A Changing SAP

Big news on the enterprise software front overnight. SAP announced that CEO Bill McDermott would be leaving the company after nearly a decade at the helm. McDermott has overseen SAP’s shift to the cloud, and the company’s stock was up 75% over the past five years.

Board members Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein were appointed co-CEOs.

For SAP clients out there, also know that IBM just rolled out a new open source SDK that lets users call Watson services directly from ABAP code in SAP systems. ABAP is the primary programming language supported on the SAP NetWeaver ABAP server platform.

On the frenzied AI dealmaking front, AI-powered checkout firm Standard Cognition has bought DeepMagic, which provides autonomous retail kiosks. This apparently to better compete with Amazon Go’s checkout experience.

DeepMagic allows customers to swipe a payment card when entering a smaller kiosk or store, pick up items that are detected by cameras and then walk out while having their card charged.

Sorry, no cash!

And for those of you who are using G Suite (especially those in newsrooms) who thought your documents were encrypted end-to-end, the Freedom of the Press Foundation says differently. 

Apple Loses a Signal

TechCrunch is reporting that the Telegram messaging apps appear to have breached Apple’s App Store guidelines and are currently unavailable for download on iOS. 

According to TechCrunch, it’s not apparently clear what the problem is, but Telegraph founder Pavel Durov tweeted that it related to “inappropriate content.”

“We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store,” he wrote.

Journalists, human rights activists, and terrorists everywhere are likely shaking in their boots.

As The Verge writes:

Due to the secretive nature of messages on Telegram, it has been widely criticized by governments around the world for becoming the messaging “app of choice” for terrorists. Telegram was forced to create a team of moderators in Indonesia to remove “terrorist-related content” after the Indonesian government threatened to ban the messaging app.

New IBM Mainframe Users in New Era of Data Protection

IBM today unveiled IBM Z, the next generation of the IBM mainframe, capable of running more than 12 billion encrypted transactions per day.

The new system also introduces a breakthrough encryption engine that, for the first time, makes it possible to pervasively encrypt data associated with any application, cloud service or database all the time.

IBM Z’s new data encryption capabilities are designed to address the global epidemic of data breaches, a major factor in the $8 trillion cybercrime impact on the global economy by 2022.

Of the more than nine billion data records lost or stolen since 2013, only four percent were encrypted, making the vast majority of such data vulnerable to organized cybercrime rings, state actors and employees misuing access to sensitive information.

You can learn more about the new IBM Z system here.