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Oct 24
1

Artificial Intelligence part of the new G Suite (Google Apps)

By | Google, IT Blog | No Comments

Artificial intelligence is central to Google’s cloud productivity apps, recently rebranded as G Suite. Likewise, Microsoft is infusing Office 365 with AI.

Google has something of a penchant for changing the names of its products, and the latest one to be given a new moniker is Google Apps for Work. From now on – or until the next name change, at least – the collection of cloud-based productivity applications which includes Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar and Hangouts will be known as G Suite.
What Is in a G Suite Name

According to Kelly Campbell, senior director of G Suite marketing, Google Cloud, the new name is intended to reflect Google Apps for Work’s mission: “to help people everywhere work and innovate together, so businesses can move faster and go bigger.”

The “G” part obviously refers to Google, while the “Suite” part emphasizes the fact that the apps are designed to work together (like Lotus SmartSuite, the venerable group of productivity applications that IBM discontinued in 2013). There’s also a pun on c-suite, the term that refers to a large company’s top executives.

So the name encompasses Google, integration between applications and large companies, and that’s the real message Google is trying to get across with the rebranding, said TJ Keitt, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “Google wants people to look at its product as a suite rather than a loose assemblage of disparate apps. And it wants to pivot from selling consumer technology to enterprises and draw attention to applications that have been developed specifically for the enterprise market.”
G Suite Has AI Inside

At the heart of this pivot to the enterprise market is the infusion of a healthy dose of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology into the various components of G Suite, explained Prabhakar Raghavan, Google Cloud’s vice president, Apps, in a blog post.
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“A year ago, Smart Reply launched, offering auto-generated replies for emails that only need a quick response. Now, more than 10 percent of all replies on mobile are sent using Smart Reply. The reception has been so strong that we’re continuing to apply machine intelligence across our suite to solve customer problems,” Raghavan wrote.
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Another example of this is Quick Access in Drive on Android, a feature which selects what it thinks are the most relevant files to the work you are doing so they are easily accessible when Drive is opened. It chooses files based on interactions with colleagues, recurring meetings and other activity in Drive.

“Machine intelligence helps Drive understand the rhythm of your workday and offers the files you need before you even ask,” said Raghavan. “Our customer research shows that Quick Access saves about 50 percent of the time an employee would usually spend finding a file.”

Yet another example is the intelligence that has been implanted into Google Calendar to help find a time when multiple invitees to a meeting are free and to suggest rooms based on previous room bookings.
G Suite vs. Microsoft Office 365

One question mark over G Suite’s acceptance as an enterprise product is its ability to appeal to enterprises in which usage of Microsoft productivity tools is nearly ubiquitous. Most people have trained or grown up with Microsoft’s Office products, and in the cloud its Office 365 service is a direct competitor to G Suite. Microsoft has also been adding AI into its productivity suite – in the form of Office Graph and Delve, for example.

And IBM, the other significant player in the enterprise cloud productivity app game, can include Watson’s AI in its offerings.

“The question really comes down to this: Which parts of the market do Google and Microsoft compete evenly in, and where does Microsoft have a big advantage?” Keitt said. “In big organizations, Microsoft has an advantage because it is more flexible. Microsoft has on-premise offerings and single-tenancy offerings, but Google insists on multi-tenancy so it makes it hard for some companies to adopt it. But in the smaller enterprise market Google can compete.”

While Keitt is doubtful that Google would ever move toward a dedicated hosting model to boost its appeal to larger enterprises, the company has made some concessions, he pointed out. “They have, for example, disaggregated their services so that you can have Google Drive separately, but they won’t stray too far unless there is a specific market opportunity like the U.S. federal sector,” he said.

Given that Google is unwilling to compete head-on with Microsoft in the large enterprise space, it is worth considering why it bothers getting involved in the enterprise market at all. Can it possibly be worthwhile to run an offering like G Suite?

