Supplier Report: 6/13/2015
Rumors dominated the news again this week with talk that Oracle could buy Splunk and (once again) that HP could be purchasing EMC. IBM actually went out and bought ANOTHER company called Blue Box to add to their OpenStack offerings (this is a major trend developing).
IBM also scored new long term business while HP finally settles on past mistakes.
IBM
- IBM buys another company: IBM acquired Blue Box to retain its dominance in the hybrid cloud space
IBM said that the inclusion of Blue Box to its services portfolio will strengthen its OpenStack lineup with a remotely managed OpenStack offering. Clients can now integrate cloud-based applications and on-premise systems into OpenStack-managed clouds, thus simplifying the deployment of workloads across hybrid cloud environments.
http://marketrealist.com/2015/06/ibm-continues-acquisition-spree-blue-box/?source=google
- IBM’s Expanding Margins: Overly Aggressive Cost Cutting Or Change In Business Mix
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3253235-ibms-expanding-margins-overly-aggressive-cost-cutting-or-change-in-business-mix - We Need Only Three Hadoops, And Maybe Three Systems
We are also starting to think that IBM, which is trying to revitalize and open up its Power chip architecture, might be better served if it would anoint one of the larger Hadoop distros as its preferred stack and to get it all tuned up to run on Power-based servers. Such an approach is probably necessary to take on Intel in the datacenter, which was the really the point of IBM selling off its System x server division to Lenovo Group last fall.
http://www.theplatform.net/2015/06/11/we-need-only-three-hadoops-and-maybe-three-systems/
- IBM signs 5-year IT services deal with Citizens Bank
IBM will be using a hybrid IT approach to optimize the bank’s existing IT infrastructure. IBM will be integrating automation and predictive analytics technologies to standardize and streamline many of its internal IT systems and processes.
http://www.infotechlead.com/bpo/ibm-signs-5-year-it-services-deal-with-citizens-bank-31037
- Doctor Evidence to Supply IBM Watson Health with Cancer Research Data
Doctor Evidence will contribute 2 million additional data points from highly structured, peer-reviewed content, including thousands of clinical papers, conference proceedings, abstracts on remissions, patient survival cases, epidemiology, and drug label data from the U.S. and Europe. This medical information will be added to Watson’s existing corpus of health data that includes content from partners such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Cancer.gov, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.
http://hitconsultant.net/2015/06/11/doctor-evidence-ibm-watson-health-cancer-data/
- IBM introduces SuperVessel open access cloud service
IBM has introduced SuperVessel, an open access cloud service created by Beijing’s IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs. The system is available to all developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem. The cloud acts as a virtual R&D engine for the creation, testing and pilot of emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ibm-introduces-supervessel-open-access-cloud-service–1086689
Oracle
- Does An Oracle-Splunk Merger Make Sense? Wall Street Split
He says that Splunk’s highly differentiated big data processing software is in high demand and thus wouldn’t be surprised if multiple large tech companies were bidding to acquire the firm. However, he’s skeptical of whether Splunk executives would see now as the correct time to sell, since they have a “very robust growth outlook ahead of them.”
Hewlett Packard Enterprises
- HP Abandons Medellin Global Center and Has No One to Blame But Itself
With triumphant platitudes and self-congratulatory praise, Hewlett-Packard made history by opening a US$14 million global services captive in Medellin, Colombia back in 2012. Plans called for employing over 1,000 professionals, with the center positioned to become the backbone for HP’s regional back-office, HR and call center operations.Three years later and the entire project is being dissolved to the utter dismay of staunch supporters in Medellin and Bogota who bent over backwards to “seduce” (the word local media used at the time) HP into selecting Medellin during a highly competitive, global selection process where several other geographies were considered.
http://www.nearshoreamericas.com/hp-kills-medellin-global-services-center-blame/
- HP pays big bucks to settle class-action lawsuit over botched deal
HP said June 9 that its insurance would pay the $100 million settlement fund to resolve the lawsuit from a Dutch pension fund PGGM Vermogensbeheer B.V. The lawsuit stems from an impairment charge after HP purchased the software company Autonomy.
