Hewlett Packard Enterprise is said to be close to selling off their software assets… all of them. Thoma Bravo is rumored to be a front runner to purchase a portfolio valued between $8-10 billion dollars.
While HPE transitions back to a hardware-only company with their own designs on storage, datacenters, and AI; they face increasing and varied competition from IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Meanwhile a Chinese company known for mobile phones is about to get very serious about IT hardware and EMC is officially going to become Dell Technology next week.
IBM
- IBM swings axe through staff, humming contently about cloud and AI
Lee Conrad, an ex-IBMer who today runs the Watching IBM Facebook page, has been sharing messages from long-serving staffers laid off this week, some of whom claim their jobs are effectively being shifted overseas to India, China and Costa Rica.
Some axed workers say their last day will be at the end of November, allowing IBM to avoid paying into their 401K retirement savings pot for the year. Big Blue will only cough up the cash if you are an employee on December 15. This comes after the biz slashed its severance payouts to a maximum of one month of pay.
- IBM expands cloud footprint in Korea
Located outside Seoul in Pangyo, the new data center is designed to support growing cloud adoption and customer demand across the country.
According to IDC, an information technology research firm, the public cloud services market in Korea is expected to grow from USD445 million in 2015 to approximately $1B in 2019.
The new facility in Pangyo is IBM´s ninth cloud data center in the Asia-Pacific region, and part of the company´s growing global network of 47 cloud data centers.
http://www.financial-news.co.uk/36745/2016/08/ibm-expands-cloud-footprint-in-korea-20160826082900/
- Can IBM Win The Storage War Against Dell-EMC?
IBM said last year that it will invest $1 billion over the next five years to win the software-defined storage space. Although breaking EMC’s dominance isn’t an easy task from a technological point of view, I believe the potential disruption resulting from product portfolio integration of Dell and EMC could help IBM get closer to EMC due to certain advantages IBM enjoys in the enterprise software market.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4002896-can-ibm-win-storage-war-dell-emc
- IBM and VMware extend public cloud tech deal
Further moves to strengthen the partnership see a VMware Cloud Foundation compatibility with IBM aiming to make it faster to deploy VMware’s products in an on-premise environment to IBM’s cloud.
The aim is to make it much easier for customers to be able to use VMware’s products in an IBM Cloud and for an IBM Cloud user to use VMware’s products.
Partnerships like this are becoming increasingly common as vendors look for a collaborative approach to the cloud market in order to differentiate themselves from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform that lead the market.
http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/ibm-and-vmware-extend-public-cloud-tech-deal-4992298
Comment: This is interesting, IBM is clearing going after EMC storage, yet making partnership deals with VMWare. - Hybrid Clouds Dominate — Enable Companies to Innovate, Exceed Expectations
The IBM study, “Tailoring hybrid cloud: Designing the right mix for innovation, efficiency and growth,” is based on in-person interviews and surveys of more than 1,000 C-suite executives from 18 industries. Conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), the study finds that the top reasons executives cite for adopting hybrid cloud solutions are: lowering total cost of ownership (54 percent), facilitating innovation (42 percent), enhancing operational efficiencies (42 percent) and enabling them to more readily meet customer expectations (40 percent).
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP INC
- HP: Gloomy Outlook Despite Increased PC Sales
Cathie Lesjak, the chief financial officer of HP, pointed out that one of the major reasons that the tech company is projecting downbeat earnings for the fourth quarter regardless of the stabilizing PC sales was that it has been pumping in a lot of money to boost its higher-end printers’ sales. The objective is to sell more of these in locations where individuals print more, which could result in more sales for printer supplies and other related services.
The HP CFO said, “We think that is the right investment to make.“ Even though the boost in investments will put some pressure on the present quarter, Lesjak promised that it will “pay dividends in supply revenue in the future.”
http://www.themarketdigest.org/201608/hp-gloomy-outlook-despite-increased-pc-sales/3146061/
- HPE is betting big on AI to fuel your apps and analytics
Companies can use HPE Vertica 8 on data residing on premises, in private and public clouds, and in Hadoop data lakes. With its in-database machine learning capabilities, they can natively create and deploy R-based machine learning models directly within the software.
Improvements to data movement and orchestration let users load data as much as 700 percent faster than before, HPE said. Those gains are possible for hundreds of thousands of columns. Vertica 8 also makes it easier to load data from Amazon S3 and includes comprehensive visual monitoring of Apache Kafka data streams.
http://www.cio.com/article/3113986/hpe-is-betting-big-on-ai-to-fuel-your-apps-and-analytics.html
- HPE CIO tackles tough ‘spin merge’ with CSC
While Spradley is laser focused on the services separation, HPE has seemed anything but focused in recent years. There have been ill-conceived acquisitions (Compaq, EDS and Autonomy), scandals (pretexting and Mark Hurd) and architecture missteps (such as Itanium). And that’s independent of the secular trends, including the shifts to public cloud software offered by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, a tech evolution to which the company has struggled to adjust.
