a <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367460921937817602" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweet thread</a>. "We'll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools, and new complementary revenue streams."</p><p>"I said from the beginning that Tidal was about more than just streaming music … Artists deserve better tools to assist them in their creative journey," Jay-Z <a href="https://twitter.com/sc/status/1367461494821171202" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a>.</p><p>Focusing on services over streams is a smart bet, music industry analyst Mark Mulligan from <a href="https://www.midiaresearch.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIDiA Research</a> said. "Streaming is fundamentally a terrible margin business," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/m/waterandmusic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Water & Music</a> author Cherie Hu agreed. "The business of music streaming is not sustainable in and of itself," Hu said, pointing to the fact that Tidal <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/01/13/tidal-2019-earnings-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">lost $52 million</a> on subscription revenues of just $166 million in 2019. "Tidal is not a profitable business," she said.</p><p>A bigger focus on creator services could change that. "It is the only big bet at the moment," Mulligan said. And while pundits have focused on Tidal's star power, creator services could actually help Tidal and Square monetize the long tail of music: part-time creators looking to make a few extra bucks, musicians who haven't given up on their day job. "It monetizes hobbies," Mulligan said.</p><p>Square could build out credit or other products or tools for artists. "Even though Tidal has been declining as a streaming service, they have a strong brand and access to artists," said Laura Chau, partner at Canaan. "With Square buying Tidal, they essentially are buying access to those artists and circumventing the creator acquisition challenge that many emerging companies will have."</p><p>The flip side is that there are already a plethora of creator services companies out there, helping bands with everything from playlist sharing to merchandise sales. Those companies include Spotify, which has been looking to offer musicians more tools after acquiring artistry services startups SoundBetter and Soundtrap. "It's super crowded right now," Hu said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>The one major differentiator for Square could be its financial services business, freshly strengthened with its own chartered bank. "That is one of the growth areas," Mulligan said. The company could offer artists advances, royalty processing and more, effectively taking over some of the roles traditionally held by record labels.</p><p>It's a space that is long overdue for change. In the age of TikTok, artists can see huge streaming spikes practically overnight when one of their songs goes viral. Most of them won't see the resulting royalties for months, Hu said: "The financial innovation has not caught up to general technological innovation." </p><p>If the Tidal bet pays off, Dorsey's reputation as a daring strategic thinker will only grow.</p><p>"He deserves a lot of credit for long-term vision," Eric Sager, Plaid's chief operating officer who was once head of sales at Square, told Protocol in January. "A lot of the things that have made Square the amazing company it is today are things that he was talking about years and years and years ago when it wasn't clear at all that those things would be successful."</p>
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Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
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The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Protocol | Enterprise
Can we talk? Microsoft unveils voice and text-chat service for developers.
Web and mobile developers will be able to use Azure Communication Services to let customers chat with service reps directly from their apps or web sites.
Microsoft is adding more communication services to Azure.
Photo: Microsoft
March 2, 2021
Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET and paidContent, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.
March 2, 2021
One year after the pandemic forced businesses to adapt in countless ways, the race to overhaul how they interact with their customers is starting to heat up.
Microsoft said Tuesday it would release Azure Communication Services into the wild this week, kicking off the first day of its Ignite virtual conference. The service, first introduced at the autumn version of Ignite last September, allows developers to embed voice, text chat, SMS or video capabilities into their applications.
