It was not a peaceful week for IT suppliers.
Lawsuits are plentiful at the moment: IBM lost a case with Indiana, HPE is getting sued by Oracle, and EMC is suing Pure. Microsoft had to take down one of their AI experiments because users (very quickly) figured out a way to make it say inappropriate things on Twitter.
RedHat has good news… they are the first open source subscription company to hit $2 Billion in value.
IBM
- Opportunity knocks for IBM customers, but will they answer?
With IBM’s substantial workforce rebalancing and strategic business transformation ongoing, it is a perfect time to meet with IBM to conduct a personal assessment of their transformation and strategic direction by having them explain how these developments can benefit your organization. This inquiry meeting can serve as the platform for a subsequent meeting to re-negotiate your current relationship across all of IBM’s business units (Hardware, Software, and Services), including any new spend initiatives.
- Indiana court: IBM breached contract, still due $50M
The high court’s four other justices unanimously found Tuesday that IBM had breached its contract by failing to meet “timeliness metrics” and to “assist the State in achieving its policy objectives” – thus reversing a 2012 Marion County trial court finding – and said the state can seek damages. However, the justices also affirmed the trial court’s award of nearly $50 million to IBM in assignment and equipment fees.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/22/indiana-court-finds-ibm-breached-contract-but-due-/
- IBM creating 250 cybersecurity jobs in New Brunswick over next three years
New Brunswick is already home to a natural cybersecurity cluster that dates back 25 years, with the establishment of Canada’s first faculty of computer science in 1989. IBM’s Security QRadar analyzes data across an organization’s information technology infrastructure to identify potential security threats, acting as support for IBM’s 10 global security centres.
- IBM Takes Stand Against Controversial North Carolina Law
Big Blue, North Carolina’s largest employer, posted a statement on Thursday that expressed disappointment with the new law, which LBGT rights supporters widely view a setback. The law short-circuited a Charlotte ordinance that would have let transgender men who identify as women use the women’s bathroom.
http://fortune.com/2016/03/24/ibm-north-carolina-transgender/
Microsoft
- Microsoft’s Tay AI Bot Shut Down After Racist Tweets
Tay was designed to engage in playful conversations with 18- to 24-year-olds. It could tell jokes, play games, send pictures, tell you your horoscope. Tay was even supposed to become more personalized with users as time went on. But within hours of it going live, Twitter users took advantage of Tay’s flaws and forced Microsoft to shut it down.
http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/microsofts_tay_ai_bot_shut_down_after_racist_tweets
- Microsoft is investing millions in a $1 billion startup that rejected its acquisition offer
Last year, reports emerged that Microsoft tried to buy Mesosphere, a hot cloud computing startup, for $150 million,only to get shut down.
Today, Mesosphere is announcing a new $73.5 million “strategic” investment, led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and with Microsoft listed as a “significant participant.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/hp-enterprise-and-microsoft-invest-735-million-in-mesosphere-2016-3
- Microsoft provides a few more details on its SQL on Linux plans
In early March, Microsoft execs told me that the “core relational database” features would be coming to Linux, meaning only a subset of the features found in SQL Server 2016. A company spokesperson said officials would not provide a specific list of which features would and would not be part of SQL Server on Linux.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-provides-a-few-more-details-on-its-sql-on-linux-plans/
Oracle
- Oracle Is Suing Hewlett-Packard for Selling Its Proprietary Updates
Oracle says HP “falsely represented to customers that HP and Terix could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services at a lower cost than Oracle, and then worked with Terix to improperly access and provide Oracle’s proprietary Solaris Updates to customers,” according to the suit.
- Workday: An Oracle Slayer Or An Also-Ran Competitor?
For several years now, dating back to at least 2012, before Workday even became a publicly traded company, Oracle’s management in general and Larry Ellison in particular have articulated strong negative sentiments regarding Workday and what it was trying to achieve. In those long-ago years, Workday had subscription revenues of less than $90 million while Oracle was selling more than $10 billion of software. And yet, here is a quote from the Oracle earnings press release that was issued at the end of its fiscal 2013 year (ended May 31), “Furthermore, in Q4, our HCM cloud alone generated more SaaS revenue and added more new Fusion HCM customers than Workday added HCM and ERP customers combined in their most recent quarter.” There are many, many things that might be said about a company with literally 100X more revenues comparing itself to an upstart that Workday was at that point. At this writing, Workday has grown something more than tenfold and Oracle has shrunk, but the rhetoric is still the same. If it wasn’t accurate all the way back then and hasn’t been accurate since that time, why should anyone choose to believe Oracle’s forecast for Workday at this point?
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3960035-workday-oracle-slayer-also-ran-competitor
Storage ( Dell | EMC )
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants to ‘fast forward’ Dell customers
Readers of some national newspapers yesterday will have seen the latest broadside from HPE, with the firm taking out full page adverts to raise concerns about its rival.
“Don’t let the EMC/Dell merger put your business on pause” proclaimed the ad in bold letters before going on to highlight the alternative for concerned customers.
- EMC Hits Rival With Another Patent Suit After $14M Jury Win
EMC’s instant suit accuses Pure Storage of infringing U.S. Patent No. 7,434,015. It argues that the jury’s March 16 damages award in the separate suit covered only a limited period of time and only a limited set of Pure Storage products.
Following a seven-day trial, jurors found that EMC was owed $14 million in royalties for Pure Storage’s infringement of a data storage patent, rejecting arguments that the patent was invalid. However, the jury cleared Pure Storage of infringing two other patents at issue in the case, U.S. Patent Nos.7,373,464 and 6,904,556.
http://www.law360.com/articles/774242/emc-hits-rival-with-another-patent-suit-after-14m-jury-win
- Internal Email Says EMC Execs Were Worried About ‘BlackBerry Moment’
“This is truly our Blackberry moment and we need to be ultra aggressive around XtremIO at this exact moment because we have an 18-month window to win this war,” Michael Wing, EMC’s SVP of Primary Storage, wrote in an email in July 2014.
Other
- Red Hat Becomes World’s First Ever $2 billion Open Source Company
Subscription revenue hit $480 million (£338m), up 18 percent year-over-year, accounting for around 88 percent of Red Hat’s total revenue. The growth in subscription revenues was seen by analysts as a particularly encouraging trend, indicating that Red Hat’s business is stabilizing and gaining more predictability.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said increased adoption of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and open source technologies were chiefly responsible for the growth. He added that Red Hat closed the year with a record backlog, which Abhey Lamba of Mizuho Securities told The Wall Street Journal “is a good indication of its growing strategic importance.”
http://www.techworm.net/2016/03/red-hat-becomes-worlds-first-ever-2-billion-open-source-company.html
- Google Just Showed Up Amazon And IBM
Now, Google has decided to commercialize pretty much all of this AND also to become a much bigger player in the cloud hosting business and software-as-a-service business. This is a truly massive shift. See, Amazon has the most mature virtual machine hosting platform with tons of services around it e.g., virtual private clouds, caches, proxies, DNS services, databases and so forth, but it does not have the machine learning know-how and services Google has. IBM has lots of natural language processing and computer vision services in its Watson Cloud product as well as hosting in its SoftLayer product, but it does not integrate them into one smooth platform like Google. This is because IBM has obtained much of its technology in that space from acquisitions.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3960633-google-just-showed-amazon-ibm
- Docker, not production-ready? Not so, says Docker
It seems safe to assume that Docker isn’t being used to containerize existing enterprise applications. Instead, developers are bringing in Docker for new application deployments, greenfield opportunities that aren’t dependent on yesterday’s infrastructure.
Photo: Donald Tong