“Sell, Sell, Sell!” is the theme of the week. Dell is selling off Quest and SonicWall while HP Inc finishes the job they started in April and sold off their Extreme platform to OpenText.
Microsoft bought a text app company named Wand while RedHat purchased 3scale.
We also look at IBM’s purchases over the last 6 months and go deeper into understanding their future direction.
IBM
- What Do IBM’s Acquisitions over The Past Six Months Indicate?
International Business Machines has acquired nine companies in the last six months. The acquisitions indicate that the company is focused on rebuilding its business around digital marketing, Software as a Service (SaaS) verticals and business intelligence verticals
- Inside IBM’s plan to become a cloud broker and even resell AWS, Microsoft Azure
While cloudMatrix is a cloud broker, the term is a bit of a misnomer. CloudMatrix is priced as a subscription based on the number of virtual machines used. What IBM is really going for is to be the proverbial one pane of glass for IT infrastructure with a financial engine to gauge costs on the fly. CloudMatrix supports AWS, Azure and SoftLayer on the cloud side and VMware vCloud Director and vRealize. OpenStack and Google Cloud Platform will be added in the months to come.
- IBM unveils serverless-computing, simplifies IoT app development
IBM has unveiled its new Bluemix OpenWhisk, allowing developers to build feature-rich, intuitive applications which easily connect to the Internet of Things and tap into advanced services such as cognitive and analytics without the need to deploy and manage extra infrastructure. Bluemix OpenWhisk has been positioned as a serverless computing platform that leverages Docker and features new user interface updates that claims to drive efficiency for developers.
http://techseen.com/2016/06/22/ibm-serverless-computing-iot-app/
- IBM Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service
Oh how I love press releases…“We believe IBM’s recognition in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service report is due to the strength and reach of our resiliency services portfolio, and the results our clients are experiencing on a daily basis,” said Laurence Guihard-Joly, General Manager, IBM Resiliency Services. “Given the range of risks surrounding businesses today, we are dedicated to continue delivering the most advanced, secure solutions in the industry so clients – no matter how hybrid their IT environments are – can focus first and foremost on keeping their businesses up and running for long term growth.”
- IBM promises 200 petaflop supercomputer
The US is clearly embarrassed the Chinese Sunway TiahuLight system is leading the supercomputer arms race. Now the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced that is having a new IBM system, named Summit, delivered in early 2018 that will now be capable of 200 peak petaflops.
That would make it almost twice as fast as TaihuLight. The Summit will be based around IBM Power9 and Nvidia Volta GPUs. Summit use only about 3,400 nodes. Each node will have “over half a terabyte” of coherent memory (HBM + DDR4), plus 800GB of non-volatile RAM that serves as a burst buffer or extended memory.
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/40970-ibm-promises-200-petaflop-supercomputer
Microsoft
- Microsoft buys Wand to improve chat capabilities
The Wand team will be joining Bing’s engineering and platform group, Corporate Vice President David Ku wrote in a post announcing the deal Thursday. The company’s team members will be working primarily on Microsoft’s push to enable the creation of intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants.
It’s a natural fit for Wand, which had been working since 2013 on apps that let users chat with one another and add outside information from sources like Yelp. Users could share music and let other people access their smart home devices using Wand, too.
http://www.cio.com/article/3085151/microsoft-buys-wand-to-improve-chat-capabilities.html
- Psst, want to flog a turkey like LinkedIn? Well, phone up Microsoft
In that sense, the purchase of LinkedIn reminds one of Microsoft’s acquisition in September 2013 of the mobile phone assets of Nokia, the Finnish telecoms giant. That deal was masterminded (if that is the right word) by Nadella’s predecessor, Steve Ballmer, and likewise represented a desperate attempt to rectify an earlier strategic blunder, namely Microsoft’s failure to spot the smartphone revolution that had been launched by Apple in 2007. The Nokia venture turned out to be an unmitigated disaster and led to Microsoft writing off a loss of $7.9bn in July last year.
Acquiring LinkedIn would have provided Salesforce with a vast amount of data on users all around the world. This would have helped Salesforce develop tools and enabled customers to finalize sales deals. Users’ profiles on LinkedIn provide an insight into a range of information, including users’ skills, responsibilities in previous jobs, and contact details.
http://marketrealist.com/2016/06/microsoft-make-linkedin-offer-thwart-salesforces-bid/ - Microsoft is marketing software to help state governments keep track of legal marijuana
To do this, Microsoft is partnering with Kind a company who built software to track legal marijuana from “seed to sale” for local and state government agencies. Kind’s government solutions department says their mission is to help the cannabis industry to transact safely; transact securely, and stay in compliance with the rules and regulations governing marijuana-related businesses. Microsoft will leverage their cloud platform Azure to facilitate and expand the services, and will be actively marketing it in states where marijuana is legal at some level. Microsoft will not be working with Kind’s Kiosk division or any point of sale services — this is strictly for government agencies.