<p>It's based on the same technology that runs the communications features in Microsoft Teams, and the company is also planning to preview a service this week that lets Azure customers use Teams to manage the back end of interactions with their own customers through their respective apps. </p><p>Microsoft started working on this service prior to the widespread shutdown orders imposed one year ago in hopes of containing COVID-19 in the U.S., but that experience "really accelerated our thinking," said <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/svanvliet/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scott Van Vliet</a>, corporate vice president for intelligent communications at Microsoft.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>The experience of the past year has <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/small-business-recovery/how-small-businesses-pivoted-to-shopify" target="_self">sped up many businesses' plans</a> to overhaul customer communications. Microsoft's new service targets a customer who has no shortage of options after deciding to ditch traditional call centers with rows of operators on landlines, a trend that was well underway before the pandemic.</p><p><a href="https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/twilio-jeff-lawson-parler-aws" target="_self">Twilio became a $63 billion company</a> on the back of its developer-friendly communications APIs, and <a href="https://www.protocol.com/enterprise/ringcentral-underdog-zoom-microsoft" target="_self">enterprise software players like RingCentral</a> also offer customers communications tools for their apps. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-connect-smarter-and-more-integrated/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">AWS updated Amazon Connect last December</a> at re:Invent 2020 with new machine-learning capabilities, and <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/zoom-executives-have-discussed-an-expansion-into-contact-center-market" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Zoom is reportedly thinking about using its pandemic dividend</a> to go after this market.</p><p>"We've been building this rich, real-time communications infrastructure for products at Microsoft over the last couple of decades," Van Vliet said, citing products such as Microsoft Live Meeting and Skype as a proving ground for Azure Communications Services. "We realized that we really had something special in terms of the scale that we were able to achieve in building this platform with something that third party developers may also get the benefit from."</p><p>While Microsoft wants to encourage its own customers to use Microsoft Teams to manage those communications, those companies do not want to force their customers to download yet another communications app in order to talk to a doctor or resolve a customer service issue.</p><p>The idea is "really to give developers … the choice to take the core communication services that we offer and integrate them into the products and workflows they may already have," Van Vliet said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Still, in keeping with its efforts to make <a href="https://www.protocol.com/microsoft-slack-saas-competition" target="_self">Microsoft Teams as one of its most visible products</a>, Microsoft would really like Azure customers to use Teams as well. For now, the link between Teams and Azure Communications Service is available as a preview, but it's clear that Microsoft has organized much of its product-development strategy around Teams as a central hub for business customers.</p><p>"If [a Microsoft] customer was already using Teams, they could add ACS to their own mobile application, or even to their own website using WebRTC, and allow customers to join a call, that on one end, they're using their mobile device or their desktop and on the company side, they're actually using Microsoft Teams and the same familiar interface and workflows that they already have to connect those experiences," Van Vliet said.</p><p>That's one reason <a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/protocol-enterprise/microsoft-cloud-bezos-musk" target="_self">why Microsoft has an advantage</a> over the other cloud companies jockeying for a piece of this market. Thanks to the ubiquity of Microsoft Office, the company already has a business relationship with countless enterprise software buyers, making it easier to entice those customers to use other parts of the Microsoft portfolio in their own applications.</p><p>Still, many companies that were forced to reinvent their customer-service and purchasing workflows last year as in-person business activity ground to a halt went with other vendors. Yet as with other categories of cloud services, which a surprising number of companies have yet to adopt in any fashion, Microsoft believes there's still plenty of growth left in this slice of the market.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"What we see happening in the future is really this concept of a hybrid work model, where a lot of the things that were requirements, or things you just had to do during the pandemic, will be things that will be pretty sticky," Van Vliet said.</p><p>Microsoft Ignite kicks off later Tuesday with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and runs through Thursday.</p>
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Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET and paidContent, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Protocol | Fintech
IBM’s huge bet on building a cloud for banks
Howard Boville left his post as Bank of America's CTO to lead Big Blue's bold cloud offensive. Can he make it work?
IBM is embarking on an ambitious bid to build a cloud banking platform.
Image: Scott Eells/Getty Images
February 17, 2021
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
February 16, 2021
Moving to the cloud can be burdensome for a bank: If you don't know exactly how and where your company's data is being stored, meeting regulations that control it can be almost impossible. Howard Boville is betting he can solve that problem.
Last spring, Boville left his post as chief technology officer at Bank of America to lead IBM's ambitious bid to build a cloud banking platform. The concept: that any bank or fintech would automatically be following the rules in any part of the world it operates, as soon as it started using the platform.
