ICYMI: Our Channel News Roundup for the Week of October 2nd

October, the Halloween month, snuck in while we were distracted by too much news, too much of it sad. Soon we’ll be back to shame-Instagramming the first Christmas displays we see weeks before Halloween, getting used to fall, and pinning our hopes on a better year in 2018. All while juggling the annual fourth-quarter sales and revenue dash, of course.

Big news for mostly big corps at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco with all the keynotes, VIP meet and greets, parties, more VIP meet and greets, more speeches, shrimp bars, and more salespeople chasing prospects through the halls of Moscone Convention Center. Don’t believe the reports of TP rolls printed with “almost as soft as the new Oracle Cloud” until you see one for yourself. Allegedly.

But not even Oracle can fill the news buckets all by itself. Some bits from Intel, Google, Microsoft, and more, along with many Oracle details, await your perusal.

Our Oracle OpenWorld news cup runneth over. Oracle’s cloud may (allegedly) be soft, but Oracle bigwigs hammered home promises about the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in a variety of areas. The new X7 system architecture boosts performance, including 400 percent faster bare metal GPU instances, and all-flash block volume storage is designed to reach 60 IOPS per GB and 480Kbps throughput.

Tired of your data? Archive it with the Archive Storage service. Integrated DNS from Dyn, 25Gb network infrastructure, and packaged migrations from other customers continue the cloud pump-up. Big Data folks will like enhancements to the Oracle Big Data Platform Cloud, including better analytics and AI capabilities.

Say hello to the Oracle Identity Security Operations Center portfolio and Oracle Management Cloud for improved security with machine learning, compliance, analytic engines, and user and entity behavioral analytics.

Smarter is gooder, so a major update of Oracle Mobile Cloud added AI chatbot capabilities. Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps mashed into existing cloud apps help out finance, HR, supply chain, manufacturing, ecommerce, marketing, sales, and even, they promise, customer service professionals. Maybe some AI can help Oracle execs to come up with less on-the-nose literal names for every product.

But wait, there’s more love from Larry. Developers got plenty of love from Oracle, in fact, including new materials in Oracle’s developer.oracle.com portal and more GitHub involvement.

Blockchain still wants to take over the world, and the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service may help.

Channel fans will be interested to learn that “channel marketing has been underserved by the digital marketing industry.” Never fear, the Oracle Data Cloud channel marketing solution will take care of that.

If you consider yourself human capital, then the Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud portfolio will smother, er, cover you like a blanket. Functionality for recruiting, health and safety, compliance, risk, and more treat employees with all the care of a life-cycle managed laptop.

Big Larry himself rolled in to unveil the Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud packed with machine learning and other smarts, all built on top of Oracle Database 18c.

Oracle Exadata X7 gets faster thanks to in-memory performance from shared storage.

Last but not least, Oracle NetSuite got tuned up, including the release of SuiteSuccess industry solutions for IT VARs and solution providers.

Look at this clever Oracle to Intel transition. Intel Xeon Scalable processors support Oracle’s Blockchain Cloud Service. On October 5, we didn’t see Christmas decorations but did see 8th Gen Intel Core desktop processors on the shelves for retail sale.

Companies besides Oracle had meetings this week as well, including the IoT Solutions World Conference, where Intel announced the launch of Intel Secure Device Onboard (Intel SDO). Soon you can bring IoT devices online in seconds rather than hours.

Sometime in the first half of 2018 Intel will combine platforms, software stacks, and ecosystems to enable faster deployment of customized field programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions.

Microsoft raises a hand. Remember them? Microsoft launched some apps for iOS and Android, including Microsoft Edge for iOS/Android and Microsoft Launcher for Android. Just another reason to love the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

Non-ironically, Microsoft announced the era of Windows Mixed Reality will begin on October 17. Samsung has a headset, AltSpaceVR teams up, and the StreamVR catalog gets plugged in.

Laggards rejoice: the Firefox Extended Support Release for Windows XP and Vista users kicks the can down the road all the way to June 2018.

Google talks hardware. If your pocket is tired of your current smartphone, you might try filling it with the Google Pixel 2. Match your pocket size with the 5-inch model or the 6-inch Pixel 2 XL. Both sport Android 8.0 Oreo, a better camera, search upgrades, and a smarter Google Assistant.

Too big for your pocket, the Google Pixelbook (pictured) promises to be a high-performance Chromebook full of flexibility and even Intel Core i5 or i7 processors and lots of RAM. And the Google Pixelbook Pen. If you’ve been wondering when you can drop $1,000 on the counter and get a single Chromebook in return, now you know. Pen not included.

Other companies raise hands and wave new products in the air. Yes, more cloud stuff. Acronis released Acronis Data Cloud, a new platform for cloud service providers that unifies the vendor’s backup, disaster recovery, and file sync and share solutions.

