SourceCast: Episode 11: Back to the news
Supplier Report: 1/16/2016
IBM is looking for trouble… or at least fraud. The company purchased Iris Analytics, a company that developed a real-time fraud engine for machine learning. I guess Watson really will be Watson-esque. IBM also topped US patent creation list (again).
HPI did not have good news during the holidays, PC sales slipped (except for Apple), while HPE looks to sell of their stake in MPhasis ($1B).
EMC has a new CIO and Microsoft dropped their cloud fees to be more competitive with Amazon.
IBM
- IBM buys fraud sniffing biz for real-time protection
IBM has assimilated a German payment fraud prevention business, IRIS Analytics, a provider of a real-time fraud analytics engine using machine learning algorithms, for undisclosed terms.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/ibm_slurps_up_fraud_detection_biz_for_realtime_protection/
- IBM tops US patent list again
The computer company was granted 7,355 patents in the US. According to its statement, IBM inventors generated more than 2,000 patents in areas related to cognitive computing and the company’s cloud platform.
http://ipprotheinternet.com/ipprotheinternetnews/article.php?article_id=4738
- IBM Introduces Dynamic Pricing to Help Retailers Navigate Online Price Wars
“At any given moment, a retailer is no more than one click away from losing a customer online. IBM Dynamic Pricing executes real-time pricing recommendations at the scale and speed needed to ensure competitiveness in a volatile shopping environment,” saidStephen Mello, Vice President, IBM eCommerce & Merchandising. “This intuitive and dynamic pricing system improves visibility into what’s happening in the market, allowing retailers to make decisions that are best for their businesses and customers alike.”
- IBM’s Profits Hit An All-Time High
While stagnant on a nominal basis, IBM’s per-share profitability has hit an historical high in the most recent trailing 12-month period. This improvement can be attributed to two factors: value-accretive share buybacks and the firm’s shift in focus to less asset-intensive businesses. Uncertainty remains as to how soon the company will be able to generate revenue growth, but growth in profits and cash flow are arguably more important to valuation.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3810366-ibms-profits-hit-an-all-time-high
More on this:
Outstanding! In fact, IBM’s profit per share increase works out to roughly a 9% compound annual growth rate of profits since 2006 and the most recent trailing twelve-month figure is the highest in the company’s history.
HP Inc | Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Apple leads holiday PC shipments despite market contraction
Market leaders Lenovo, HP Inc. and Dell all faced decreases, with Lenovo’s shipments declining to 15.4 million from 16.1 million, HP’s dipping to 14.2 million from 15.4 million and Dell’s dimming to 10.2 million from 10.8 million. The fourth quarter marked the fifth straight quarter of worldwide PC declines, and Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said holiday sales “did not boost” the market.
http://www.forextv.com/market-news/apple-leads-holiday-pc-shipments-despite-market-contraction/
- HP Inc. Is Cheap, But Is That Enough?
In the medium to longer term, it’s also worth thinking about whether the strong improvements in battery life enabled by newer generations of chips will continue to extend the refresh cycle over time. Think about it – old laptops that had 2-3 hour battery life to start with left you with battery anxiety within a few years. Now that smaller, more power-efficient laptops can get double or triple that battery life, there may not be as much need for personal users to replace laptops as quickly. This article from Digital Trends demonstrates the rapid improvements in battery life over just the past few years – and indications are that Intel’s Skylake chips will continue the trend of Haswell and Broadwell toward greater efficiency.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3803146-hp-inc-is-cheap-but-is-that-enough
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to Sell ($1B) Stake in Mphasis?
Hewlett-Packard purchased Mphasis when it acquired Electronic Data Systems in 2008 for approximately $13.9 billion. At the time, the company’s Technology Solutions Group segment shifted its outsourcing services operations and a part of its consulting and integration activities to Electronic Data. The Indian company has since functioned as an independent subsidiary of Hewlett Packard. The sale of Mphasis comes at a time when the company is attempting to restructure its IT consulting and services group. Hewlett-Packard stated that it was planning to shed around 25,000 to 30,000 jobs in its enterprise business.
http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/203493/hewlett-packard-enterprise-hpe-to-sell-stake-in-mphasis
EMC | Dell
- EMC gets new CIO in midst of Dell purchase
ML Krakauer took the reins as EMC’s CIO last week, replacing Vic Bhagat, who joined EMC as CIO in 2013.
http://www.ciodive.com/news/emc-gets-new-cio-in-midst-of-dell-purchase/411931/
- How Will EMC’s Once Pivotal Ambitions Play Out?