EMC
- HP will stomp EMC’s disks into the dust, babble storage mystics
Networked storage array revenues are shrinking while server-SAN and hyper-scale storage revenues grow strongly, IDC said in its latest worldwide disk storage tracker. Total worldwide disk storage revenues in the first 2015 quarter were almost $8.8bn, up 6.8 per cent year-over-year, with 28.3EB shipped, which was 41.1 per cent higher year-on-year.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/08/hp_overtake_emc_in_disk_storage_revenues_says_idc/
- We think HP will buy EMC, says analyst
“While management’s messaging around the size of M&A in HP Enterprise continues to refer to Aruba as a benchmark (~$3bn), CEO Meg Whitman explained that from an academic perspective, technology hardware is an industry that should consolidate due to declining revenues and slowing growth rates. This sounds like EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s answer. Have they been talking? We think so. Pro forma financial leverage is manageable at a $32-$33 takeout price (less than 3x net debt/EBITDA). There are so many reasons this makes sense.”
http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2411970/we-think-hp-will-buy-emc-says-analyst
Other
- Mainframe Developer Workforce Shortage Seen Ahead
The latest survey, slated for release Wednesday morning, found that 39% of the respondents, who come from 10,000-employee-plus companies based worldwide, have no plans to address coming mainframe developer shortages. Yet more than 80% acknowledge that mainframes will remain a key business asset to handle ongoing operations and the growing amounts of Big Data.
Video: The single biggest reason why startups succeed
Supplier Report: 6/6/2015
For the 3rd straight week, OpenStack is a major news item. Both IBM and Cisco announced acquisitions of OpenStack firms. Acquisitions were the major news driver in general as CA also acquired Grid Tools while HP is making news for what they didn’t (and might) buy.
IBM
- IBM Acquires Managed Private OpenStack Cloud Startup Blue Box
The Seattle-based cloud provider simplifies private cloud for enterprises by offering it as a managed service. Its turnkey private clouds are hosted in customers’ data centers but managed by Blue Box, similar to Cisco’s Metacloud. Blue Box gives IBM capabilities to deliver public cloud-like experience within a data center of the client’s choice.
- When Watson meets procurement
Another example that Michael provided might best be described as the category/supplier “briefing book” on steroids. The idea behind “the complete procurement overview” is to aggregate information on a real-time basis when anyone within procurement (or outside of it) needs a briefing document or related auto-generated deliverable.
- IBM Extends Watson Platform Capabilities
IBM revealed the existence of a Tradeoff Analytics API that developers can invoke via the IBM Watson Cloud running on the IBM Bluemix cloud service. This particular API, said Vince Padua, director of the IBM Watson platform, makes it easier for developers to create applications that filter large amounts of content. Similar in concept to the filtering tools commonly used in e-commerce applications on the Web, Padua said the goal is to enable end users to weight different types of content in way that enable Watson to deliver better answers based on the personal preferences of the end user based on multiple criteria.
http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/06042015/ibm-extends-watson-platform-capabilities
- IBM has been awarded an average of 21 patents per day so far in 2015
Although the media (Quartz included) tend to focus on what wacky inventions companies like Google and Apple are patenting, IBM is still far and away the leader in patents in the US. The US Patent and Trademark Office releases its new patent awards on Tuesdays. After yesterday’s awards, IBM has been awarded an average of 152 patents a week—or 21 patents a day—in 2015, whereas Apple has only received about 42 a week, and Google about 64.
http://qz.com/418068/ibm-has-been-awarded-an-average-of-21-patents-per-day-so-far-in-2015/
- IBM is shutting Many Eyes data visualization service
Launched 8 years ago by IBM Research, the project gave people a way to crowd-source their data analysis cheaply and easily. Users could upload data sets to Many Eyes, which would then present visualizations for other people in different specialties to assess.
