Today’s topics include estimates of the size of outgoing Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s golden parachute, Why Oracle’s Content and Experience Cloud is a direct challenge to Adobe, IBM’s Bluemix cloud data center expansion, and Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report notes a rise in politically-motivated cyber-attacks.
Outgoing Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will receive an internet-scale golden parachute when she leaves office before her company is taken over by Verizon Communications. Mayer will receive compensation ranging from $112 million to $187 million, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing earlier this week.
Mayer was recruited from Google in the summer of 2012 to try to get Yahoo back on a growth track. Ultimately nothing she tried stimulated enough growth to allow Yahoo to remain an independent company.
She plans to depart ahead of Yahoo’s impending sale to Verizon. Yahoo shareholders are scheduled to vote June 8 on whether to accept the Verizon takeover.
Oracle is developing a direct challenge to customer experience leaders like Adobe with its new Digital Experience Cloud. On April 26 it launched its Oracle Content and Experience Cloud.
The platform will enable organizations to manage and deliver content to any digital channel in order to engage with customers, partners and employees. The goal is to provide businesses with a meaningful way to improve brand engagement as well as customer growth and retention.
Adobe, long a leader in the field of multimedia and graphics content creation, launched its own “Experience Cloud” running on Microsoft Azure in March.
Under competitive pressure to build out its cloud service infrastructure, IBM announced on April 26 the opening of four new cloud data centers in the U.S.: two in Dallas, Texas and two in Washington, D.C.
The new data centers in the U.S. will provide clients with infrastructure scaled to run cognitive workloads. All four will offer access to the internet of things, blockchain, quantum computing and Watson services through IBM Bluemix.
The announcement is part of IBM’s cloud data center expansion effort. In the last year, the company tripled data center capacity in the UK, opened data centers in Seoul, South Korea and Chennai, India. Overall, IBM has 55 data centers in 19 countries on six continents, including 22 in the U.S.
The latest release of Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report explains some of the more significant trends in security over the past year.
The 77-page report, released April 26, noted a sharp increase in politically motivated attacks as well as an increase in ransomware payouts. The report described the Shamoon disk-wiping malware that attacked organizations in the Middle East and attacks against the Democratic National Committee, among others.
Cyber-attack methods are changing as well. Email is now a primary method for attack delivery, the report stated. “Attackers are taking advantage of social engineering and the ability to fool people,” Haley said. “Email attacks are cheap, easy and they work.”