Amazon Web Service’s announcement of their value and performance is forcing the other suppliers to react. There was a substantial amount of articles for each supplier this week comparing their performance and strategy against Amazon’s.
Cloud growth and SaaS expansion is the loose theme of the week. Oracle is looking to have 95% of their products available via SaaS by October. IBM continues to grow SoftLayer internationally and focus on methods of connecting (and gathering data from) everything.
IBM
- IBM “pushing boundaries” of IoT with Peugeot tie up
As part of the new partnership – which will last for seven years – IBM and PSA will work with partners to develop connected solutions and services, which they hope to take out to their business customers and consumers.”The number of cars connected worldwide is expected to grow significantly to a quarter billion by 2020,” IBM said. “Until now, however, most of the innovations available have primarily focused on smartphone apps, navigation and roadside assistance. IBM and PSA will share the responsibilities of developing, selling and marketing, as well as delivering and implementing connected services with new and existing clients.”
- Hortonworks, IBM and Pivotal to Support Open Data Platform in Their Big Data Solutions
The ODP initiative is an industry effort focused on simplifying the adoption of Apache Hadoop for the enterprise, and enabling big data solutions. It will also provide a set of tools and methods for the group members to create and test their offerings based on the ODP Core platform.
- IBM is Canada’s Most Attractive Employer
Recruitment and HR services company Randstad Canada awarded IBM with the title at a ceremony held at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/canadas-most-attractive-employer-2015-04-24
- IBM sentenced to pay 6.5 million as contractual damages for failed CRM solution (thought this would be interesting to share)
In 2004, IBM won a call to tender launched by MAIF in relation to the rebuilding of its Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) by integrating new software. On December 14, 2004, a contract was concluded between IBM and MAIF, pursuant to which IBM was to provide, for a fixed price of €7,302,822, software that was compliant with the scope determined by the parties and a strict schedule. These commitments were defined as an obligation of result, whose breach can only be justified by an external cause such as force majeure or the other party’s default. However, the project fell behind shortly afterwards.
http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ibm-sentenced-to-pay-65-million-as-cont-90381/
- IBM is helping Chinese company make company and patent acquisitions:
IBM has announced plans “to help a little-known Chinese company (Teamsun) absorb and build upon key technologies” that IBM licenses, according to the New York Times. The buyer knows what to do with that intellectual property: its advisor, Shen Changxiang, is the former supervisor of the cybersecurity of China’s strategic missile arsenal, was in charge of computer security research for China’s increasingly potent navy, and is a long-time critic of his nation’s reliance on U.S. technology. Teamsun makes no secret of its goal: eliminating the need to buy American products. IBM wants access to China’s market for its “rope”, and the price it is willing to pay is teaching China how to make its own.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/lenin-was-right_928054.html
- IBM opens a SoftLayer center in the Netherlands
The company said the new datacentre, located in Almere just outside Amsterdam, will double SoftLayer capacity in the region and provide customers with more in-country options for data storage and geographically isolated services.
http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/04/23/ibm-adds-second-softlayer-datacentre-in-the-netherlands/
Oracle
- Oracle CEO Hurd Plans to Lift Almost All Products Into Cloud
Around 65 percent of Oracle’s products are available on the cloud today, Hurd said in the interview, held on Thursday. That will climb to 95 percent by the time the company holds its annual Oracle OpenWorld conference in October, he said.
- Oracle CEO Mark Hurd cuts loose at Boston College executive event
On SalesForce: “It’s just a fact: Their earnings, the reason they have a very high earnings ratio, is because they don’t make any money…. There’s no cash flow. So when you look for a category that says ‘cash flow multiplier,’ it says ‘n/a.’ What are they worth right now? $35 billion? Who cares? It’s absurd. But they’re quote-unquote, ‘cool.’ And people ask me for real numbers, they ask, ‘Well, what’s your cash flow?’… What are we worth right now, $190 billion, $180, something like that? And we have to do it with real numbers. It’s crazy, just crazy.”
HP
- Is Antonio Lucio the right person to define HP’s brand? Comms experts weigh in
While HP’s consumer printer and PC business has been facing financial difficulties – with cloud and digital services on the rise – the spinoff will provide Lucio with an opportunity to carve out and highlight the brand’s core value propositions, says Derek Lyons, VP of tech business development at Shift.
- HP to sell Snapfish to District Photo
HP announced it will sell its photo sharing service Snapfish to District Photo. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, Reuters reports. HP, the world’s No. 2 PC maker, bought Snapfish for more than $300 million in 2005 and made the company a part of its printing and personal systems group.
http://blouinnews.com/82600/story/hp-sell-snapfish-district-photo
Other
- Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business—and growing fast
Drumroll please. For the quarter, AWS logged $1.57 billion in revenue, up 49 percent from the year-ago period. Perhaps a bigger deal: It logged operating income of $265 million for the quarter, up from $245 million a year ago. And for the first time Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, put a number on the AWS business. In a statement he characterized Amazon’s cloud as “a $5 billion business and still growing fast — in fact it’s accelerating.”
http://fortune.com/2015/04/23/amazon-web-services-5-billion/
Here is a run down of the cloud players and what their revenue is:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-microsoft-ibm-and-the-cloud-gang-comparing-the-revenue/ - VMware is becoming a Linux distributor to compete with container rivals
The open-source technology has emerged as a threat to the hypervisor maker’s long-dominant flavor of virtualization with the sudden push toward production-readiness in the upstream community. With its supporters’ vision of a future populated by fleets of lightweight containers running on similarly slimmed-down versions of Linux from the likes of Red Hat Inc. edging closer to reality, the new homegrown distribution represents a well-timed effort by VMware to slow the advance.
- EMC cites troubles abroad for turbulent sales here at home
EMC chief Joe Tucci said the company continued to bear fruit from investments in its so-called federated business model — namely its ownership stakes in cloud and virtualization businesses VMware and Pivotal — by attracting a steady and increasing number of large multinational customers in need of “massive IT transformations.” Indeed, VMWare and Pivotal reported year-over-year Q1 revenue increases attributable to EMC of 12 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
- Teradata rolls out platform updates designed to connect Hadoop ecosystem
http://www.zdnet.com/article/teradata-rolls-out-platform-updates-designed-to-connect-hadoop-ecosystem/