- Is It Time For Microsoft To Rebrand?
But I’m not suggesting that the Microsoft brand go away completely. It does seem, though, that its role should change. Instead of serving as the corporate moniker and the lead brand for the company, Microsoft could be used as a product or category brand and a business unit name. Just as Google’s leaders adopted Alphabet as the parent company name and transitioned the Google brand away from entities “far afield” from its main Internet products, perhaps it’s time for Nadella to limit the use of the Microsoft and adopt a new name for his company.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/deniselyohn/2016/06/22/is-it-time-for-microsoft-to-rebrand/#243311d16e89
Oracle
- Oracle Corporation: A Tale of Cloud
With most metrics falling largely in line with expectations, cloud revenue stood as the star of the quarter, raking in revenue of $690 million, while the consensus expectation was $660 million. The strong cloud growth was, however, accompanied with a decline in on-premise software sales. New software license revenue declined 12% YoY to $2.77 billion. On the contrary, cloud plus On-Premise Software Revenues for the fourth quarter were $8.4 billion, while total Cloud revenues, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) increased 49% YoY, to come in at $859 million.
- Oracle’s Vision About the Cloud Is Now Paying Off in a Very Big Way
This is the second straight quarter where Oracle’s earnings have significantly outpaced Wall Street’s expectations. After the last report, Oracle stock surged so much that founder Larry Ellison was catapulted over Facebook‘s Mark Zuckerberg into sixth place on the Forbes list of America’s richest people.
- Ellison Tells HP Jury Itanium Retreat Was Just Business
Ellison denied that he meant Hewlett-Packard harm in 2011 when he issued a press release, just ahead of that company’s shareholder meeting, announcing Oracle would no longer support Itanium, which had been created by Intel Corp.
Storage [EMC | Dell | Infinidat]
- Dell sells data analytics unit to Francisco Partners, Elliott
Private equity players Francisco Partners and Elliott Management have signed a definitive agreement to snap up all shares in Dell Software Group for $US2 billion, according to newswire Reuters. Terms of the deal will see the combined entity take control of both Quest and SonicWall, which provide business software to more than 180,000 customers across the world.
http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/dell-sells-data-analytics-unit-to-francisco-partners-elliott
Is Dell cutting too deep?In March, Dell sold its consultancy arm to NTT Data for $3 billion. This latest sale sees it dispose of the bulk of its software division including security to Francisco Partners and Elliot Management. The two big assets in this sale are Quest and SonicWALL. Nobody is speaking publicly about what Dell will get but Reuters has cited an insider putting the deal at over $2 billion. If that number is accurate it represents a loss for Dell who paid $2.4 billion just for Quest in 2012.
http://www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2016/06/22/dell-cutting-deep/
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- Open Text to buy customer communications assets from HP for $315 million US
The transaction includes HP Extream, HP Output Management, HP TeleForm and HP LiquidOffice – collectively used to manage customer communications.
Open Text said the purchase will help it expand its range of customer communications management products and services.
It estimates the acquired HP businesses will generate between $110 million and $125 million US of annualized revenue.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/open-text-buy-communications-assets-hp-1.3644994
- HP Inc. Plans to Use Gains From Divestiture to Invest in Print
The company’s move will reduce revenue in the supplies category, including items like ink cartridges and toner, by about $450 million over two quarters, Chief Financial Officer Catherine Lesjak said Tuesday on a conference call with analysts. HP Inc. will gain about $285 million from the divestiture of its Marketing Optimization assets. The company said it will pay back the investment over three years.
Other
- Amazon Web Services Expanding With Artificial Intelligence
On June 15, Smola reported he would be joining Amazon to lead its artificial intelligence initiatives mostly focused within the firm’s cloud machine learning platform business. With this effort, Amazon will be increasing its competitiveness in the infrastructure as a service artificial intelligence market. Current competitors are Microsoft Azure, IBM SmartCloud and Google Compute Engine, all offering different variations of artificial intelligence technology.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-services-expanding-artificial-intelligence-192956493.html
- Red Hat to Acquire API Management Leader 3scale
3scale complements our existing middleware product portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift by enabling companies to create and publish APIs with tools such as Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and then manage and drive adoption of those APIs once they have been published.
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-api-management-leader-3scale