- IBM Targets Specific Industries with Prebuilt Analytics
The specially tailored solutions provide modeling patterns for predictive analytics — basing business decisions on Big Data gathered from different sources — and customized interfaces and dashboards so users can focus on industry-specific use cases. Data preparation capabilities are also specialized to handle unique industry-related data, collecting the information and massaging it for analytic investigations.
https://adtmag.com/articles/2015/06/01/ibm-industy-data.aspx
HP
- Is HP Backing out of Computer Sciences Acquisition Deal?
Citing people familiar with the matter, H-P was in talks with Computer Sciences for the past months and was close to signing the deal. However, the exact reason behind the change of decision is still unclear.
- HP’s Meg Whitman: More job cuts ahead
Asked how many cuts are ahead — Whitman declined to specify, but noted it will depend on how the economy fares between now and November 1. That’s when the 76-year-old company is splitting itself into two publicly-traded entities.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/04/news/economy/hp-job-cuts-meg-whitman/ - HP Discover: The 9 biggest announcements
HP revealed CloudSystem 9.0, the latest version of its cloud-in-a-box product and service which gains the addition of OpenStack and the Helion Development Platform to deliver a comprehensive private cloud for customers that can bridge the legacy and cloud native worlds.
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2411308/hp-discover-the-5-biggest-announcements-so-far
- Hewlett-Packard Company EVP Tracy S. Keogh Sells 213,522 Shares
Transaction worth $7.2M
http://www.wkrb13.com/markets/625771/hewlett-packard-company-evp-tracy-s-keogh-sells-213522-shares-hpq/
EMC
- Enterprise storage share of EMC, NetApp, Dell and IBM drop, HP gains
http://www.infotechlead.com/it-statistics/enterprise-storage-share-of-emc-netapp-dell-and-ibm-drop-hp-gains-30789 - Hewlett-Packard: They’ll End up Buying EMC
HP to buy EMC? We think so. We have also held the belief that HP will ultimately buy EMC (including VMware) to strengthen its position in several key areas, including cloud (VMware and Virtustream), converged infrastructure (EMC), analytics (Pivotal), and mobility (VMware AirWatch). While management’s messaging around the size of M&A in HP Enterprise continues to refer to Aruba as a benchmark (~$3 billion), CEO Meg Whitman explained that from an academic perspective, technology hardware is an industry that should consolidate due to declining revenues and slowing growth rates. This sounds like EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s answer. Have they been talking? We think so. Pro forma financial leverage is manageable at a $32-33 takeout price (less than 3x net debt/EBITDA). There are so many reasons this makes sense. HP management has not commented specifically on acquiring EMC.
- EMC’s Management Presents at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Tech Conference
(Full Transcript)
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3231396-emcs-emc-management-presents-at-bank-of-america-merrill-lynch-global-tech-conference-transcript - Is EMC cloud strategy a victory for customer choice or just confusing?
Howard Elias: The long and short of it, is that customers really do need different cloud varieties depending on the task at hand, he said. “They may want on- or off-premises; managed or unattended; production or test-and-development; mission-critical or otherwise clouds,” Elias acknowledged that vCloud Air could run the same workloads, but “you won’t get the self-provisioning, and there’s an SLA for the underlying infrastructure capability, but not in terms of resiliency, performance etc.” That is, vCloud Air is positioned to work very well with an existing VMware workload running in-house but “you won’t get the curation and attendedness” that Virtustream provides, he added.
Other
- Cisco and IBM acquisitions highlight efforts to make OpenStack easier to use
Cisco’s target, Piston, has developed CloudOS, which manages clusters of commodity servers as a single pool of resources. The software offers features for quickly deploying OpenStack, and by using automation functionality it promises to free up IT staff from time-consuming management tasks. On average, when using more than 50 nodes, running a private cloud environment using CloudOS with OpenStack costs less than one third the amount required to do the same thing on Amazon Web Services, according to an FAQ on Piston’s website.
