Technology moves fast and doesn't wait for anyone. New digital innovations such as cloud computing have forced businesses to adapt quickly in order to keep up with innovation. Jason McDonald, U.S. President for Contino, a consulting firm helping brands adopt new tech, was with us to chat about how businesses are responding to rapid changes in technology.
McDonald breaks down the challenges for moving data to the cloud. He points out that 70% of digital transformation projects will fail in 2018, according to a recent study. The key failure is not bringing the right personnel into the system, he says. McDonald names the healthcare sector as a laggard because of moving regulations and calls out the government for being even farther behind.
It's hard for companies to ignore headlines around cybersecurity breaches. Contino is working to mitigate concerns about those threats and help businesses plan for the future. McDonald says it's less of a "software and tech" conversation, and more of a "people and process" conversation.
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
Image-sharing app Pinterest reported big beats on its Q4 earnings for the top and bottom lines. The social platform surprised investors after seeing a decline in users while earnings and revenue were much higher than expected.
