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News You Can Use: 7/6/2016

sn_suitcases_Mike Birdy

  • Your Procurement Sucks … and Here are 3 Likely Reasons Why.

    Invoices. RFPs. Catalogues. It’s not the 90s anymore, it’s the teens. If you don’t have a modern e-invoicing, e-RFX, and e-Catalog/e-Shopping solution there’s no hope of you ever getting your Procurement on track because you’ll never be able to process the mound of paperwork that is getting bigger and bigger every day as your organization grows and more invoices go in, more RFPs go out, more suppliers respond, and more suppliers send you their catalogues that get bigger every year.

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2016/06/16/your-procurement-sucks-and-here-are-3-likely-reasons-why/

  • Flipping the office telepresence model
    sn_telepresence_getty

    If you haven’t encountered a telepresence robot before, they look surprisingly humble. There is some variety in appearance, but the basic elements are: a screen that functions as a “head,” a “leg” or a “neck” for turning the “head” and a set of gyroscopic wheels for traveling. The model we use is made by Double Robotics and is essentially an iPad on a leg with wheels. Though it may seem simple, the technology is quite remarkable in what it can do for bringing people together.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/18/flipping-the-office-telepresence-model/

  • Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: Brexit Update (Absolutely Not Safe for Work!)

    Seriously bad language on this one… you have been warned. 
  • Tech culture still pushing out women, study finds

    The research was conducted by having more than 40 undergraduate engineering students keep bi-monthly diaries, providing the study with more than 3,000 entries to analyze. The results were published in a paper titled “Persistence is cultural: Professional socialization and the persistence of sex segregation,” in the May issue of Work and Occupations.

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/3084460/careers/tech-culture-still-pushing-out-women-study-finds.html

  • Supply Risk Management Can Not Be Siloed

    even though there may have been hundreds of smaller incidents in the supply chain that resulted in small fines, unexpected cost increases, disruptions, and minor brand damage, if no single incident has been severe enough to get the C-Suite’s attention, something else will always be higher priority

    http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2016/06/17/supply-risk-management-can-not-be-siloed/

Photo: Mike Birdy

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/2/2016

sn_throwrock_Felix Russell-Saw

This week the various arms of HP have caught my attention.  They successfully defeated Oracle over their Itanium dispute and have been awarded $3B.

In the wake of that news, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a massive restructuring (again) as their long time CTO Martin Fink is on his way out along with their COO. Meanwhile, HP Inc announced the purchase of a 3D scanning company.

With the sell off of the Autonomy products, the divestiture of their consulting services to CSC, and now with this $3B win, both HP companies have some cash, and I want to know what their grand strategy is.

In other news, IBM is doubling down on block-chain technology with their Bluemix Garage initiative, Microsoft has 350 million windows 10 devices active, and Oracle is trying their hardest to kill Java.

IBM

  • IBM and Cisco to combine collaboration tools

    IBM’s Verse email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/3090100/ibm-and-cisco-will-make-watson-into-a-virtual-workmate.html
    IBM and Cisco team up on enterprise collaboration to stave off rivals like Slack and Microsoft

    The bigger picture in this latest IBM and Cisco deal is that both companies are feeling the heat of competition from a wide range of rivals, some big and some actually quite small.

    They include standalone services from popular startups like Slack, Quip, Trello and Asana; as well as those offered by large companies like Microsoft and Citrix, which not only build their own solutions but have been aggressive acquirers of those startups that have built popular enterprise productivity tools.

    It’s a mark of how far we’ve come in the tech world that some of these products from much smaller outfits can give huge IT businesses a run for their money.

    https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/30/ibm-and-cisco-team-up-on-enterprise-collaboration-to-stave-off-rivals-like-slack-microsoft-and-more/

  • IBM storage has a new boss: The same one it had six years ago

    At IBM Walsh has a disparate set of products to look after, including FlashSystem, SVC, Storwize, XIV and the DS8000 line. FlashSystem is popular, while the others could be characterised unkindly as fading stars – or, more sympathetically, as long-lived survivors facing the challenges of public cloud storage, software-defined storage, server SANs and hyper-converged systems.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/01/ibm_storage_new_boss_ed_walsh/

  • IBM Launches NYC Bluemix Garage With Former Azure Exec

    The design element is what made a difference for Murray. For example, one of the Bluemix Garage engagements Murray sat in on was a small startup out of San Francisco that had a complete idea and knew exactly what it wanted to build. IBM had the company come to the garage for a design thinking workshop to help it visualize what it was trying to solve and what experience it wanted its end users to have. And the design workshop, the startup abandoned the idea it initially had because it realized that what it was trying to build wasn’t really what it was trying to solve.

    http://www.eweek.com/developer/ibm-launches-nyc-bluemix-garage-with-former-azure-exec.html
    Can IBM Really Make a Business Out of Blockchain?

