Procurement & Career Guidance
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that IBM is looking to potentially sell the Watson Health Platform (consisting of AI and companies like Merge, Truven, Explorys, and Phytel).
Why did something so promising end up becoming a failure for the company?
This video explores the ups and downs of Watson Health:
We made jokes last week when IBM didn’t buy a company, I guess we can’t make the same joke twice. With their purchase of Truven, IBM has has solidified its place in the medical analysis world. The market is reacting well to the news, with IBM up 5% on the day of the announcement.
While IBM (finally) gets some good financial news, Dell is still in a waiting pattern for funding. News that the EU is set to approve the deal is looming as Michael Dell finalizes the loans from mostly Chinese financial institutions. Loans are not the only source of funds as Dell is looking to sell off assets, namely Perot Systems.
IBM
Truven has over 8,500 clients, and will boost the size of Watson Health to over 5,000 employees. IBM: “Upon completion of the acquisition, IBM’s health cloud will house one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of health-related data, representing an aggregate of approximately 300 million patient lives acquired from three companies. IBM plans to integrate Truven’s extensive cloud-based data set spanning hundreds of different types of cost, claims, quality and outcomes information with its existing data sets.”
As a reminder of the health-related companies IBM has purchased in the last year:
The deal comes six months after one to buy top medical imaging software firm Merge Healthcare, and ten months after the purchases of patient data analysis software firm Phytel and clinical database provider Explorys. The Phytel/Explorys deals coincided with the launch of Watson Health, which aims to provide software/services that can deliver insights from large volumes of anonymized patient data.
http://seekingalpha.com/news/3118536-ibm-buying-healthcare-analytics-firm-truven-2_6b
Side Note: The street is reacting favorably to the news – IBM was up 5%.
And by grand challenges, it’s thinking big — it lists past achievements like the moon landing, mapping the human genome, and addressing climate change. (That last one might still be up for grabs, by the way).
The contest is being launched Wednesday at the TED conference in Vancouver by Peter Diamandis, founder of XPrize, which is partnering with IBM on the project.
The winners will be announced at TED 2020 (assuming the event is still around then). Three winning teams will split $4.5 million of the prize money, an IBM spokeswoman said, meaning they could each pick up $1.5 million. The other $500,000 will help fund projects along the way. IBM is the one putting up all the cash.
Blockchain is a type of distributed database. It’s designed in a way that ensures that all transactions are public, yet no centralized party has exclusive control over them. The technology has become explosively popular because it powers Bitcoin, the open source, peer-to-peer payment system — although it can be used for much more than that.
IBM’s visions of blockchain are centered around IoT:
IBM is also promoting integration of blockchain apps with IoT devices for purposes that extend beyond payment. “Devices will be able to communicate to blockchain-based ledgers to update or validate smart contracts,” IBM says. “For example, as an IoT-connected package moves along multiple distribution points, the package location and temperature information could be updated on a blockchain. This allows all parties to share information and status of the package as it moves among multiple parties to ensure the terms of a contract are met.”
The z13s includes new cryptography hardware that can encrypt and decrypt data twice as fast as its predecessors for example. To speed up the z13s’ cryptography functions, the mainframe now features a faster cryptography co-processor card with more memory than IBM’s previous mid-range machines.
“This means clients can process twice as many high-volume, cryptographically-protected transactions as before without compromising performance,” the company says. “This equates to processing twice as many online or mobile device purchases
“You see two of them coming together on yesterday’s business model, and you see another one breaking up on yesterday’s business model,” Rometty said in a thinly veiled reference to the pending merger of Dell and EMC, and last year’s split of Hewlett-Packard into two companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc.
Microsoft
Following its earlier announcement of a partnership with Red Hat, Microsoft added Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6.7 and 7.2 to the Azure Marketplace. That means developers who want to use the popular operating system now have an easy and Microsoft-approved path to get it running on Azure.
A majority of Azure Marketplace workloads are Linux-based, which is an interesting position for Microsoft’s cloud platform, considering the company’s previously dim view of the open source OS.
http://www.cio.com/article/3034269/microsoft-azure-continues-open-source-love-affair.html#tk.rss_all
Dell | EMC
“Between the date the merger agreement was entered into and the date of this proxy statement/prospectus, the market value of the VMware Class A common stock has declined, thereby reducing the implied value of the stock portion of the merger consideration,” the letter said.
“Changes in the market value of the VMware Class A common stock also will impact the amount of cash that holders of EMC common stock will receive in the merger in lieu of fractional shares of Class V Common Stock,” the letter continued.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3034359/cloud-computing/the-dell-emc-merger-hits-some-snags.html
Dell Inc, the world’s third-biggest maker of computers, is set to gain unconditional EU antitrust approval for its US$67 billion bid for data storage company EMC Corp, two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday. European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso declined to comment on Thursday. The Commission is scheduled to give its ruling on the deal by Feb. 29.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/technology/eu-set-to-clear-dell-s-us/2528382.html
Dell Inc. is in negotiations to sell Perot Systems Corp. to NTT Data Corp. of Japan, Reuters reports.
Round Rock-based Dell is trying to sell the IT consulting business to raise money to fund its $67 billion buyout of Massachusetts-based EMC Corp. Dell has asked for $5 billion for Perot Systems but worldwide market jitters appear to have dampened companies’ appetite for tech acquisitions.
Oracle
It will be the largest campus outside the US and will seat 11,000 employees, which will be ready in the next five years, BusinessLine reports.
The company will also launch incubation centres. “I am particularly excited about the incubation centres which will house substantial software and technology capabilities, tools, and training to help launch new technology start-ups built utilising Java and the Oracle platform,” Catz added.
http://www.ibtimes.co.in/oracle-invest-400-million-india-says-global-ceo-safra-catz-666849
Other
Too often I have witnessed companies prematurely forced into a negotiation as a result of an event created by SAP (e.g. audit) or their company (e.g. merger). These organizations are compelled to operate in a reactionary manner, and challenged to fully understand their existing relationship with SAP, resulting in uncertainty and doubt. In most cases, these situations result in below market commercial agreements, increased risk and strained relationships, both internally and with SAP.
On the other hand, I have also partnered with IT executives who recognize the need to anticipate such events and proactively undertake a detailed baseline and assessment of their SAP relationship well in advance of entertaining a commercial discussion.
Virtualization made computing more efficient by enabling companies to run multiple operating systems on a single server. But VMs only support one application per OS. Containers take server resource utilization much further by allowing developers to run an app in its own container, and run multiple containers on the same OS. Developers can also move containers between Linux servers or virtual machines (VMs) and make changes to apps or portions of apps, called microservices, without breaking the software and risking downtime. Proponents say containers facilitates greater agility in the age of constantly updated mobile and Web apps.
Photo: Luis Llerena