To be fair, that may never have been Pivotal’s vision, though there’s little question that EMC and VMware had to offer their customers a reason to stick with their more expensive, proprietary solutions instead of rushing to Amazon. Whether they succeeded with that is unclear, but we’ll leave it to Michael Dell to craft the rest of that story. Pivotal, on the other hand, may have the chance to write its own story if reports of its immanent IPO are true. In the mean time, it went shopping — but more on that later.
http://www.cmswire.com/information-management/how-will-emcs-once-pivotal-ambitions-play-out/
- EMC exec reacts to criticism of proposed Dell merger
“Vinod is a smart venture capitalist and I don’t doubt his ability to recognize innovation in startups, but his view on our ability to innovate at scale is not entirely accurate,” according to a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. ” … As a roughly $80B entity, Dell+EMC will need more than just one source and method of innovation. Our model provides exactly that.”
- EMC’s Stock Fell 14% in 2015
the share price of EMC fell 14% in 2015 from $29.83 to $25.68. Its share price fell 6.2% on October 21, 2015, as it reported an 8.3% YoY (year-over-year) drop in EPS (earnings per share) in its 3Q15 earnings results. Its reported revenues of $6.1 billion were in line with analyst estimates.
Other
- Microsoft Drops Prices For Some Azure Instances By Up To 17%
Microsoft has long said it would match AWS’s prices for compute, storage and bandwidth. Earlier this month, Amazon dropped the priceof some of its general purpose, compute- and memory-optimized EC2 machines. It doesn’t come as a major surprise then that Microsoft is now also dropping the prices for some of its virtual machines by between 10 and 17 percent.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/microsoft-drops-prices-for-some-azure-instances-by-up-to-17/
Photo: Greg Rakozy
Video: New payment systems
News You Can Use: 1/13/2016
- A.T. Kearney Is Just Plain Wrong
Not only are more than half of US manufacturers considering reshoring now, we have some really great examples of success stories including GE Appliance Park, Starbucks, Apple and others. In addition, we can point to other companies such as Haier, Nissan and Smithfield Foods where Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has directly resulted in the establishment of more manufacturing in America.
All of the signs and statistics (other surveys by Boston Consulting Group, Alix Partners and several European studies) point to the rebuilding of manufacturing in America and in Western Europe. The trend is strong and we are very optimistic that it will continue to be so. US jobs loss to offshoring is now about equivalent to jobs created or reshored to America. We need to be reshoring supporters and make more of this happen, not detractors.
http://www.scmr.com/article/a.t._kearney_is_just_plain_wrong
- How Quitting Can Get You Exactly What You Want
Quit selling those cheap houses to those unqualified, needy people who he didn’t like working with. If he was going to attract million-dollar sellers, he was going to have to give up on working with $100,000 homes. That meant reaching way out of his comfort zone and giving up on what he had built so far. If Jon was going to gain traction, pick up luxury sellers and earn more money, he was going to have to project the image of expertise, confidence and exclusivity. Exclusivity meaning he had to be selective of who he worked with. The days of taking on any old client were gone. If they didn’t fit the luxury mold, he had to refer them out.
- PAGING DR. ROBOT: THE COMING AI HEALTH CARE BOOM
More than six billion dollars: That’s how much health care providers and consumers will be spending every year on artificial intelligence tools by 2021—a tenfold increase from today—according to a new report from research firm Frost & Sullivan. (Specifically, it will be a growth from $633.8 million in 2014 to $6,662.2 million in 2021.)
