IBM had an extremely health-focused week by announcing two acquisitions in the health space and making headlines with Watson’s medical diagnostic abilities. IBM also deepened their Apple partnership with the announcement that they will collect medical related information from i-devices.
Oracle continues their braggadocios ways with claims of overtaking competitor SalesForce in the coming months while HP underwhelms with their new logo design.
IBM
- IBM’s vision for Watson in the medical arena:
Take breast cancer. Two million new cases a year. You would guess, I think, given all of the progress of time in world, but mortality is up 14 percent. Incidents are up 20 percent. And the number of therapies for breast cancer approach 800 and more. What Watson can do, looks at all your medical records. He has been fed and taught by the best doctors in the world and comes up with what are the probable diagnosis, percent confidence, why, rationale, diagnosis, why, odds, conflicts
- What to Expect When IBM Reports Earnings on Monday
Analysts are expecting the tech giant to post a year-over-year increase in earnings per share and a decline in revenue for the most recent quarter.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13117085/1/what-to-expect-when-ibm-reports-earnings-on-monday.html
- IBM buys Explorys
Explorys provides health care companies cloud-based analytics, working with around 360 hospitals and 317,000 health care providers throughout the country. Terms of IBM’s acquisition were not disclosed.
http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/blog/2015/04/ibms-latest-buy-has-a-nashville-connection.html
More information:
Explorys’s technology runs on Hadoop, a data management system that relies on distributed computer clusters and allows for much faster processing and analysis of large, complicated data sets than conventional database systems can handle. The speed was important in the company’s pilot application, a search engine that gave physicians at the Cleveland Clinic a way to find data in medical records. Explorys has since built analytics tools that perform specific functions like identifying risk factors and common gaps in patient care that can lead to bad outcomes.
They are also buying a company called Phytel – a population health company:
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ibms-big-buy - They are also beefing up their health partnership with Apple:
The new Watson Health unit plans to aggregate health information from a large number of devices and providers in the cloud and offer insights to health companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic Inc. In deepening its partnership with Apple, IBM will make use of health information gathered by millions of Apple devices.
http://www.macworld.com.au/news/ibm-beefs-up-healthy-partnership-with-apple-137323/
- HortonWorks, IBM, Pivotal Align Hadoop Platforms on ODP Core
http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/hortonworks-ibm-pivotal-align-hadoop-platforms-on-odp-core.html - More on IBM’s cyber-threat platform:
IBM said it will make its library of security intelligence data available via the IBM X-Force Exchange, a new cyber threat intelligence sharing platform powered by IBM Cloud. The collaborative platform provides access to IBM and third-party threat data from across the globe, including real-time indicators of live attacks, which can be used to defend against cybercrimes.
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ibm-shares-intelligence-data-on-new-cyber-threat-platform–1077221
- Australian firm having issues with IBM softlayer availability:
Australian-owned e-commerce platform provider Bigcommerce has written a scathing blog post criticising IBM SoftLayer over availability problems affecting its customers.
http://www.crn.com.au/News/402665,ibm-softlayer-slammed-for-failing-on-every-level-after-outage.aspx
Oracle
- Oracle’s Mark Hurd: On Ellison, the cloud and bouncing back
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Oracle-s-Mark-Hurd-On-Ellison-the-cloud-and-6207830.php - ORACLE TO DETHRONE SAAS LEADER SALESFORCE BY YEAR’S END (hype headline, no facts):
Oracle is looking to propel that growth even further. In the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report call, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison predicted an influx of SaaS and PaaS use as the company experiences more than 100 percent yearly growth of its cloud services. The figures have led Ellison and Oracle to revise their predictions to reflect the expectation that Oracle will surpass Salesforce this year in SaaS and PaaS sales. “It’s going to be close but we are going to sell more,” said Price.
http://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2015/oracle-to-dethrone-saas-leader-salesforce-by-years-end/
HP
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise Branding introduced (kind of “meh”)
http://sdtimes.com/hp-introduces-new-hewlett-packard-enterprise-branding/ - Visa marketing chief moving to HP
http://www.prweek.com/article/1343031/visa-global-marketing-chief-antonio-lucio-quits-hp-spinoff - Wait…HP still DOES have a public cloud… where exactly?
Hilf was saying HP must stick to the thing it can do, which is to provide an alternative data center and self-service provisioning to its regular customers. HP doesn’t want to compete, let’s say, in the ruthless price war that Amazon,Google, and Microsoft are waging with each other, or in the many features that Amazon is piling on top of its infrastructure platform.
Other
- Article about CEO pay (Microsoft’s Nadella is top paid)
http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/04/microsoft-ceo-top-paid-ceo-us/ - EMC Acquires Hybrid Cloud Encryption Company
CloudLink, a 20-employee firm based in Ottowa, encrypts workloads across multiple cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and EMC subsidiary VMware’s vCLoud Air and other vCloud powered clouds, according to CloudLink’s web site.
http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300076560/emc-acquires-hybrid-cloud-encryption-company.htm
- This is timely: After SaaS: Opportunities for Next-Gen CRM
The CRM market is ripe for disruption and the combination of the mobile-social revolution and the demand created by sellers of peer-to-peer marketplaces is creating a perfect storm. For a while, Salesforce would likely ignore the threat of a company providing such service much the way its predecessors ignored Salesforce. This will result in many opportunities for marketplaces and their developers to innovate and create value.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sophiecharlotte-moatti/after-saas-opportunities-_b_7067632.html
- A Closer Look At Tableau’s Customer Base Growth
Tableau had approximately 4,400 customers by the end of 2010 and this increased to 26,000 in 2014. [1] We expect this number to be north of the 60,000 mark by the end of our forecast period, facilitated by a strong sales and marketing team that is striving for expansion in domestic and international markets. Tableau’s focus on innovative products and its popularity in the market also will be a deciding factor in achieving the predicted growth. There could be a 10% downside to our price estimate if the number of customers do not grow beyond 54,000. This could happen if the business intelligence and analytics market becomes overcrowded with competing big and emerging small innovative players.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3070416-a-closer-look-at-tableaus-customer-base-growth
