IBM is like an elevator at the moment… going both up and down. The company announced job cuts and job growth. IBM’s transformation is becoming more tangible as we can see the humans being impacted (10,000 jobs eliminated in GTS) and growth in others (Watson, Explorys, BI).
We can also see changes at EMC and Dell. The companies announced their combined leadership team post-acquisition as well as some changes in leadership for VMWare.
After HP INC’s bad news last week, the stock market offers some hope to Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Oracle’s hopes of being a solid #2 in the cloud space is evaporating with SAP coming on strong.
IBM
- Explorys added 80 people after IBM deal, expects more growth
Explorys has added about 80 new positions since it was acquired by IBM last May. Now the health care data analytics software company employs about 220 people.
That number is still growing: Explorys had 48 open positions as of Feb. 24, the vast majority of which will be based in Northeast Ohio. The company plans to hire at least 80 people this year, according to CEO Stephen McHale.
- IBM Cuts Jobs In ‘Workforce Rebalancing’
On March 2, he said he began getting hundreds of emails and hundreds of Facebook messages from employees that the layoff had begun. He said the messages conveyed that cuts were hitting GTS and the Global Business Services group, with some additional reports of cuts from the software group and the cloud business. The reports of cuts are coming from workers in the US, France, and the UK. Conrad said he expects to hear more about international layoffs next week, including some from Australia.
Also:
Job cuts are nothing new for IBM. The company was rumored to have engaged in a gigantic job-cut effort in early 2015, too, though no actual numbers were ever confirmed. IBM reduced its 2014 workforce by 12%, from 431,212 in 2013 to 379,592 in 2014, according to numbers provided in its 10-K report.
- IBM Plans to Sell ~$150M Worth of Lenovo Stock
Specifically, IBM will offer 182 million Lenovo shares with a price range of HK$6.26 – HK$6.42. The price is a 6.4 percent discount to Lenovo’s last closing price.
- IBM Creates Breach Response Team With Resilient Systems Acquisition
Last week it was a rumor, this week it is reality…IBM said it plans to use Resilient and its roughly 100 staff – among them security expert Bruce Schneier – as the cornerstone of a new unit called X-Force Incident Response Services, which is to help organisations plan for, manage and respond to cyberattacks, drawing on the skills of about 3,000 consultants and security researchers worldwide.
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/security/ibm-breach-response-resilient-acquisition-187098
- IBM’s Watson Provides Brainpower to Turner
“This solution addresses one of the timeless objectives of marketing leaders—infusing new levels of data and science into advertising decisions,” said Adam Steinberg, VP, IBM Cognitive Business Solutions. “Armed with deep, fact-based recommendations, Turner will hone the precision of every advertising recommendation, and in turn, lift the impact of the customers who place advertising on Turner’s award-winning programming.”
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/currency/ibms-watson-provides-brainpower-turner/154189
- Buffett Did Not Call IBM A Mistake
I wasn’t going to cover this, but there are so many posts saying Buffett called IBM a mistake.If there was anything of value said about IBM, it was that Buffett still thinks it will be worth more in 10 years than it is worth today and that he generally believes the turnaround effort will pan out. It’s worth noting that Charlie Munger, his erstwhile partner, isn’t particularly convinced of that outcome, though it sounds like he’s a far cry from saying IBM was a mistake, too.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3940386-buffett-call-ibm-mistake
- Did IBM Just Go ‘Full Patent Troll’?
In the suit, IBM accuses Groupon’s website and app of using technology built by Prodigy to display content, specifically ads, as well as client tracking technology that monitors “service selections while the client is shopping and then use that information when the client decides to make a purchase,”according to PC World.
http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2016/03/03/ibm-lawsuit-patent-trolls-groupon-over-prodigy-ip/
Dell | EMC
- VMware leadership changes continue as Dell-EMC deal looms
VMware announced Tuesday that its Chief Operating Officer Carl Eschenbach will resign. According to a Fortune report, Eschenbach is moving to become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. VMware representatives said Eschenbach’s duties will be distributed among several executives. Zane Rowe, EMC’s CFO, took the reins as VMware’s financial lead Tuesday. CFO Jonathan Chadwick, also co-COO, left VMware at the end of January, the same time the company announced plans to cut 800 jobs by the end of March or mid-April.