http://www.fastcompany.com/3055256/elasticity/paging-dr-robot-the-coming-ai-health-care-boom
- Strategic Sourcing predictions for 2016
the doctor is already seeing a number of 2016 posts about how this is the year we replace “negotiate” with “collaborate” (which the thought leaders have been saying since strategic sourcing decision optimization started becoming common in the leading Sourcing organizations, also known as the Hackett Group top 8%), that analytics will take off (which is the same speech we heard 15 years ago when Business Objects and Cognos were the names in analytics), that the skills gap will finally be addressed (which reminds the doctor of conversations he was having nine years ago), and so on. It looks like the amount of future sh!t that is going to be dumped upon you this year is greater than the truckload Biff Tannen had dumped upon his head in the original Back to the Future movie, way back in 1985. (A reference that is very appropriate because every year at this time it seems we get taken back to the future.)
http://sourcinginnovation.com/wordpress/2016/01/04/sis-prediction-for-2016-it-will-only-get-hotter/
- To connect to last week’s podcast, How Millennials Are Affecting the Supply Chain
Respondents said that the biggest impact millennials will have on the supply chain is in terms of how they change the way consumers buy. The move towards new marketplaces – online, mobile, via social media – will be one of the transformative ways supply chains will be affected.
http://mhlnews.com/labor-management/how-millennials-are-affecting-supply-chain
- In 2016, Intel’s Entire Supply Chain Will Be Conflict-Free
Since Intel and other manufacturers began the program, the profits from mines have started flowing to miners themselves rather than to war. In the last study of three of the major materials—tungsten, tantalum, and tin—a nonprofit called the Enough Project found that the amount of money going to conflict had dropped 65%, and it continues to fall.
Photo: Ricky Kharawala
Supplier Report: 1/9/2016
We are back to work and the news is flowing! It is a new year and that means changes. IBM announced the departure of three long-time executives while Oracle quietly snapped up two companies.
The realities of the Dell/EMC merger are hitting EMC with the announcement of job eliminations. IBM is also expected to announce job reductions in the GTS space.
Meanwhile, HPE is opening a private bar in London…
IBM
- Why IBM just lost three key executives
That, in fact, is just what apparently happened at IBM in December, when it reportedly lost Steve Mills, the 43-year company veteran who was most recently executive vice president of IBM Software and Systems, along with Danny Sabbah, its chief technology officer for cloud, and Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security.
Bottom line? “Keep an eye on these three,” Enderle said. “The fact they left together suggests they have something else they want to do together, and given their powerful skillset, that ‘something’ could be really interesting.”
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3020616/why-ibm-just-lost-three-key-executives.html
More on Steve Mills:
http://fortune.com/2016/01/06/ibms-steve-mills-retires/ - More IBM job cuts to services unit expected by Alliance
In one form or another, the workers group Alliance@IBM is bracing for downsizing in the Global Technology Services unit at IBM Corp. “We’re hearing rumors of (GTS) being sold off,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator of Alliance@IBM. “As with everything inside IBM, we don’t get confirmation until just before it happens. If the company says anything, they will wait until the last moment.” Sale or not, Conrad said cuts to the GTS units most likely will happen sometime this month.
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/money/2016/01/07/more-ibm-job-cuts-services-unit-expected-alliance/78405848/
More on Alliance who is also folding:After trying since 1999 to turn IBM into a union shop, the Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America local, is “suspending” its organizing efforts. The Alliance, which had 400 dues-paying members at its peak, now has about 200.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3019552/it-industry/ibm-union-calls-it-quits.html
- IBM cuts new Watson deals that push it deeper into health
Medtronics:IBM and Medtronic are using Watson’s analytics as the back-end for an app which they say could help the roughly 400 million people in the world with diabetes.
SoftBank:
Rometti was also joined by the president of Softbank, to talk about how the companies will combine Watson’s analytics with Softbank’s Pepper robot to market services to businesses.
Pepper is already being used by Nestle in about a hundred of its stores, where it greets customers, asks them what type of coffee they like and makes recommendations for the type of coffee machine they might want to buy. But Pepper can gather all kinds of data, including how many people interact with it, their gender, and even their emotion. The idea is to take all that data and use it to hone marketing and sales strategies.
- IBM’s Watson flexes muscles with Under Armour partnership
Powered by Watson technology, Under Armour’s application, UA Record, aggregates and analyzes an individual’s health and fitness data to provide personalized coaching and advice. A few examples include the app telling a user the average steps taken daily and bed time for a person their age.
- Ginni Rometty 2016 CES Keynote speech
What exactly is that leather “thing” she is wearing? That isn’t a jacket.