HPE’s micro and macro challenges might seem like drudgery to CIOs whose primary occupations include building digital products and services to drive business innovation. Such CIOs would rather experiment with blockchain, stitch together APIs and host hackathons than divest and spin off assets and staff.
- HP Enterprise (HPE) Stock Gains on Potential Software Division Sale
Shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) were up in mid-afternoon trading on Thursday as the Palo Alto, CA-based technology infrastructure company is in discussions to sell its software division to buyout firm Thoma Bravo in a deal that it hopes could bring in between $8 billion and $10 billion, sources told Reuters.
https://www.thestreet.com/story/13692527/1/hp-enterprise-hpe-stock-gains-on-potential-software-division-sale.html
Looks like we have a buyer…
Oracle
- Oracle’s Database 12c R2: Boom, bust, or meh upgrade cycle ahead?
In other words, this upgrade cycle for Oracle will be different from previous database rollouts. For starters, more of Oracle’s revenue will be subscription based. In addition, there are more competitors than ever for Oracle. It’s quite possible that SAP, which is using its HANA platform to prod customers to move off of Oracle databases, and Oracle are fighting yesterday’s war.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/oracles-database-12c-r2-boom-bust-or-meh-upgrade-cycle-ahead/
Storage
- NetApp a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant SSA report
According to a recent report from the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), NetApp registered an impressive revenue growth of 238.2 per cent year over year, which was 2.7 times faster than the all flash array market as a whole.
http://www.canindia.com/netapp-a-leader-in-gartner-magic-quadrant-ssa-report/
- $67B EMC sale to Dell cleared; to close next week
Approval from China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) was the last hurdle for the acquisition to clear after EMC shareholders voted in favor of the agreement in July. According to Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, the merger will be beneficial for both companies, using the power of 140,000 employees worldwide to achieve scales of economies as the company moves into new and growing technology markets.
Other
- Huawei Plots to Seize Another Tech Industry
Huawei is training its sights on selling computing gear for the world’s biggest data centers, which are the invisible locomotives of the digital world. These giant buildings packed with racks of computing equipment and miles of data-carrying cables enable every moment in the digital world, from the Facebook photo you shared this morning to the databases managing Walmart’s supply chain.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-08-31/huawei-of-china-plots-to-seize-market-for-data-center-gear
I totally predicted this situation in Episode 37 of SourceCast - Party Over At Salesforce.com With Terrible Q2 Earnings
Let’s look at what really matters: deferred revenues and billings. Deferred revenue missed at $3.82 billion versus $3.88 billion consensus, and billingsmissed at $1.86 billion versus $1.89 billion consensus. “This is a slight miss” you say, but billings have been beating estimates at an accelerating pace in recent quarters, which sent the stock soaring – one must view everything in context. Last quarter, the company beat billings by 12.9%, by 6.1% two quarters ago, and by 1.8% three quarters ago – so clearly, there is an acceleration that got the market really excited. To the best of my knowledge, billings never missed before (at least in recent years). When you go from that kind of bullish dynamic to a miss, trouble ensues – don’t blame me, that’s just how the market works.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4003466-party-salesforce-com-terrible-q2-earnings
- Salesforce To Launch AI Product, Einstein
The company is hoping Einstein, the Artificial Intelligence product it is working on introducing to the world, will propel her to fresher growth.
Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference hold in San Francisco and the event typically draws around 170,000 attendees. The company believes this will be the perfect time and place to formally make the big announcement.
It could be recalled that Salesforce acquired a handful of artificial intelligence companies in the last two years and Forbes believes this coming announcement explains those decisions. Other companies to have towed the same path in the past include Google and Microsoft.
http://stocknewsusa.com/2016/08/26/salesforce-launch-ai-product-einstein-stocks-rise-announcement/
- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff indicates his rivalry with Microsoft is back on
Their purchase of Quip is a direct threat against Microsoft…“We have to have productivity built in. All of our applications need to have core productivity applications, whether it is email, like with Salesforce Inbox or spreadsheets or word processors like Quip, live documents. All of that has to be an integrated part of what we are doing. We believe that strongly. We have obviously done a lot of great work with Microsoft as well, with their products. We have now our own product in this category. And this is going to be really important for us going forward and it’s the reason that we bought Quip.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/salesforces-marc-benioff-ups-rivalry-with-microsoft-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T
- Why the container community is wrong to whine about Docker
Predictably, everyone wants in on this Docker action, though few are as honest about that interest as Red Hat’s Riek. Though he stresses he doesn’t speak for Red Hat, it’s not hard to believe that his concerns would be widespread within the open source giant, not to mention other vendors. Declaring “containers as the future of the Linux OS and application-centric IT,” Riek questions “the aggressive way that Docker Inc is trying to control the Docker open source project.”
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-container-community-is-wrong-to-whine-about-docker/
Photo: Blake Richard Verdoorn