    According to Jerry Cuomo, vice president of blockchain and cloud at IBM, the plan will succeed because the company offers a full-suite of tools that allow developers to get up and running quickly while also benefiting from a mentoring environment at the Bluemix Garage. The garage moniker is supposed to exude a Silicon Valley-esque vibe, where people throw around ideas with markers on whiteboards and Post-It Notes.

    http://fortune.com/2016/06/28/ibm-blockchain/?iid=leftrail

  • Why IBM Will Soar While Apple Stumbles

    Unfortunately, these great strengths may have become toxic. Its culture has become highly secretive. Suppliers may only refer to Apple by a specially assigned code name. They win new contracts without knowing why and what Apple plans to do with their technology and then lose them again without knowing what they did wrong.

    http://fortune.com/2016/06/30/ibm-apple-soar-stumble/

Microsoft

Oracle

  • Oracle (ORCL) Loses Itanium Lawsuit Worth $3 Billion to HPE

    Oracle and HPE have been embroiled in a legal tangle involving software for Itanium chip-based servers over the last five years. HP Enterprise had asked for $3 billion in compensation from Oracle for allegedly causing a decline in the demand for its Itanium based products.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-orcl-loses-itanium-lawsuit-141002455.html
    Of course, Oracle vows to contest the ruling…

  • How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java

    Oracle employees that worked on Java EE have told others in the community that they have been ordered to work on other things. There has also been open talk of some Java EE developers “forking” the Java platform, breaking off with their own implementation and abandoning compatibility with the 20-year-old software platform acquired by Oracle with the takeover of Sun Microsystems six years ago. Yet Oracle remains silent about its plans for Java EE even as members of the governing body overseeing the Java standard have demanded a statement from the company.

    http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/07/oracle-killing-java-ee/
    bye_felicia

Storage ( EMC | Dell )

  • Why states like Massachusetts are trying to curb noncompete pacts

    Noncompete pacts were only one ingredient in the recipe that worked against Massachusetts and to the advantage of Silicon Valley, where employees can depart and start their own companies mostly without fear of a lawsuit. But they mattered. In California, companies are generally prohibited from enforcing noncompete agreements because of a worker-friendly statute from the 19th century.

    https://www.boston.com/jobs/jobs-news/2016/06/28/states-like-massachusetts-trying-curb-noncompete-pacts

  • Dell Promises ‘Seamless’ Deal Registration For Partners On First Day After EMC Merger

    In a letter to partners Tuesday, Marius Haas, Dell chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions, said the company is “driving to maintain the partner and customer experience you have come to expect today, and at the onset of day one, provide seamless deal registration and intact sales coverage plans.”

    “I do not think it will be seamless,” said a top executive at one large Dell and EMC solution provider, who did not want to be named. “Nothing in life ever is.”

    http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/300081182/dell-promises-seamless-deal-registration-for-partners-on-first-day-after-emc-merger.htm

  • Data Protection: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

    The key findings of the survey of IT decision makers at 2,200 organizations included:

    • incidents of traditional data loss and disruption are down since 2014, but new challenges mean 13% more businesses experienced loss overall;
    • over half of businesses fail to protect data in the cloud despite more than 80% indicating they will rely on SaaS-based business applications;
    • 36% have lost data in the last year as the result of a security breach;
    • 73% are not very confident they can protect flash storage environments;
    • the average cost of data loss is more than $914,000.

    http://it-tna.com/2016/06/29/data-protection-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc

  • Whitman lifts lid on big HPE reorganization
    The CTO and COO are leaving as part of this reorg…

    Whitman also said that HPE would merge its Hewlett Packard Labs research arm into its enterprise group, which is focused on selling data center gear. The idea is to better align research projects with products and services that can eventually be sold, she explained. Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of the HPE enterprise group, will lead Hewlett Packard Labs.

    As for the restructurings, Whitman wrote that it would consolidate its sales teams into one big global sales unit under its enterprise group. HPE will do a similar reshuffling with its marketing departments and will consolidate staff from e-commerce, product marketing, and customer relations group into one big marketing unit.

    http://fortune.com/2016/06/27/hewlett-packard-enterprise-martin-fink-meg-whitman/

  • HP launches PC as a service, buys 3D scanning specialists

    HP Inc said it has launched PCs as a service, simplifying PC lifecycle management. HP Device as a Service (DaaS) is designed to help take the stress out of acquiring, deploying and managing technology, with one single contract across devices and services, and no upfront investment. The programme is globally scalable, meaning customers can easily evolve their hardware infrastructure to adapt to changing workforces.

