Tag: TechCrunch: Sessions

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Bill McDermott steps down as SAP’s CEO

SAP today announced that Bill McDermott, its long-running CEO, is stepping down immediately. The company says he decided not to renew his contract. SAP Executive Board members Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein have been appointed co-CEOs.

McDermott, who started his business career as a deli owner in Amityville, Long Island and recently spoke at our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event, joined SAP in 2002 as the head of SAP North America. He became co-CEO, together with SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, in 2008 and the company’s sole CEO in 2014. Under his guidance, SAP’s annual revenue and stock price continued to increase.

It’s unclear why McDermott decided to step down at this point.

Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course with Bill McDermott SAPDSC00248

“SAP would not be what it is today without Bill McDermott,” said Plattner in today’s announcement. “Bill made invaluable contributions to this company and he was a main driver of SAP’s transition to the cloud, which will fuel our growth for many years to come. We thank him for everything he has done for SAP. We also congratulate Jennifer and Christian for this opportunity to build on the strong foundation we have for the future of SAP. Bill and I made the decision over a year ago to expand Jennifer and Christian’s roles as part of a long-term process to develop them as our next generation of leaders. We are confident in their vision and capabilities as we take SAP to its next phase of growth and innovation.”

Updating…

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Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich will join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise on September 5

Being the CTO for one of the three major hyperclouds providers may seem like enough of a job for most people, but Mark Russinovich, the CTO of Microsoft Azure, has a few other talents in his back pocket. Russinovich, who will join us for a fireside chat at our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco on September 5 (p.s. early-bird sale ends Friday), is also an accomplished novelist who has published four novels, all of which center around tech and cybersecurity.

At our event, though, we won’t focus on his literary accomplishments (except for maybe his books about Windows Server) as much as on the trends he’s seeing in enterprise cloud adoption. Microsoft, maybe more so than its competitors, always made enterprise customers and their needs the focus of its cloud initiatives from the outset. Today, as the majority of enterprises is looking to move at least some of their legacy workloads into the cloud, they are often stumped by the sheer complexity of that undertaking.

In our fireside chat, we’ll talk about what Microsoft is doing to reduce this complexity and how enterprises can maximize their current investments into the cloud, both for running new cloud-native applications and for bringing legacy applications into the future. We’ll also talk about new technologies that can make the move to the cloud more attractive to enterprises, including the current buzz around edge computing, IoT, AI and more.

Before joining Microsoft, Russinovich, who has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon, was the co-founder and chief architect of Winternals Software, which Microsoft acquired in 2006. During his time at Winternals, Russinovich discovered the infamous Sony rootkit. Over his 13 years at Microsoft, he moved from Technical Fellow up to the CTO position for Azure, which continues to grow at a rapid clip as it looks to challenge AWS’s leadership in total cloud revenue.

Tomorrow, Friday, August 16 is your last day to save $100 on tickets before prices go up. Book your early-bird tickets now and keep that Benjamin in your pocket.

If you’re an early-stage startup, we only have 3 demo table packages left! Each demo package comes with 4 tickets and a great location for your company to get in front of attendees. Book your demo package today before we sell out!

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Quantum Computing is coming to TC Sessions: Enterprise on Sept. 5

Here at TechCrunch, we like to think about what’s next and there are few technologies quite as exotic and futuristic as quantum computing. After what felt like decades of being ‘almost there,’ we now have working quantum computers that are able to run basic algorithms, even if only for a very short time. As those times increase, we’ll slowly but surely get to the point where we can realize the full potential of quantum computing.

For our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco on September 5, we’re bringing together some of the sharpest minds from some of the leading companies in quantum computing to talk about what this technology will mean for enterprises (p.s. early-bird ticket sales end this Friday). This could, after all, be one of those technologies where early movers will gain a massive advantage over their competitors. But how do you prepare yourself for this future today, while many aspects of quantum computing are still in development?

IBM’s quantum computer demonstrated at Disrupt SF 2018.

Joining us on stage will be Microsoft’s Kyrsta Svore, who leads the company’s Quantum efforts, IBM’s Jay Gambetta, the principal theoretical scientist behind IBM’s quantum computing effort, and Jim Clark, the director of quantum hardware at Intel Labs.

That’s pretty much a who-is-who of the current state of quantum computing, even though all of these companies are at different stages of their quantum journey. IBM already has working quantum computers, Intel has built a quantum processor and is investing heavily into the technology, while Microsoft is trying a very different approach to the technology that may lead to a breakthrough in the long run but that is currently keeping it from having a working machine. In return, though, Microsoft has invested heavily into building the software tools for building quantum applications.

