This week the various arms of HP have caught my attention. They successfully defeated Oracle over their Itanium dispute and have been awarded $3B.
In the wake of that news, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a massive restructuring (again) as their long time CTO Martin Fink is on his way out along with their COO. Meanwhile, HP Inc announced the purchase of a 3D scanning company.
With the sell off of the Autonomy products, the divestiture of their consulting services to CSC, and now with this $3B win, both HP companies have some cash, and I want to know what their grand strategy is.
In other news, IBM is doubling down on block-chain technology with their Bluemix Garage initiative, Microsoft has 350 million windows 10 devices active, and Oracle is trying their hardest to kill Java.
IBM
- IBM and Cisco to combine collaboration tools
IBM’s Verse email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3090100/ibm-and-cisco-will-make-watson-into-a-virtual-workmate.html
IBM and Cisco team up on enterprise collaboration to stave off rivals like Slack and MicrosoftThe bigger picture in this latest IBM and Cisco deal is that both companies are feeling the heat of competition from a wide range of rivals, some big and some actually quite small.
They include standalone services from popular startups like Slack, Quip, Trello and Asana; as well as those offered by large companies like Microsoft and Citrix, which not only build their own solutions but have been aggressive acquirers of those startups that have built popular enterprise productivity tools.
It’s a mark of how far we’ve come in the tech world that some of these products from much smaller outfits can give huge IT businesses a run for their money.
- IBM storage has a new boss: The same one it had six years ago
At IBM Walsh has a disparate set of products to look after, including FlashSystem, SVC, Storwize, XIV and the DS8000 line. FlashSystem is popular, while the others could be characterised unkindly as fading stars – or, more sympathetically, as long-lived survivors facing the challenges of public cloud storage, software-defined storage, server SANs and hyper-converged systems.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/01/ibm_storage_new_boss_ed_walsh/
- IBM Launches NYC Bluemix Garage With Former Azure Exec
The design element is what made a difference for Murray. For example, one of the Bluemix Garage engagements Murray sat in on was a small startup out of San Francisco that had a complete idea and knew exactly what it wanted to build. IBM had the company come to the garage for a design thinking workshop to help it visualize what it was trying to solve and what experience it wanted its end users to have. And the design workshop, the startup abandoned the idea it initially had because it realized that what it was trying to build wasn’t really what it was trying to solve.
http://www.eweek.com/developer/ibm-launches-nyc-bluemix-garage-with-former-azure-exec.html
Can IBM Really Make a Business Out of Blockchain?According to Jerry Cuomo, vice president of blockchain and cloud at IBM, the plan will succeed because the company offers a full-suite of tools that allow developers to get up and running quickly while also benefiting from a mentoring environment at the Bluemix Garage. The garage moniker is supposed to exude a Silicon Valley-esque vibe, where people throw around ideas with markers on whiteboards and Post-It Notes.
- Why IBM Will Soar While Apple Stumbles
Unfortunately, these great strengths may have become toxic. Its culture has become highly secretive. Suppliers may only refer to Apple by a specially assigned code name. They win new contracts without knowing why and what Apple plans to do with their technology and then lose them again without knowing what they did wrong.
Microsoft
- Microsoft Says More Than 350 Million Devices Now Running Windows 10 Ahead Of August 2 Anniversary Update
Market research group Gartner predicts that half of enterprises is set to deploy the new software by January 2017. “For enterprises, we expect that implementation will be significantly more rapid than that seen with Windows 7,” explains Steve Kleynhans, Gartner’s research vice president.
- Salesforce Forces Microsoft To Pay $8B Extra For LinkedIn
They both entered into a bidding war for LinkedIn fairly early on in the discussions, jumping from a price of around US$160 per share to Salesforce’s final offer, US$85 in cash and a portion of Salesforce stock that worked out to just around $200 per share. Microsoft ended up winning with its bid of US$196 per share, straight cash.