    Separately, HP is buying German companies David Vision Systems and David 3D Solutions, which make 3-D scanning technology, the Wall Street Journal reported. No financial terms were disclosed.

    http://www.telecompaper.com/news/hp-launches-pc-as-a-service-buys-3d-scanning-specialists–1151217

  • HP, Apple top list of tech companies fighting forced labor risk

    Forced laborers may be charged high recruitment fees to get jobs, be trapped in debt servitude, deprived of their passports or other documents, or made to work excessive hours for low pay, the report said.

    HP, Apple, Intel Corp, Cisco Systems Inc and Microsoft scored highest on the list of 20 publicly traded ICT companies. At the bottom were Keyence, BOE Technology and Canon.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hp-apple-top-list-tech-181308055.html

Other

  • What sets Red Hat apart from the Valley

    The Red Hat Summit marked 10 years since Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, and today it remains a cornerstone of the company’s offerings. Last year, Red Hat purchased Ansible, the provisioning system that competes with Chef and Puppet. In both the case of Ansible and of 3scale, Red Hat seized a smaller firm that was doing quite well, yet hadn’t taken over the market mindshare the way their public and near-public competitors had.

    Why is it that Red Hat seems to be more successful with technology acquisitions than, say, an HPE, which took on companies like Mercury, Autonomy and even Compaq? Red Hat CFO Frank Calderoni said that these successes come from disciplined acquisitions goals.

    http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-blog-sets-red-hat-apart-valley/

  • Salesforce is way behind Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP in one important area of its business

    Market-research firm Cowen Group pointed out in a note published on Thursday that Salesforce generates a substantially lower percentage of revenue from international regions compared to other software makers.

    As seen in the chart below, Salesforce gets only 32% of its revenue from outside the US, lagging behind SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, which all generate over half of their sales from overseas.

    sn_salesforce_intern
    http://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-overseas-sales-lags-oracle-microsoft-and-sap-2016-6?r=UK&IR=T

Photo: Felix Russell-Saw

Posted on

News You Can Use: 6/29/2016

sn_cowboy_Priscilla Westra

  • Automation, not cheap labor, is reshaping outsourcing

    One process that has taken off is called “Robotic Process Automation (RPA),” a term given to a virtual machine that takes over some of the applications and workflows managed by workers. These systems don’t directly replace humans, but take structured tasks and automate them, with users saving as much as much as 15%, said Karamouzis.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/3083264/it-careers/automation-not-cheap-labor-is-reshaping-outsourcing.html
    What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence

    We need to update the New Deal for the 21st century and establish a trainee program for the new jobs artificial intelligence will create. We need to retrain truck drivers and office assistants to create data analysts, trip optimizers and other professionals we don’t yet know we need. It would have been impossible for an antebellum farmer to imagine his son becoming an electrician, and it’s impossible to say what new jobs AI will create. But it’s clear that drastic measures are necessary if we want to transition from an industrial society to an age of intelligent machines.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-next-for-artificial-intelligence-1465827619

  • John Oliver on Retirement Plans (warning: bad language):
  • Ignoring People for Phones Is the New Normal

    The most interesting thing this study found was that people who reported phubbing more often were also more likely to be phubbed themselves. The authors, from the University of Kent, suggest several possible reasons for this. One is a simple retaliation—if you’re trying to talk to someone, and they’re on their phone, well, two can play at that game.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/ignoring-people-for-phones-is-the-new-normal-phubbing-study/486845/
    Note: “phubbing”—a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing.”

  • Why Leadership Development Needs to Be Updated

    As it is, 61 percent of North American employees surveyed by Achievers in 2015 said they don’t know their company’s mission. When coaches are in control, leaders receive inconsistent training that doesn’t align with company practices and values, and they can’t reinforce the mission to employees.