- Red Hat’s CEO is dead wrong about the cloud
Maybe AWS chief Andy Jassy started it all, deriding the private cloud as “archaic” and not really cloud at all. Then Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told me that public clouds like AWS become “obscenely expensive at scale” — which, of course, sent public cloud advocates into a frothing rage.
- CA Buys Grid Tools
Information technology management software maker CA, Inc.said Thursday it has bought privately-held Grid Tools Ltd., a provider of enterprise test data management, automated test design and optimization software solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/ca-buys-grid-tools-20150604-00733
Supplier Report: 5/30/2015
This is a week of unexpected actions. HP Enterprise purchases ConteXtream to enable cloud SaaS telecom, EMC purchases Virtustream to act as the centerpiece of their cloud offerings. Now there are rumors (again) that EMC might buy HP Enterprises post split.
CA bought Rally Software and SalesForce purchased Tempo.
Meanwhile, IBM gets both good and bad news about their cloud offerings and deepen their overall relationship with Apple.
IBM
- IBM to distribute 50,000 Apple machines to employees
With this announcement, IBM has not only become one of the biggest purchasers of the Macs, it has also become one of the strongest supporters of Apple. The company has currently distributed around 15,000 Macs in the organization, however, now it plans to provide 50,000 machines to its employees by the end of 2015.
- Microsoft and Google rise while IBM sinks in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud providers
IBM achieved some scale in the IaaS business by buying SoftLayer. However, Gartner says SoftLayer “typically sold to Mode 2 customers (specifically start-ups and gaming companies with a strong interest in bare-metal dedicated hosting). Since the acquisition, IBM has increasingly focused on acquiring Mode 1 customers, but SoftLayer better meets the needs of Mode 2 customers.” Gartner also notes that “IBM’s aPaaS (BlueMix) is hosted in SoftLayer data centers but the offerings are not integrated.”
- IBM cloud computing services earns $7.7 billion over the past year
IBM’s most recent quarterly earnings report indicates that the company is seeing rapid growth in its cloud business revenues, which increased 75 percent year-over-year, resulting in total cloud revenues of $7.7 billion in the twelve months leading up to the end of 2015’s first quarter. Even given the recent success of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, these most recent financial figures show that IBM’s cloud computing services are outperforming Amazon’s by more than $2.5 billion over the last year.
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/05/29/ibm-cloud-computing-services/id=58034/
- IBM is Most Popular Hosted Private Cloud Provider: Survey
Forrester noted that survey respondents were concerned about vendor lock-in. However, the report said “standards like OASIS’s TOSCA and open source projects like OpenStack provide enterprises the future hope of less lock-in and greater adherence to standards.” IBM is a major supporter of open cloud computing and a key contributor of code to the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry projects.
http://www.eweek.com/cloud/ibm-is-most-popular-hosted-private-cloud-provider-survey.html
- IBM ships new predictive analytics suite
IBM today announced 20 new industry-specific solutions with pre-built predictive analytics capabilities that will make it easier and faster for organizations across industries like retail, banking, telecommunications, insurance and others, to uncover and act on critical business insights.
http://www.finextra.com/news/announcement.aspx?pressreleaseid=59924
- Xamarin, IBM Expand MobileFirst Partnership, Add Security
Xamarin said interoperability with IBM MobileFirst Protect enables enterprises to more securely deploy, manage and monitor business applications. IBM MobileFirst Protect, formerly IBM MaaS360, is a secure enterprise mobility management platform that provides mobility management and security of mobile devices, applications, documents, emails, plus access to the Web from a single portal.
http://www.eweek.com/developer/xamarin-ibm-expand-mobilefirst-partnership-add-security.html
Oracle
- Oracle isn’t even in the Gartner magic box for cloud
http://www.cio.com/article/2926133/amazon-rules-gartners-magical-box.html - Obama administration asks U.S. top court not to hear Google copyright fight against Oracle
According to Google, an Oracle victory would obstruct “an enormous amount of innovation” because software developers would not be able to freely build on each others’ work. But Oracle says effective copyright protection is the key to software innovation.