http://www.channelnews.com.au/salesforce-forces-microsoft-to-pay-8b-extra-for-linkedin/
Oracle
- Oracle (ORCL) Loses Itanium Lawsuit Worth $3 Billion to HPE
Oracle and HPE have been embroiled in a legal tangle involving software for Itanium chip-based servers over the last five years. HP Enterprise had asked for $3 billion in compensation from Oracle for allegedly causing a decline in the demand for its Itanium based products.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-orcl-loses-itanium-lawsuit-141002455.html
Of course, Oracle vows to contest the ruling… - How Oracle’s business as usual is threatening to kill Java
Oracle employees that worked on Java EE have told others in the community that they have been ordered to work on other things. There has also been open talk of some Java EE developers “forking” the Java platform, breaking off with their own implementation and abandoning compatibility with the 20-year-old software platform acquired by Oracle with the takeover of Sun Microsystems six years ago. Yet Oracle remains silent about its plans for Java EE even as members of the governing body overseeing the Java standard have demanded a statement from the company.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/07/oracle-killing-java-ee/
Storage ( EMC | Dell )
- Why states like Massachusetts are trying to curb noncompete pacts
Noncompete pacts were only one ingredient in the recipe that worked against Massachusetts and to the advantage of Silicon Valley, where employees can depart and start their own companies mostly without fear of a lawsuit. But they mattered. In California, companies are generally prohibited from enforcing noncompete agreements because of a worker-friendly statute from the 19th century.
- Dell Promises ‘Seamless’ Deal Registration For Partners On First Day After EMC Merger
In a letter to partners Tuesday, Marius Haas, Dell chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions, said the company is “driving to maintain the partner and customer experience you have come to expect today, and at the onset of day one, provide seamless deal registration and intact sales coverage plans.”
“I do not think it will be seamless,” said a top executive at one large Dell and EMC solution provider, who did not want to be named. “Nothing in life ever is.”
- Data Protection: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
The key findings of the survey of IT decision makers at 2,200 organizations included:
- incidents of traditional data loss and disruption are down since 2014, but new challenges mean 13% more businesses experienced loss overall;
- over half of businesses fail to protect data in the cloud despite more than 80% indicating they will rely on SaaS-based business applications;
- 36% have lost data in the last year as the result of a security breach;
- 73% are not very confident they can protect flash storage environments;
- the average cost of data loss is more than $914,000.
http://it-tna.com/2016/06/29/data-protection-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- Whitman lifts lid on big HPE reorganization
The CTO and COO are leaving as part of this reorg…Whitman also said that HPE would merge its Hewlett Packard Labs research arm into its enterprise group, which is focused on selling data center gear. The idea is to better align research projects with products and services that can eventually be sold, she explained. Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of the HPE enterprise group, will lead Hewlett Packard Labs.
As for the restructurings, Whitman wrote that it would consolidate its sales teams into one big global sales unit under its enterprise group. HPE will do a similar reshuffling with its marketing departments and will consolidate staff from e-commerce, product marketing, and customer relations group into one big marketing unit.
http://fortune.com/2016/06/27/hewlett-packard-enterprise-martin-fink-meg-whitman/
- HP launches PC as a service, buys 3D scanning specialists
HP Inc said it has launched PCs as a service, simplifying PC lifecycle management. HP Device as a Service (DaaS) is designed to help take the stress out of acquiring, deploying and managing technology, with one single contract across devices and services, and no upfront investment. The programme is globally scalable, meaning customers can easily evolve their hardware infrastructure to adapt to changing workforces.
Separately, HP is buying German companies David Vision Systems and David 3D Solutions, which make 3-D scanning technology, the Wall Street Journal reported. No financial terms were disclosed.
http://www.telecompaper.com/news/hp-launches-pc-as-a-service-buys-3d-scanning-specialists–1151217
- HP, Apple top list of tech companies fighting forced labor risk
Forced laborers may be charged high recruitment fees to get jobs, be trapped in debt servitude, deprived of their passports or other documents, or made to work excessive hours for low pay, the report said.
HP, Apple, Intel Corp, Cisco Systems Inc and Microsoft scored highest on the list of 20 publicly traded ICT companies. At the bottom were Keyence, BOE Technology and Canon.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hp-apple-top-list-tech-181308055.html
Other
- What sets Red Hat apart from the Valley
The Red Hat Summit marked 10 years since Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss, and today it remains a cornerstone of the company’s offerings. Last year, Red Hat purchased Ansible, the provisioning system that competes with Chef and Puppet. In both the case of Ansible and of 3scale, Red Hat seized a smaller firm that was doing quite well, yet hadn’t taken over the market mindshare the way their public and near-public competitors had.
Why is it that Red Hat seems to be more successful with technology acquisitions than, say, an HPE, which took on companies like Mercury, Autonomy and even Compaq? Red Hat CFO Frank Calderoni said that these successes come from disciplined acquisitions goals.
- Salesforce is way behind Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP in one important area of its business
Market-research firm Cowen Group pointed out in a note published on Thursday that Salesforce generates a substantially lower percentage of revenue from international regions compared to other software makers.
As seen in the chart below, Salesforce gets only 32% of its revenue from outside the US, lagging behind SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, which all generate over half of their sales from overseas.
Photo: Felix Russell-Saw