'Their strategy doesn't serve the security industry'

SentinelOne co-founder and CEO Tomer Weingarten has some strong opinions about Microsoft's cybersecurity business. He's admittedly biased — given that SentinelOne is a fast-growing challenger to Microsoft on endpoint security — but is he wrong? You can be the judge.

Here are some highlights from my interview with Weingarten:

• On Microsoft's security business: "I think their strategy doesn't serve the security industry, and security, period. I think that if they took the amount of effort that they're putting on building security products for revenue-generating purposes, and they put it into actually solving for vulnerabilities, improving their own product security — we would all be in a much, much better place."
• On Google landing Mandiantinstead of Microsoft: "Just look at how Google is treating that acquisition. Basically they're saying, 'Mandiant is here to work with all security providers.' I'm quite certain that if Microsoft had acquired Mandiant, that's not the message that you would hear. It would be much more of a closed-garden approach."
• On enterprise trust in AI/ML: "When we talk about operationalizing AI and machine learning, I think that cybersecurity is one of the two areas in our life today that is seeing meaningful [results] … We secure three of the Fortune 10 and some of the most critical infrastructure out there — [including] federal agencies. And if you think about it, what they're trusting to make all these decisions — what gets in, what doesn't get in — they're trusting the algorithm."
• On solving ransomware: "I think it's a fixable problem. I think it's also probably a decade-long problem to fix. It will take quite a bit of work. You need to restart your network. You need to enroll your devices and your workloads into something new. [But] we're giving people more and more tools, so they can have that fresh start. That's probably one of the only ways to deal with all the different gaps in the modern network."

Read the full Q&A here.

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How global ecommerce benefits American workers and the U.S. economy: Alibaba — a leading global ecommerce company — is a particularly powerful engine in helping American businesses of every size sell goods to more than 1 billion consumers on its digital marketplaces in China. In 2020, U.S. companies completed more than $54 billion of sales to consumers in China through Alibaba’s online platforms.

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Carbon tracking

Looking to reduce the carbon impact of their energy-intensive data centers, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are pursuing renewable energy sources as the number of instances running on their servers continues to increase. The Big Three cloud providers also are adding tools to help customers track and reduce carbon emissions associated with their own cloud usage to satisfy internal goals, reporting requirements and calls from investors and customers.

Cloud customers are being advised to refrain from running cloud resources 24 hours a day, particularly for development and testing, and to take steps including picking lower-carbon cloud regions and programming workloads to run during the day, when there’s more clean energy available.

“It's map, measure, reduce, and a lot of customers are focused on this now,” said Christopher Wellise, director of sustainability for AWS. Customers need to map their companies’ operational boundaries, use tools to measure the carbon impact and then create targets and strategies for reduction, Wellise explained. That includes embedding sustainability into their own products and innovation practices.

Companies across industries identify ESG initiatives as a top priority that’s up there with evolving or adjusting their business models, according to a global survey of 1,491 C-suite and vice president-level executives conducted by The Harris Poll for Google Cloud.

Dashboards that estimate customers’ carbon impacts are among the tools offered by the cloud providers. Microsoft’s Emissions Impact Dashboard for Azure, for example, is a Power BI application that allows customers to drill down into their Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions by month, service and data-center region, and enter non-migrated workloads to get estimates of emissions savings from migrating to Azure.

“It helps them with critical insights, helps them make informed, data-driven decisions about their own sustainable computing,” said Elisabeth Brinton, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of sustainability.

Read about other tools offered by the Big Three in the full story here.

Financial corner

Contentsquare raised $600 million for its analytics software that helps enterprises analyze consumer behavior.

Fonoa raised $60 million to automate tax compliance for global enterprises.

DealHub raised $60 million to help enterprises with sales optimization, subscription management and contact management.

15Five raised $52 million for its performance management software.

— Aisha Counts (email | twitter)

Around the enterprise

Intel’s budding chip foundry business won a big customer in MediaTek, which designs chips for smartphones and tablets.

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How global ecommerce benefits American workers and the U.S. economy: Using economic multipliers published by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, NDP estimates that the ripple effect of this Alibaba-fueled consumption in 2020 supported more than 256,000 U.S. jobs and $21 billion in wages. These American sales to Chinese consumers also added $39 billion to U.S. GDP.

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