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/07/ibm-ceo-artificially-intelligent-computers-will-change-who-you/21293693/
Oracle
- Oracle purchases AddThis for $200M
Oracle continues to ramp up its business in the area of marketing tech. Today the enterprise software giant announced that it has acquired AddThis, which makes sharing features (i.e., those buttons on web pages that let you share stories or follow accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and audience tracking technology for online publishers and marketers. AddThis says it currently covers activity data for 1.9 billion monthly unique visitors and over 15 million mobile and desktop web domains.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/oracle-addthis/
I want to make a connection. Two months ago, we covered the news that TeraData is getting out of the marketing cloud space, with Oracle looking to purchase more marketing assets, could they be a possible buyer? - Oracle also quietly purchased StackEngine two weeks ago…
StackEngine was founded just last year by a couple of industry veterans. In fact, it emerged from stealth in October, 2014 with a plan to operationalize Docker, the open source container system. While Docker has been a hot commodity for the last several years, StackEngine recognized that it lacked an administrative layer for IT pros to manage their containers.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/22/oracle-stackengine-acquisition-part-of-expanding-cloud-strategy/
- Is Oracle’s ‘supergraphic’ a super problem?
Oracle has a giant sight up on their building in San Jose just in time for the Super Bowl, city officials are not pleased:“They will have to take the sign down,” Cheryl Wessling, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, said Friday after this newspaper contacted her department about the colorful sign that can be seen as far away as Interstate 280.
http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_29361163/oracles-new-super-bowl-sign-is-illegal-san
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Track to Dominate the Flash Storage Market
He further went to say that HPE will dominate the flash storage market as its latest series of all-flash storage arrays, the 3PAR StoreSev Storage family, makes storage affordable for businesses. The cost will fall to $1.50 per GB as compared to $2 per GB. New Zealand and Australia were identified by Mr. Davis as the leaders in flash adoption in the Asia-Pacific region, but early indicators point towards increased adoption in Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong.
- HPE’s London boozer dubbed the ‘Hewlett You Inn?’
This is an absolutely useless article, but… HPE has a private drinking club in London?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/06/hpe_boozer_poll_result/
EMC | Dell
- EMC tightens grip on converged infrastructure subsidiary VCE as job cuts loom
According to sources cited by The Register, VCE is also expected to announce job cuts with around 250 staff likely to be let go this week.
According to the source, the cuts will hit all levels including some senior managers; this move would make sense as EMC brings VCE closer to its own operations, perhaps believing that it can cut costs.
- Feeling jitters as Dell-EMC marriage approaches
How will the two cultures mesh? “EMC was built on engineering innovation and high-touch sales” that require lots of personal attention, says Peter Bell, who spent a decade at the company and is now a venture capitalist at Highland Capital Partners in California. (EMC chief executive Joe Tucci is known to keep the last day of every quarter free so that he can make phone calls to customers and help personally close deals that are hanging in the balance.) That meant fat profit margins for EMC, and hefty earnings for its workers.
In contrast, “Michael Dell knows how to run a big business in a low-cost way. He knows how to compete in a commodity business, and he knows there’s a lot of cost to be taken out of EMC,” Bell says. Not surprisingly, that has created a lot of anxiety among EMC employees.
http://www.betaboston.com/news/2016/01/08/feeling-jitters-as-dell-emc-marriage-approaches-2/
Other
- Why Red Hat, Inc. Gained 20% in 2015
Shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) gained 19.8% in 2015, according to data from S&P Capital IQ. Lifted by three fantastic quarterly reports to overcome the general market jitters in August, the open-source software veteran is finding its sea legs and growing into its nosebleed price to earnings ratios.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/06/why-red-hat-inc-gained-20-in-2015.aspx
- What’s in Store for Big Data in 2016?
(On Teradata) Organizations hit reset on Hadoop. As Hadoop and related open source technologies move beyond knowledge gathering and the hype abates, enterprises will hit the reset button on (not abandon) their Hadoop deployments to address lessons learned — particularly around governance, data integration, security and reliability.
https://adtmag.com/articles/2016/01/06/2016-big-data-predictions.aspx
Photo: Thomas Ulrich