“Everything that Google does which is not advertising is miniscule,” Keitt said. “It’s about business diversification. They see something that could disrupt their advertising revenue and they get involved.”

But he also believes that Google is involved in business apps — and many other activities — simply because of the nature of the beast. “Google is an engineering business so it tinkers with things, and it happened to discover an opportunity. Now it is hard to extract itself from it because it has made federal deals; extracting itself from those would be damaging.”

In fact G-Suite is aligned with Goggle’s founding principle of making information more accessible to people and usable to them, Keitt said. “Every business it gets involved in is about information: mapping, email, content distribution … So the proposition to business is how to make it easier to locate expertise and information in the organization, and Google can do this using its apps and its AI technology.”

Paul Rubens has been covering enterprise technology for over 20 years. In that time he has written for leading UK and international publications including The Economist, The Times, Financial Times, the BBC, Computing and ServerWatch.

Mar 23
0

Russian AntiVirus Firm Kaspersky Upset Over Reports of KGB Ties

By | news, Security | No Comments

Eugene Kaspersky, head of Russia-based security software supplier Kaspersky Lab, is fighting allegations that his company has “close ties” to Russian spies.

eugene-kaspersky

Last week, Bloomberg Business published an article accusing Kaspersky Lab of excluding Russia from reports examining electronic espionage by the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

Bloomberg traced an alleged change in focus at the anti-virus shop back to 2012, when high-level managers began exiting the company and being replaced by what the news service claimed were “people with closer ties to Russia’s military or intelligence services.”

“Some of these people actively aid criminal investigations by the FSB, the KGB’s successor, using data from some of the 400 million customers who rely on Kaspersky Lab’s software,” Bloomberg said, citing current and former employees who went unnamed in the article.

“This closeness starts at the top,” Bloomberg continued. “Unless [CEO] Kaspersky is traveling, he rarely missed a weekly banya (sauna) night with a group of about five to 10 that usually includes Russian intelligence officials.”

While the chief did not deny the social gatherings, he did assert that they are not conspiratorial, and that the presence of spies was purely coincidental.

Kaspersky (pictured) spoke out late last week, writing in a blog entry that Bloomberg’s piece is nothing more than sensationalism.

“Exploiting paranoia is always a great tool for increasing readership,” he said, adding that, “It’s been a long time since I read an article so inaccurate from the get-go—literally from the title and the article’s subheading.”

As security expert Graham Cluley pointed out, Bloomberg’s story was published just two days after Kaspersky revealed more details about the long-running “Crouching Yeti” attacks, which target a number of countries—but not Russia.

The nation’s absence may seem odd, Cluley said, until you read that, according to Kaspersky, the authors of Crouching Yeti were likely Russian speakers.

“Clearly Bloomberg missed that piece of information,” Cluley said.

Investigating state-sponsored attacks can be awkward for any company: Silicon Valley-based FireEye CEO Dave DeWalt told The Wall Street Journal that he would think twice before publicizing a hacking campaign by government-backed Americans.

Kaspersky has indeed probed attacks attributed to Russian cyber-spies, including Red October, CloudAtlas, CosmicDuke, and Epic Turla.

“I must have said this a million times, but we do not care who’s behind the cyber-campaigns we expose,” Kaspersky wrote in his blog. “There is cyber-evil and we fight it. If a customer comes and shows us a problem we investigate it. And once we take the genie out of the bottle, there’s no way we can put it back.”

He continued to pick apart the Bloomberg article line-by-line, responding to a number of allegations and attempting to set the record straight.

Meanwhile, Kaspersky alluded to dealing with mistrust as a Russian company when he tweeted last week that the company’s next research conference will provide better accommodations.

“It’s very hard for a company with Russian roots to become successful in the U.S., European, and other markets. Nobody trusts us—by default,” Kaspersky said. “Our only strategy is to be 100 percent transparent and honest. It took years to explain who we are. Many people attempted to find ‘dirt’ on us—and failed. Because we’ve nothing to hide.”