HP
- Mphasis Hung Out to Dry by Parent Company Hewlett-Packard
The Indian Economic Times has reported that, despite owning just over 60 per cent of Mphasis, HP has no plans to offer further financial support to the software services company. However, Mphasis chief executive Ganesh Ayyar insists that his organisation will not be stepping back from the BPO arena.
- HP acquires Israel’s ConteXtream to liberate telcos from hardware (HP has been snapping up quite a few networking companies lately)
“In the networking world there are countless functions — firewalls, caching, all kinds of activities — and we have all kinds of monolithic hardware boxes to do these things. NFV is about saying, ‘Why can’t we put these various functions in the cloud? Why does each function need to be on specialized and dedicated hardware?’”
http://www.geektime.com/2015/05/27/hp-acquires-israels-contextream-to-liberate-telcos-from-hardware/
- HP enterprise services told to cut $2bn over three years (Cathie Lesjak on some of their accounting plans)
In particular, the infrastructure technology outsourcing (ITO) business was severely dented by competition from cloud providers. Government austerity programs in the United States and Europe have forced a business model transformation, HP said in its results.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/404384,hp-enterprise-services-told-to-cut-2bn-over-three-years.aspx
- With the reduction comes…EMC Deal Makes Post-Split HP More Vulnerable
Making all that happen will require an enterprise salesforce, and a lot of engineers with experience building actual clouds. Those are two things HP has. With the personal computer pieces of the company jettisoned, HP Enterprise becomes affordable to EMC, which starts to trade today with a market cap of $52 billion.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3214566-emc-deal-makes-post-split-hp-more-vulnerable
EMC
- EMC buying Virtustream for $1.2B
When the deal closes (expected in Q3), Virtustream will form EMC‘s new managed cloud services business. “The acquisition represents a transformational element of EMC’s strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments,” says the company
http://seekingalpha.com/news/2543006-emc-buying-virtustream-for-1_2b
- Why EMC’s Acquisition of Virtustream Is Good News
With increasingly more businesses migrating applications to the cloud, Virtustream gives EMC the needed expertise and offerings to help its customers manage this transition. “It’s a game changer,” said EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci.
- EMC and Canonical expand OpenStack Partnership
For the last two years, EMC has been a part of Canonical’s Cloud Partner Program and OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). During this time EMC created a new Juju Charm for EMC VNX technology. This enables deployment by Canonical’s Juju modeling software. This past week, we specifically announced the availability of a new OpenStack solution with Ubuntu OpenStack and Canonical as part of the Reference Architecture Program announced last November in Paris. The solution is built in close collaboration with Canonical in EMC labs then tested, optimized, and certified.
http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/emc-and-canonical-expand-openstack-partnership/
Other
- CA is buying Rally software for $480M
CA, which is looking to cut its dependence on a slow-growing system management software market (pressured by cloud competition), states Rally’s Agile Development tools will “complement and expand CA’s strengths in the areas of DevOps and Management Cloud.” Rally’s clients include over 35 Fortune 100 firms.
http://seekingalpha.com/news/2547046-ca-buying-rally-software-for-480m-raly-plus-42_5-percent
- In the middle of these buyout rumors, Salesforce buys Tempo
Tempo launched in 2013 as part of an emerging trend of “smart assistant” mobile apps for email, calendars, and such. Tempo connects to a user’s calendar, contacts, and other apps to provide helpful information and suggestions like sending an email if they’re running late for a meeting, or flight and weather details ahead of a trip. It competed with similar apps like Cue, Sunrise, Donna, and others.
- Splunk Stock Too Expensive Despite Exceptional Cloud Growth
At around $68 a share, Splunk’s price-to-earnings ratio is 766 factoring in Splunk’s 9 cent-a-share earnings in its last fiscal year. That P/E is 36 times the average earnings multiple of companies in the S&P 500 (SPX) index. And even when compared with the more expensive iShares North American Tech-Software ETF (IGV), which has an average P/E of 30, Splunk stock still trades 25 times higher.