    Employers need to take back the control and launch leadership development programs consistent with the company mission, values and goals. This way, development and training aligns with the ROI and metrics companies want — not what the coaches want.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/276229

  • Building A High-Performance Sourcing Department: Hire High-Performance Sourcers

    Before you can hire high-performance sourcers you need to know what the definition of a good sourcer. Great sourcers are individuals who possess two skills sets that might appear to be polar opposites. They possess strong analytical research skills and outstanding verbal and written communication skills. According to sourcing pioneer Harry Ensley, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Sun Life Financial, a great sourcer is often a strong recruiter, but a good recruiter is not necessarily a good sourcer.

    http://www.eremedia.com/sourcecon/how-to-build-a-high-performance-sourcing-department-part-1-hire-high-performance-sourcers/

Photo: Priscilla Westra

Posted on

Supplier Report: 6/25/2016

sn_rose_Craig Dennis

“Sell, Sell, Sell!” is the theme of the week. Dell is selling off Quest and SonicWall while HP Inc finishes the job they started in April and sold off their Extreme platform to OpenText.

Microsoft bought a text app company named Wand while RedHat purchased 3scale.

We also look at IBM’s purchases over the last 6 months and go deeper into understanding their future direction.

IBM

  • What Do IBM’s Acquisitions over The Past Six Months Indicate?

    International Business Machines has acquired nine companies in the last six months. The acquisitions indicate that the company is focused on rebuilding its business around digital marketing, Software as a Service (SaaS) verticals and business intelligence verticals

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2016/06/22/what-do-ibms-acquisitions-over-the-past-six-months-indicate/#19252dafe44a

  • Inside IBM’s plan to become a cloud broker and even resell AWS, Microsoft Azure

    While cloudMatrix is a cloud broker, the term is a bit of a misnomer. CloudMatrix is priced as a subscription based on the number of virtual machines used. What IBM is really going for is to be the proverbial one pane of glass for IT infrastructure with a financial engine to gauge costs on the fly. CloudMatrix supports AWS, Azure and SoftLayer on the cloud side and VMware vCloud Director and vRealize. OpenStack and Google Cloud Platform will be added in the months to come.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-ibms-plan-to-become-a-cloud-broker-and-even-resell-aws-microsoft-azure/

  • IBM unveils serverless-computing, simplifies IoT app development

    IBM has unveiled its new Bluemix OpenWhisk, allowing developers to build feature-rich, intuitive applications which easily connect to the Internet of Things and tap into advanced services such as cognitive and analytics without the need to deploy and manage extra infrastructure. Bluemix OpenWhisk has been positioned as a serverless computing platform that leverages Docker and features new user interface updates that claims to drive efficiency for developers.

    http://techseen.com/2016/06/22/ibm-serverless-computing-iot-app/

  • IBM Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service
    Oh how I love press releases…

    “We believe IBM’s recognition in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service report is due to the strength and reach of our resiliency services portfolio, and the results our clients are experiencing on a daily basis,” said Laurence Guihard-Joly, General Manager, IBM Resiliency Services. “Given the range of risks surrounding businesses today, we are dedicated to continue delivering the most advanced, secure solutions in the industry so clients – no matter how hybrid their IT environments are – can focus first and foremost on keeping their businesses up and running for long term growth.”

    http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-named-a-leader-in-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-disaster-recovery-as-a-service-300287917.html

  • IBM promises 200 petaflop supercomputer

    The US is clearly embarrassed the Chinese Sunway TiahuLight system is leading the supercomputer arms race. Now the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced that is having a new IBM system, named Summit, delivered in early 2018 that will now be capable of 200 peak petaflops.

    That would make it almost twice as fast as TaihuLight. The Summit will be based around IBM Power9 and Nvidia Volta GPUs. Summit use only about 3,400 nodes. Each node will have “over half a terabyte” of coherent memory (HBM + DDR4), plus 800GB of non-volatile RAM that serves as a burst buffer or extended memory.

    http://www.fudzilla.com/news/40970-ibm-promises-200-petaflop-supercomputer

Microsoft

  • Microsoft buys Wand to improve chat capabilities

    The Wand team will be joining Bing’s engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The company’s team members will be working primarily on Microsoft’s push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants.

    It’s a natural fit for Wand, which had been working since 2013 on apps that let users chat with one another and add outside information from sources like Yelp. Users could share music and let other people access their smart home devices using Wand, too.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3085151/microsoft-buys-wand-to-improve-chat-capabilities.html

  • Psst, want to flog a turkey like LinkedIn? Well, phone up Microsoft

    In that sense, the purchase of LinkedIn reminds one of Microsoft’s acquisition in September 2013 of the mobile phone assets of Nokia, the Finnish telecoms giant. That deal was masterminded (if that is the right word) by Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, and likewise represented a desperate attempt to rectify an earlier strategic blunder, namely Microsoft’s failure to spot the smartphone revolution that had been launched by Apple in 2007. The Nokia venture turned out to be an unmitigated disaster and led to Microsoft writing off a loss of $7.9bn in July last year.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/19/microsoft-linkedin-acquisition-social-networking-expensive-turkey
    Also:

    Acquiring LinkedIn would have provided Salesforce with a vast amount of data on users all around the world. This would have helped Salesforce develop tools and enabled customers to finalize sales deals. Users’ profiles on LinkedIn provide an insight into a range of information, including users’ skills, responsibilities in previous jobs, and contact details.

    sn_sf_threat
    http://marketrealist.com/2016/06/microsoft-make-linkedin-offer-thwart-salesforces-bid/

  • Microsoft is marketing software to help state governments keep track of legal marijuana

    To do this, Microsoft is partnering with Kind a company who built software to track legal marijuana from “seed to sale” for local and state government agencies. Kind’s government solutions department says their mission is to help the cannabis industry to transact safely; transact securely, and stay in compliance with the rules and regulations governing marijuana-related businesses. Microsoft will leverage their cloud platform Azure to facilitate and expand the services, and will be actively marketing it in states where marijuana is legal at some level. Microsoft will not be working with Kind’s Kiosk division or any point of sale services — this is strictly for government agencies.

    http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-marketing-software-help-state-governments-keep-track-legal-marijuana

  • Is It Time For Microsoft To Rebrand?

    But I’m not suggesting that the Microsoft brand go away completely. It does seem, though, that its role should change. Instead of serving as the corporate moniker and the lead brand for the company, Microsoft could be used as a product or category brand and a business unit name. Just as Google’s leaders adopted Alphabet as the parent company name and transitioned the Google brand away from entities “far afield” from its main Internet products, perhaps it’s time for Nadella to limit the use of the Microsoft and adopt a new name for his company.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/deniselyohn/2016/06/22/is-it-time-for-microsoft-to-rebrand/#243311d16e89

Oracle

Storage [EMC | Dell | Infinidat]

  • Dell sells data analytics unit to Francisco Partners, Elliott

    Private equity players Francisco Partners and Elliott Management have signed a definitive agreement to snap up all shares in Dell Software Group for $US2 billion, according to newswire Reuters. Terms of the deal will see the combined entity take control of both Quest and SonicWall, which provide business software to more than 180,000 customers across the world.

    http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/dell-sells-data-analytics-unit-to-francisco-partners-elliott
    Is Dell cutting too deep?

    In March, Dell sold its consultancy arm to NTT Data for $3 billion. This latest sale sees it dispose of the bulk of its software division including security to Francisco Partners and Elliot Management. The two big assets in this sale are Quest and SonicWALL. Nobody is speaking publicly about what Dell will get but Reuters has cited an insider putting the deal at over $2 billion. If that number is accurate it represents a loss for Dell who paid $2.4 billion just for Quest in 2012.

    http://www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2016/06/22/dell-cutting-deep/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc

  • Open Text to buy customer communications assets from HP for $315 million US

    The transaction includes HP Extream, HP Output Management, HP TeleForm and HP LiquidOffice – collectively used to manage customer communications.

    Open Text said the purchase will help it expand its range of customer communications management products and services.

    It estimates the acquired HP businesses will generate between $110 million and $125 million US of annualized revenue.

    http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/open-text-buy-communications-assets-hp-1.3644994

  • HP Inc. Plans to Use Gains From Divestiture to Invest in Print

    The company’s move will reduce revenue in the supplies category, including items like ink cartridges and toner, by about $450 million over two quarters, Chief Financial Officer Catherine Lesjak said Tuesday on a conference call with analysts. HP Inc. will gain about $285 million from the divestiture of its Marketing Optimization assets. The company said it will pay back the investment over three years.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-21/hp-inc-plans-to-use-gains-from-divestiture-to-invest-in-print

Other

  • Amazon Web Services Expanding With Artificial Intelligence

    On June 15, Smola reported he would be joining Amazon to lead its artificial intelligence initiatives mostly focused within the firm’s cloud machine learning platform business. With this effort, Amazon will be increasing its competitiveness in the infrastructure as a service artificial intelligence market. Current competitors are Microsoft Azure, IBM SmartCloud and Google Compute Engine, all offering different variations of artificial intelligence technology.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-services-expanding-artificial-intelligence-192956493.html

  • Red Hat to Acquire API Management Leader 3scale

    3scale complements our existing middleware product portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift by enabling companies to create and publish APIs with tools such as Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and then manage and drive adoption of those APIs once they have been published.

    https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-api-management-leader-3scale