Mashup alert! Microsoft and NetApp teamed up to create the (allegedly) first enterprise Network File System (NFS) service in the cloud and announce that NetApp Cloud Control for Microsoft Office 365 now supports Azure Storage, as does NetApp AltaVault for Azure Archive Storage. Without any help from Microsoft, meanwhile, NetApp also released a new AI-enabled NetApp virtual support assistant called Elio that works with NetApp Active IQ cloud-based analytics.

Don’t forget these folks, either:

• HP unveiled the next generation HP Spectre 13 and HP Spectre x360 13 (pictured) laptops. Faster, thinner, sharper displays and more await your approval.

• IOGEAR launched the Thunderbolt 3 to Dual 4K DisplayPort Adapter (GTC3DDP). Now your laptop can support two 4K displays or a single 5K DisplayPort v1.2 monitor.

• NETGEAR rolled out “revolutionary, industry-first 5-speed Multi-Gigabit switching products,” including 5 and 8 port versions, some with PoE.

• AMD announced the AMD Embedded Radeon E9170 Series GPU, its first Polaris architecture-based discrete GPU.

• NETSCOUT added new features to its AirCheck G2Wi-Fi tool.

• Belkin told us all about its new USB-C 3.1 Express Dock HD, which supports eight devices at once, including gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, and USB-C and USB-A devices.

• Kaspersky Lab let us in on its new Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response for improved client security.

• Comodo turned loose its Comodo Dome Firewall 2.0, an all-in-one UTM virtual appliance.

• ZeroStack gushed enthusiastically about its hardware-independent Intelligent Cloud Platform, one app-dev platform across clouds, hardware platforms, and locations.

• Data Dynamics opened the barn door for StorageX 8.0 to help enterprises analyze, move, manage, and modernize data assets.

• Netwrix Corporation handed the world its Data Access Bundle tailored to meet the specific needs of SMBs to help control unstructured data.

• Bomgar stepped its Remote Support solution up to version 17.1.

People, places, programs. Arcserve brought in Tom Signorello as its new CEO, effective now.

LogicMonitor printed up new business cards reading vice president and head of marketing for Karyn Scott (pictured).

BitTitan announced David Geevaratne has joined as director of sales, Americas.

Digital Guardian beefed up its Synergy Global Partner Program.

Mojo Networks and its Cognitive WiFi opened up an MSP program, along with a new monthly-based pricing structure.

Arrow Electronics and Cypress Semiconductor mixed and mingled and out came the Titanium board, an IoT platform for developers to create products using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, cellular, and LPWAN technologies. Get boards in November.

OKI Data Americas put New Jersey in the rear-view mirror and relocated to Irving, Texas (just west of Dallas and very close to DFW International Airport).

This week’s stats ticker:

Channel pros preparing to lock themselves in the Budget Dungeon(tm) and ruin their eyes with spreadsheets may find some hope in Gartner’s projection that worldwide IT spending will increase to $3.7 trillion in 2018. Enterprise software and IT services lead the charge, a boost of 4.7 percent from 2017 estimates.

International Data Corporation (IDC to friends) estimates a market of nearly $16.2 billion in 2021 for software-defined storage.

Sweating just a bit over data breaches? Join the club. Ponemon and Centrify launched a global IT survey that discovered less than half of IT professionals are confident they can prevent, detect, and resolve the next data breach. Worse, 56 percent fear a breach will put their heads on the chopping block.

AI-powered threat prevention tool maker Cylance announced the results of a report titled Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise: The AI Race is On. 652 IT decision makers in the US, Germany, and France declared AI optimism high and said they’ll continue to invest. Nearly 80 percent say AI is a top priority, and 87 percent see AI tech as a competitive advantage.

Nobody dreams bigger than Elon Musk. Technology’s official Big Thinker, Elon Musk (E-Man to his friends, maybe), has taken us fast (HyperLoop), down (The Boring Company), and in style (Tesla). Now he wants to take us up—way, way, way up.

Newest brainstorm? The BFR, for Big Effing Rocket. No, not the one to send E-Man and his friends to Mars one day, but one to zoom from New York to Shanghai in 39 short minutes, or just over eight listens to Elton John’s Rocket Man. Actually, it might be the same rocket, like a bus that can go downtown or across the country.

Bypass LaGuardia Airport and go to a floating launch and landing platform, perhaps with a good view of the Statue of Liberty. Take off from there, survive the crushing G-forces of accelerating to 18,000 miles per hour, and show your passport in Shanghai 40 minutes later. All this for about the same price as an airline seat today.

Or not. Anyone else wonder if E-Man goes home, closes the door, turns to his dog, and says, “Can you believe they fell for that nonsense?” Which is a shame, because we can’t wait to see how thrilled the Defense Department will be about intercontinental ballistic missiles launching from places like China and the Middle East on a regular basis. E-Man says we don’t have long to wait—the BFR could launch in 2022. Or not.