http://www.ciodive.com/news/vmware-leadership-changes-continue-as-dell-emc-deal-looms/414844/
- Michael Dell unveils leadership line-up for merged Dell-EMC
• Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer
• Jeff Clarke, vice chairman of operations and client solutions
• Howard Elias and Rory Read, co-chief integration officers
• David Goulden, president of Enterprise Systems Group
• Marius Haas, chief commercial officer
• Steve Price, chief human resources officer
• Karen Quintos, chief customer officer
• Rich Rothberg, general counsel
• John Swainson, president of Dell Software
• Tom Sweet, chief financial officer
• Suresh Vaswani, president of Dell Services - EU clears Dell’s purchase of EMC
HP Inc | Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Why HP Is Suffering A Slow Death
The first mistake was extreme outsourcing, which was supposed to cut cost and limit corporate size. But instead it ended up giving old HPQ’s advantage away to Asian PC and printer makes, piece-by-piece.
Then came a string of bad acquisitions– in an attempt to fight ‘the last war’ in a number of segments of the technology industry — which drained Hewlett-Packard’s resources. The purchase of Compaq Computer in 2001 was supposed to provide HP with a scale advantage in the PC market and allow it to compete effectively against Dell Computer, IBM, and all sorts of emerging Asian competitors. The purchase of near-bankrupt Palm in 2010 was supposed to help the company enter the fast growing mobile devices market, which began to replace PCs. And the acquisition of enterprise software maker Autonomy in 2011 (at a hefty price of $10.3 billion) pitted the company against three major competitors – Salesforce.com, Oracle, and IBM.
- HP Enterprise rises on reassuring demand
The Silicon Valley company, reporting its first quarterly results since it split in November from printer and personal computer maker HP Inc., on Thursday said net income in its first fiscal quarter fell 52%, including restructuring costs. Revenue declined 2.5%. Excluding the effects of a stronger dollar, however, the company said revenue rose 4%–the third consecutive quarter of growth on a constant currency basis–and both revenue and adjusted profit beat Wall Street expectations.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hp-enterprise-rises-on-reassuring-demand-2016-03-03
Oracle
- Oracle CEO Safra Catz advises ‘don’t eat dog food’
Larry is fond of saying we should eat our own dog food. First of all, don’t eat dog food. It’s bad for you. It’s dangerous. We eat our own cooking. That’s correct. We have to eat our own cooking. You know why? Because the entire scale of our business is to the point where I cannot meet the demands of all our customers unless I transform myself, meaning Oracle.
http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-ceo-advises-dont-eat-dog-food-2016-2
- Oracle Corporation Falls Victim to Hubris as SAP Overtakes Its Cloud Business
Not only has SAP outperformed Oracle recently, but since Bill McDermott took the CEO reigns in February 2010, SAP stock has increased 77%, outpacing Oracle which is up about 60% over the same period.
SAP beating Oracle in the cloud, it is doing so by taking a page out of Oracle’s own playbook — making savvy acquisitions. Over the past five years, the software giant has spent $16 billion acquiring SuccessFactors, Ariba, and most recently, Concur Technologies, a travel and expense software provider. All three company’s solutions already do or will run on HANA, SAP’s application server that includes an in-memory database management solution.
Other
- Want to edge out competitors? Hybrid cloud is key, new IBM study says
The IBM study, titled Growing Up Hybrid: Accelerating Digital Transformation, reported that organizations using hybrid cloud systems are almost three times as likely as their counterparts to monetize their data and the insights gained from data analysis. It also found these organizations five times as likely to use hybrid cloud for predictive intelligence and machine learning applications. Further, more than a third of hybrid cloud organizations polled said they were using their hybrid environments to develop Internet of Things applications.
- Salesforce CEO Benioff: ‘We Will Win In Georgia’ Against ‘Religious Liberty’ Bill
A year ago, Benioff contested a similar law in the Hoosier state, pulling his $8 billion (revenue) company out of hosting a money-generating conference there and offering to relocate employees. That time, Governor Mike Pence had already signed the bill into law. “We didn’t move fast enough,” Benioff says. But Benioff learned several tactics key for reversing Pence’s decision and prompting revisions to the bill.
Photo: Lena Bell