<p>"I saw a big gap in the marketplace," Boville told Protocol. "How do you have the right compliance controls built into a cloud, so that you could satisfy regulators and also the risk posture you have as a financial institution?" </p><p>The cloud he envisioned would have "all these little railway sets with different gauge tracks," he added. "The big idea was to set a series of standards on those controls that the industry could consume. Then on a global basis, you could ride on those rails to carry the analogy of the railway set, and all of the gauges met and de-risk the whole financial services industry."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>While IBM has long been a major provider of hardware and software used to run the in-house data centers of major banks and other institutions in the financial services industry, that business has been under fire as banks slowly started to migrate to the cloud.</p><p>"You cannot be in the technology business and not be serving financial services, because you're missing one of the largest areas of spend in technology," Sonny Singh, executive vice president of Oracle's financial services business, told Protocol. </p><p>That's why the financial services cloud is a major offensive for Big Blue — and a chance for Boville to prove his idea works. </p><h3><strong>'Compliant out of the box'</strong></h3><p>Boville was still CTO of Bank of America when he began developing with IBM the concept of a financial services cloud that would be "compliant out of the box." The idea was to build a platform geared to a heavily-regulated industry known for a web of regulations meant to protect the interests of consumers and businesses, and to guard against fraud and criminal activity.</p><p>The rules are typically extensive and complex, Falk Rieker, SAP's global head of banking, said. "I have here on my desk the outsourcing guidelines from the European Banking Authority," he told Protocol. "It's 20 pages and goes down into hundreds of details that banks have to keep in mind when they outsource their operations." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Yobie Benjamin, who served as the global chief technology officer of Citi's global transactions group and is co-founder of the fintech infrastructure startup Token, noted that banking rules often take a long time to change and pointed to strict regulations for record-keeping: "In the banking system, we can't throw shit away. … Technology changes at the speed of light. Regulations move at the speed of molasses. … Regulatory burden is not trivial."</p><p>It's a burden not just for the big banks, but also for vendors that sell them software and services, especially fintech startups. Boville himself had to deal with this issue at Bank of America: "We had to do vendor risk assessments on software companies that we consume technology from." It's no problem for bigger vendors that could afford to go through the process, which could take up to two years, "but the fintechs are too small." </p><p>"That's a problem for the industry, because it meant that we couldn't consume innovation at the pace that we wanted to because we had to go through all these various checks. If you're a small fintech, you haven't got the capacity to have that overhead," he said. "It's a very long checklist to check that the vendor is not going to introduce risk into the financial system. And for smaller companies, that's just too much of an overhead, particularly when every bank will ask you to do the same thing but in a slightly different way."</p>
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<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTYzNDYzMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMjE3ODg3OH0.Ws6WJmPh-qmidbEBVzYpG4yOZPXwj76DGdv1VjXGnVE/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTYzNDYzMi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMjE3ODg3OH0.Ws6WJmPh-qmidbEBVzYpG4yOZPXwj76DGdv1VjXGnVE/img.jpg?width=980" id="021cc" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="af6c9dee9bbb14f3da702e2d36c74b3b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Howard Boville, head of IBM hybrid cloud</small>
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</p><p>Boville had worked closely on the financial services cloud project with Arvind Krishna, who took over as IBM CEO last year. By the time IBM launched the platform in late 2019, Boville said he was looking to return to his technology roots. </p><p>He had started out as a database programmer in England and ended up working in the telecommunications industry, including a stint with Comcast in the 1990s when he "started to figure out that the internet might be a thing." He subsequently spent nearly 14 years with BT Global Services before joining Bank of America in 2012. </p><p>He said he told IBM about his plan to move on. "That's when the conversation with Arvind arose," he said, adding that Krishna told him, "Come here and continue the incredible work that you're doing." Boville said he "was humbled by the opportunity. It was just such an easy decision to make."</p><h3>A way to win trust</h3><p>The IBM cloud provides "a comfy bubble" where banks and fintech startups have access to tools that would ensure that they're doing everything right when it comes to such matters as encrypting their data properly or handling and storing them properly, Hillery Hunter, chief technology officer of the IBM financial services cloud, said. It is also set up to prevent "people from doing the wrong thing and leaving things vulnerable" and to "send an alert if anything was left vulnerable" by developers or engineers who work for the bank or a third-party software vendor, including fintechs.