Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Snap faced the music in a new and very real way this week. The company’s first earnings report, after going public in March, disappointed investors and fell short of expectations on almost every metric.

The makers of Snapchat reported a $2.2 billion loss in the first quarter on almost $150 million in revenue and user growth slowed to its lowest rate in years. Shares took a nosedive and remain down by more than 20 percent at the week’s end.

[ Related: Snap soars on IPO, now what? ]

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Uber, like the smartphones and wireless networks that enable it, entered the enterprise market uninvited or at least unbeknownst to most levels of management. However, since late 2014 Uber has been developing more direct relationships through a specialized service for enterprises that assists companies with billing, reporting and management.

The 8-year-old company is now the most expensed line item for business travel — ahead of Starbucks — and ground transportation accounts for half of all business expense line items overall, says Travis Bogard, Uber’s global head of enterprise. “Companies started using Uber a lot because employees started using Uber a lot,” he tells CIO.com.

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NEW ORLEANS — Amazon has quickly built a commanding lead on voice-enabled digital assistants, but the company’s vision for bringing Alexa to connected devices as diverse as light switches, automobiles and household appliances is just getting underway. Amazon’s plans for Alexa are more widespread than any device category or the constraints of Amazon’s own hardware aspirations, Steve Rabuchin, vice president of Amazon Alexa, said at last week’s Collision conference.

“We have this vision of Alexa everywhere,” he said. “We can’t do it all ourselves. There’s no way we’re going to build every smart home device and every wearable… so we opened that up.” Voice-controlled technology is a “significant new interface that humans will use. It’s very convenient and it makes hard things simple.”

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NEW ORLEANS — The perception of IT among employees who aren’t involved in the technology centers within their organization is generally bad and the onus is on technology leaders to rectify those problems, Blackstone CTO William Murphy said at the Collision conference this week. “People have been disappointed over IT many times,” he said. “It’s not necessarily the fault of technologists, but technologists have not stood up for themselves.”

IT still bears the blame for almost every technology-related project that’s been delayed for the last 20 years and IT professionals need to find a way out of those internal conflicts, according to Murphy. Such a change requires a shift in thinking about IT’s role and how it can deliver a more collaborative model for technology innovation, he said.

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NEW ORLEANS — The perception of IT among employees who aren’t involved in the technology centers within their organization is generally bad and the onus is on technology leaders to rectify those problems, Blackstone CTO William Murphy said at the Collision conference this week. “People have been disappointed over IT many times,” he said. “It’s not necessarily the fault of technologists, but technologists have not stood up for themselves.”

IT still bears the blame for almost every technology-related project that’s been delayed for the last 20 years and IT professionals need to find a way out of those internal conflicts, according to Murphy. Such a change requires a shift in thinking about IT’s role and how it can deliver a more collaborative model for technology innovation, he said.

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NEW ORLEANS — As the head of product for Facebook Messenger, Stan Chudnovsky is responsible for one of the most popular consumer products in the world. And yet, despite Messenger’s 1.2 billion monthly active users, he’s convinced that the app can continue its growth and add more functions if users and business embrace the app as a channel for business-to-consumer communications.

More than 60 million businesses have a presence on Facebook and at least 20 million are active on Messenger today, but Facebook continues to develop APIs, bots and other means to expedite connections between people and business, Chudnovsky said this week at the Collision conference. “We need to make it obvious that you can make a connection between people and businesses,” he said.

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NEW ORLEANS — YouTube this week revealed a redesign of its desktop app that strips out superfluous information and makes videos the primary feature of the viewing experience. “We’re rolling out a revamped design of our desktop application,” Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, announced at the Collision conference.

The redesign, which is available for preview at youtube.com/new, will be rolled out in stages during the next few months, according to Mohan. “The design principle is very basic, it’s very simple, which is we really want the technology and everything surrounding the content to simply fade out of the way,” he said. “A lot of what might have been distracting text and things like that in the current YouTube experience fades away when you’re consuming content. It has a much lighter, ephemeral feel to it.”

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Adobe CIO Cynthia Stoddard doesn’t think about marketing and IT as separate functions. “We don’t have an artificial wall between these organizations,” she tells CIO.com. IT and marketing have distinct priorities within the business, but aligning their respective responsibilities around company goals leads to greater outcomes, according to Stoddard.

[ Related: CMOs will outspend CIOs on technology in 2017 ]

“We tend to place ourselves in the other person’s role and situation,” she says. “Try to put yourself in the shoes of the CMO or the CIO so you can jointly feel what the other person is going through and what their priorities are.”

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Google and Microsoft are both benefiting from solid growth in enterprise cloud services. Both companies released earnings reports this week that highlighted significant momentum in G Suite, Office Suite, respectively, and more sophisticated cloud platforms for business.

“We crossed a major milestone with more than 100 million monthly active users of Office 365 commercial,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a conference call. “Office 365 commercial seats grew 35 percent year-over-year and revenue is up 45 percent.” Microsoft also reported a 15 percent year-over-year gain in revenue from Office 365 and other consumer products. The company ended the quarter with 26.2 million Office 365 consumer subscribers.

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