Tag: silicon valley

Intel is now “female friendly”

Posted on July 10, 2017 by - News

wintel_blimp_featureFormer chip giant Intel claims that it’s moving to redress its attitude to women by spending $100 million worldwide to support businesses they run.

Barbara Whyte, who is Intel’s diversity and inclusion office, told an audience in Hamburg: “Diversity and inclusion are critical underpinnings to our constantly evolving culture at Intel.”

She added: “They [women] accelerate our ability to consistently innovate and drive the business forward.”

Intel has made efforts to hire women and minorities and has pledged to reach full representation by 2020.

The company said that IBM and Pfizer have also jumped on the bandwagon and have committed to making similar efforts.

It’s widely known that women executives in Silicon Valley routinely earn less than their male counterparts.

But Intel’s Whyte stayed mum on the matter at the conference.

Jesse Jackson calls for technology diversity

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

Reverend_Jesse_JacksonUS civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has called on the government to investigate the tech industry’s lack of diversity.

Jackson told USA Today  that the government has a role to play” in ensuring that women and minorities are fairly represented in the tech workforce.

He said the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission needs to examine Silicon Valley’s employment contracts.

Jackson said that the tech industry’s demands for foreign workers need to be silenced after data shows Americans have the skills and should have first access to high-paying tech work.

There was no talent shortage, but an an opportunity shortage and Silicon Valley “far worse” than many others such as car makers that have been pressured by unions.

Tech giants have largely escaped scrutiny by a public dazzled with their cutting-edge gadgets, Jackson said.

Jackson has lobbied nearly two dozen tech companies to disclose hiring data, and about a dozen have done so.

According to the figures, men make up 62 per cent to 70 per cent of the staffs of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn, while whites and Asians comprise 88 per cent to 91 per cent.

Their dominance is highest in computer programming and other tech jobs that tend to pay the most.

Jackson said that work equality was the next step in the civil rights movement. Minorities represent a sizable share of tech consumers but not its workers. Of Twitter’s U.S. employees, only 3 per cent are Hispanic and 5 per cent black, but those groups along with Asian Americans account for 41 per cent of its US users.

 

 

Box pushes, with force, into EMEA channel

Posted on February 5, 2013 by - Moving People, News

boxfactoryEnterprise cloud and collaboration company Box is launching a channel partner programme packed with incentives and organised by industry veterans to boost growth in the UK and EMEA.

The Silicon Valley firm posted an impressive end of fiscal year in 2012 with its technology in roughly 150,000 enterprises and with about 15 million users, channel director Chris Penner told ChannelEye, along with over 17,000 developers actively building custom apps for the platform. Pre-partner programme, the company has been busy boosting its roster of seasoned executives and went on a poaching spree over a six month period, bringing on staff with experience at Salesforce, VMware, HP, NetApp, Cisco and more to make sure it gets the channel strategy right on the first try.

One such hire is David Quantrell, who joined Box in September 2012 to run Box’s channel strategy in EMEA. Prior to this role he was President, EMEA for McAfee, and also has experience at HP and Nortel.

Wayne Cook, another hire, was previously at McAfee and is now a VP for channel and alliances at Box.

Penner told us that for the poached staff, moving over to Box presented an opportunity “of a lifetime” in a company that is well positioned with proper venture backing, a tremendous install base, and $40 billion pre-IPO. “A lot of ingredients that don’t come along every day,” Penner said. “We are building a really fundamental industry leading channel”.

Box Partner Network will create an “ecosystem of strategic alliance, channel and platform partners” that will bring Box’s content into new markets and, it hopes, drive further lofty aims of expansion. In a press release, the company boasted that, although in relative infancy, the company already had tons of big business clients signed up, including EA, NBC, Nationwide, Discovery Communications, Sony Music, and Netflix.

Starting partners include Autodesk, AtTask, Fonality, Marketo, CollabNet, Clarizen, TIBCO, Tidemark, and Xero – while five new partners, CollabNet, Clarizen, Fonality, tibbr, and Tidemark, will be tasked with leveraging the Box Embed HTML5 framework introduced late last year.

50 resellers have been signed up on a global basis over the last four months, including big hitters such as Ingroam Micro.

Interested channel players should head here.

As for Box’s position in the tech industry, Penner is optimistic: he tells us that end users love the service for its collaboration tools and simplicity, while IT likes Box because they know exactly what technology is going to be on premises and can control and manage every level of content in a secure manner – which is not the case for consumer alternatives, Penner said.