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>In fact, one of IBM's key goals is to attract fintechs. The platform aims to make it easier for a startup with a hot new technology to convince a bank or a financial services company that it is safe to work with them. "We have heard story after story after story of startups that got positive affirmation from financial institutions about what they were trying to do, but the banks were unwilling to move into production," Hunter told Protocol. She said a typical response startups get from a bank is: "You know, your functionality is great, but I don't trust you with my clients' data."</p><p>IBM is building the financial services cloud after falling behind in the cloud more generally — the most dominant trend in enterprise tech dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. IBM has recently struggled with sliding revenue as a result: The company last month reported <a href="https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-4Q20-Earnings-Press-Release.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">fiscal 2020 revenue of roughly $74 billion</a>, down 4.6% year-over-year, and continuing a streak of annual revenue declines.</p><p>IBM does not break out revenues for its financial services business, but the overall revenue drops are hitting at a time when IT spending in the banking and securities industries has actually been rising: It's projected to reach roughly $589 billion in 2022, up 14% from 2018, according to Gartner. That would be about 14% of total enterprise IT spending of $4.1 trillion.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>The problem is most of that spend is shifting to the cloud. Jerry Silva, IDC's vice president of financial insights, said banks and financial services companies have been allocating bigger chunks of their IT budget on the cloud based on a yearly survey of banks worldwide. In 2018, most banks said they were spending roughly 20% of their budgets on cloud related expenses. By 2020, that figure was up to 33%. On the other hand, the share of IT budgets for in-house data centers dropped from 44% in 2018 to only 13% in 2020, Silva said.</p><p>Singh said IBM "has been pretty solidly positioned in financial services traditionally," but "a lot of that presence was under threat from aging of the systems that they were serving up on those mainframes." </p><p>Silva said he had mixed reactions when IBM shared its plan for the financial services cloud. "I think it will resonate with the industry because you're taking the workload off the bank," he said.</p><p>But it is such an enormous undertaking that he wondered if IBM, even with a market cap of roughly $108 billion and a massive technology arsenal, could pull it off. "If you just look at the U.S., sometimes the [regulations] get down to the county," he said. "It's going to take enormous resources from IBM to do this. … I think it will be a longer rollout when they talk about global ability. It's not a trivial thing to do."</p><h3>Up to the job?</h3><p>IBM hopes to meet this challenge with the help of cutting-edge technology like AI and the capabilities it acquired when it bought <a href="https://www.americanbanker.com/news/ibms-ceo-explains-why-the-computing-giant-bought-promontory" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Promontory Financial Group</a>, a consulting company that specializes in regulatory compliance, in 2017. IBM is building the cloud in a way that ensures "continuous monitoring of all regulatory obligations," including potential rules that are not yet on the books, Hunter said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>"There are some common trends and themes and other things like that that you can start to see emerging, and having those headlights [shining on] what's happening, for example, in the U.K. or in Singapore, helps us develop better technology and be proactive and stay ahead when those obligations then begin to become required in other countries," she said.</p><p>It's a capability that would make life easier for fintechs, said Sandeep Tandon, chief technology officer of digital banking technology company Intellect Design Arena, an IBM cloud client. "We don't have to be concerned whether we are deploying for a European Bank or for a North America bank or an Asian bank," he told Protocol. "There may be different requirements and IBM should have taken care of those beforehand."</p><p>So far, IBM cloud's partners include Bank of America, Luminor (the third largest bank in the Baltics and Estonia), and around 50 software vendors and fintech startups, including payments platform Ripe Hub and Zafin, a product and pricing platform for banks.</p><p>Silva said IBM's financial services cloud "does seem to be unique." He added: "Let me put it this way, it's much more than marketing-speak at this point ... assuming they can deliver on the promise."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>And IBM is a force to reckon with in financial services, SAP's Rieker said. "They have the footprint in the banks … They're still in most of the large banks. They have a wide understanding of the infrastructure and the landscape banks are running. I think that this is something IBM can bring to the table, which the other providers cannot do to the same extent," he said. "We all know they are the 800-pound gorilla."</p>
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Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
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