Data Sheet—Friday, August 29, 2014

Google delivery drones? Apple wearables? The industry is rife with rumors as August wanes, and September is busy with big conferences bookending the month. But first, there’s plenty to share this last Friday before the unofficial end of summer, starting with a peek into what She-Who-One-Day-Could-Be-President thinks about technology. Enjoy your weekend, Data Sheet readers. We’ll return Tuesday with more enterprise tech news.

Hillary hopeful on tech innovation. She may not be an expert on software defined networking, but Hillary Clinton's now-familiar tech stump is long on opinions about privacy, data security, tech jobs and basically woeful state of government IT. If push comes to shove, she's fan of expanding the H-1B visa program. While we're on the subject of government policy, Ireland is close to picking a new data privacy regulator. Here's why that matters for global protection policies.

Google on the wing. First, self-driving vehicles. Now, autonomous delivery drones, like the ones being tested for the Amazon Prime Air service. It's Google Wing, the latest bizarre-o research project to emerge from the company's "moonshot" tech lab.

No one quite knows. While the scope of the cyberbreach at J.P. Morgan is a mystery, no one has detected fraudulent financial activity (yet) related to the stolen information. Hugely scary: aside from being the biggest U.S. bank, J.P. Morgan is the nation's biggest credit-card issuer. Other banks were affected but so far none are fessing up. Meanwhile, Heartbleed isn't stealing headlines but it's still alive and well—and half of all vulnerable servers still are.

Soon, your smartphone could predict a heart attack. Two startups with mobile medical apps for monitoring patient vital conditions and alerting doctors when things don't look right just won FDA approval. Now, we just need to make sure health insurance companies accept these digital referrals.

CLOUD CHATTER

One big happy community? Jive Software and Salesforce released modest social enterprise updates with the mission of better connecting internal stakeholders (aka employees and business partners) with external ones (aka customers). Best-of-breed Jive gets points for allies like Cisco, but CRM tie-ins are helping Salesforce win over the likes of British Sky Broadcasting and GE Capital.

New frontier for NASA. The federal agency migrated more than 100 applications and websites to Amazon Web Services at breakneck speed, and it's far from finished. Here's how it approached the switchover.

STATS & SPECS

Hewlett-Packard's new architectural approach, coming to you Sept. 8. The overhaul extending across its data center portfolio turns ProLiant servers, storage and networking products into modular components that can be managed in pools. The other value prop for the so-called Gen9 line: triple the computing capacity of earlier models. By the way, HP is happy to tell you that it held onto its server market-share lead in the second quarter.

Apparently, we're not smart enough yet. But smartphone growth is slowing: IDC analysts anticipate 1.25 billion shipments worldwide this year, with most of that uptick happening in emerging markets.

STARTUPS & DISRUPTORS

Splunk boosts guidance after second-quarter splash. Approaching 8,000 customers for its operational intelligence services, the developer is aiming for $423 million to $428 million in annual revenue (up from its estimate of $402 million to $410 million earlier this year). It still lost money, but less than expected.

Keeping tabs on your till and talent. Bank of America is the biggest customer yet buying into Workday's recipe for financial and human capital management—the developer is raising its full-year revenue forecast. Plus, here are Workday COO Mike Stankey's ingredients for the five cloud application clusters that will eventually rule enterprise IT.

FAQ

Admit it: you or someone on your team chortled over at least one #icebucketchallenge declaration during the August doldrums.

While some IT organizations thwart or throttle traffic-hogging activity of this nature, new Wainhouse Research data shows many enterprises will boost streaming video investments this year—almost one-third will spend more than $100,000 on this stuff.

The stats were gathered in a survey of 1,007 execs commissioned (but not controlled) by video tech company Qumu in late 2013, so consider the source. Still, here are some of the more intriguing revelations:

They're getting a daily dose: 24% of the respondents viewed on-demand video from their desktop everyday

Mobility matters: 20% enable streaming video for smartphones (another 18% have it on the checklist this year); the trends were comparable for tablets

Everyone's a director: 51% of users have capture-ready cameras, so interest in simple "Enterprise YouTube" sharing and playback platforms is appreciable

See you soon: 42% embraced live video communications with co-workers as "very important" for collaboration

Just make it work: 46% want whatever video platforms they use to plug into existing communications apps

There is a subplot within the data: 27% of the surveyed execs say they will spend zero on enterprise video this year. Whether that's because they've already invested the money, aren't actually paying the bills for videoconferencing services, or just aren't ready for their close-up isn't explored.

Where do you see enterprise video in your IT organization's future? Share your anecdotes via datasheet@heatherclancy.com.

ONE MORE THING ...

Countdown to coolness. The invites for Apple's next launch event are out, so get ready for 12 days of non-stop speculation as even jaded journalists (ahem) fall all over themselves trying to tease out details beforehand. Favorite guesses as to what Apple CEO Tim Cook will show off: a bigger iPhone series with "touch to pay" technology (aka near-field communications) and a smart, wearable thingamajig that breaks the company into new form factors.