Billion-Dollar Acquisitions, the Chip Industry and AI for the Enterprise: Trending Topics and Clients in the News

In the past month, Mission North clients commented on trends and news making waves through the technology industry, including the escalating tensions within the chip industry, big data acquisitions by high-profile companies and the growing need for serverless computing. Read on to learn about the topics in the news that our clients have been weighing in on.

Chip Companies Amid the Trade War

Semiconductor executives in the American chip industry – one of the tech sectors hit hardest by the trade war – are becoming increasingly concerned that Chinese companies will shift away from American component makers because they won’t be seen as dependable partners. Tradeshift CEO Christian Lanng told The New York Times that normal supply chain communication has now become politicized, which has shocked many players as recent tensions have interrupted routine patterns of conducting business.

Betting Billions on Big Data

Within a matter of days, Salesforce and Google both announced multi-billion-dollar acquisitions of business analytics companies Tableau Software and Looker, respectively. ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair told Peter Cohan at Forbes that the Tableau acquisition demonstrates the critical role that insights play in analytics, and his comment that he anticipates similar M&A deals in the future was featured in MarketWatch.

Setting AI Benchmarks

Many enterprises have been slow to adopt artificial intelligence. A new set of benchmarks from a consortium of Facebook, Google and other tech firms could help businesses better evaluate AI tools before implementing them. ServiceChannel CEO Tom Buiocchi spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the value of such benchmarks for evaluating the pros and cons of AI solutions. ServiceChannel itself uses AI to verify the performance of its contractors, and a benchmark would help give it confidence that it’s deploying the right solution.

Other clients in the news

• As data expands, costs skyrocket for enterprises. Qubole already saves its customers quite a bit through the Qubole Data Platform and its first serverless product takes these savings a step further. This TechCrunch article dives into the product, which is called Quantum. Its ANSI-SQL compatibility means that companies looking to move to a serverless environment don't need to retrain engineers who already know the common programming language.
• Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives released a draft bill that would prevent patients from receiving surprise charges after emergency room visits. While this is a crucial first step, Waystar CEO Matt Hawkins told Forbes that it won't truly benefit patients until healthcare providers also have an accurate way to take insurer estimates into consideration.
• During a time of concern about internet safety, Google’s “Be Internet Awesome” program is helping to make the internet safe (and fun) for children. This LifeHacker article explores the Google initiative, which features free online games about digital safety, media literacy activities and bilingual workshops for parents.

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