During the panel, we’ll discuss the current state of the industry, where quantum computing can already help enterprises today and what they can do to prepare for the future. The implications of this new technology also go well beyond faster computing (for some use cases), there’s also the security issues that will arise once quantum computers become widely available and current encryption methodologies become easily breakable.

The early-bird ticket discount ends this Friday, August 9. Be sure to grab your tickets to save to get the max $100 savings before prices go up. If you’re a startup in the enterprise space, we still have some startup demo tables available! Each demo table comes with 4 tickets to the show and a high-visibility exhibit space to showcase your company to attendees – learn more here.

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Discover Deep Learning with Nvidia’s Robotics Workshop on April 17 at UC Berkeley

Nvidia is partnering with TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI to host a pre-conference workshop at UC Berkeley on April 17 titled Deep Learning for Robotics.

In this eight-hour, instructor-led workshop you’ll get an overview of the Robot Operating System(ROS) and its associated architecture, followed by hands-on simulation and coding experience using a live GPU-accelerated environment. At the end of completing your assessment, you’ll get an Nvidia Deep Learning Institute certificate. Learn more about the workshop here.

Learning Objectives

  • Learn the general ROS paradigm of messages passing between nodes
  • Learn to work with the robotic development workflow by taking a hands-on approach to simulation, development and deployment using a Gazebo simulator
  • Learn to integrate an object detection inference model, trained with DIGITS, into a ROS network to build autonomous behavior for a Jetson-based robot

Why Deep Learning Institute Hands-on Training?

  • Learn how to build deep learning and accelerated computing applications across a wide range of industry segments, such as autonomous vehicles, digital content creation, finance, game development, healthcare and more
  • Benefit from guided hands-on experience using the widely used, industry-standard software, tools and frameworks
  • Gain real-world expertise through content designed in collaboration with industry leaders such as the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Mayo Clinic and PwC
  • Earn a DLI certificate to demonstrate your subject matter competency and support professional career growth
  • Access content anywhere, anytime with a fully configured, GPU-accelerated workstation in the cloud

Prerequisites:
Experience with deep neural networks (specifically variations of CNNs) and intermediate-level experience Python. Knowledge of Linux and C++ is helpful but not required.

Tickets are on sale now for $299 (normally $500) for this immersive workshop. Seating is limited, book your ticket today before we sell out.

What: Nvidia Deep Learning for Robotics Workshop
When: April 17, 2019
Duration: 8 hours, 10:00am – 6:00pm
Where: UC Berkeley, CA
Type: In-person, instructor-led workshop
Cost: $299
Tools, Libraries, Frameworks: ROS, GAZEBO simulator, NVIDIA DIGITS

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Watch all the interviews from TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain

What a day. Yesterday, hundreds of people gathered in Zug, Switzerland for TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain. In addition to some of the key people of the Ethereum Foundation, the team interviewed the entrepreneurs behind Binance, Coinbase, ConsenSys, CryptoKitties and many other organizations.

The event was packed with interesting content. But if you couldn’t be there in person, don’t worry as you can watch everything that happened in Zug:














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Come mix your realities at our AR/VR event in LA in October

TechCrunch is hosting one of our single-topic Sessions events centered on AR/VR and mixed reality in Los Angeles on October 18th at UCLA’s Royce Hall. We’re going to be doing some very cool stuff that we’re not quite ready to talk about, but at the core we’re looking to have incredible discussions with the best and brightest in reality creation.

The goal is to get folks into one room to see some demos, hear some talks and take part in a salon of sorts about the state of AR/VR. We’ll talk shop, philosophy, hardware, software and inclusion.

As someone who has logged hundreds of hours in a headset, reported on the space and been an advocate of what augmented and virtual realities could do for us, I’m pretty excited. I’ll be programming the event personally, along with our crack reporter in the space, Lucas Matney. The show promises to be bang-up cool with attention paid to the hardware and software that will enable the next generation of experiences in the augmented reality and virtual reality worlds, as well as some more metaphysical chit-chat about how we all go about building these worlds.

Check out the site for Sessions: AR/VR 2018; we’ll be fleshing it out with speakers and more details as we lock them down. You can grab early tickets here for $95, which includes access to all the day’s talks and demos and, if you’re a student, we’ve got special tickets just for you here for $45.

More to come soon. See you in October!