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August 5, 2015August 1, 2015

News You Can Use: 8/5/2015

Gartner Announces Rankings of Its 2015 Supply Chain Top 25

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3053118
Detroit Is Cultivating Local Entrepreneurship to Secure It’s Future

What have I been saying about Detroit and Camden? It is going to happen…Detroit is also a city that is made of 82 percent African-American residents and 52 percent women residents, with an annual median household income of $26,000. When witnessing this new business growth we must ask ourselves, is everyone able to participate? Can all have the opportunity to start a business and grow? Nationally, according to our database, minority entrepreneurs make up 15 percent of businesses and contribute $591 billion in revenue to the economy. Will Detroit capture and foster this growth?

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248844?ctp=BizDev&src=Syndication&msc=Feedly
Big Data and Risk are a Match Made in Heaven

Tier one automotive supplier Borg Warner, for instance has developed a Supplier Performance Monitor using huge amounts of readily available data from its own SAP system plus third party data all fed through an artificial intelligence algorithm similar to Google’s search engine to stay ahead of problems. Rather than periodically assessing risk and paying for protection with working capital, Borg Warner constantly listens for tremors and responds before the problem gets out of hand.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinomarah/2015/07/30/big-data-and-risk-are-a-match-made-in-heaven/
Amazon CTO: ‘We Still Consider Ourselves a Startup’

It’s very important to realize today that with minimal investment you can start building applications. Five, ten years ago you would need millions [of dollars] in investment. It allows entrepreneurs to truly focus on new products without having to worry about the infrastructure, without having to get additional investment to buy hardware. And if you look at the big household names these days, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest – all of these are born in the cloud. Without cloud, if you asked them, they would probably say they would not have been able to reach this scale at the speed they did, without it.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248884?ctp=BizDev&src=Syndication&msc=Feedly
Summer Break: Procurement’s Day in the Sun

Added Miller, “the demand for supplier transparency and high-quality, responsibly-sourced offerings has never been higher. Cost containment will always remain a key sourcing objective, but today, it’s equally important that a company can find and retain reliable and reputable sources of supply. How and where a product gets made can have far-reaching implications on an organization’s sales effectiveness and brand reputation.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmartyn/2015/07/28/summer-break-procurements-day-in-the-sun/
Exploring Investment Drivers for Global Supply Chain Risk Management

a new concept is emerging: global supply chain risk management (SCRM).  Quite often, the decisions to invest in SCRM are often driven more by the fear of negative press – and of course regulatory penalties – than the opportunity to make the supply chain more resilient and maintain top-line revenue and market share, even in the case of a supply chain upset.

http://spendmatters.com/2015/07/31/global-supply-chain-risk-management-investment-drivers/

Photo: Christian Joudrey

April 25, 2015

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.”

http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/2405305/ibm-pushing-boundaries-of-iot-with-peugeot-tie-up
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.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/04/hortonworks-odp
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.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-24/oracle-ceo-hurd-plans-to-lift-almost-all-products-into-cloud
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.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/bottom_line/2015/04/oracle-ceo-mark-hurd-cuts-loose-at-boston-college.html

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.

http://www.prweek.com/article/1344543/antonio-lucio-right-person-define-hps-brand-comms-experts-weigh
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.

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/04/22/vmware-is-becoming-a-linux-distributor-to-compete-with-container-rivals/
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.

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass_roundup/2015/04/emc-cites-troubles-abroad-for-turbulent-sales-here.html
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/

April 11, 2015April 11, 2015

Supplier Report: 4/11/2015

This week feels like yesterday’s news. Many of the major IBM stories are updates and rehash from the last few weeks – however they did release news on a breakthrough in tape storage. 64-year-old tape storage technology.

Bad week for HP. PC sales are down and they are exiting the public cloud sector due to not wanting to go head to head with Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM.

IBM

More insight into IBM’s $3B investing into the Internet of Things (IoT):

The “things” in the Internet of Things represent just the tip of the iceberg. The heavy lifting is obviously done by backend infrastructure. The data generated by the sensors and devices needs to be ingested in real-time. Industrial IoT requires massive infrastructure running powerful compute and storage engines. IBM’s investment in SoftLayer instantly turned it into an IaaS player giving the company the muscle to compete with Amazon and Microsoft MSFT +0.58%. SoftLayer’s bare metal compute infrastructure, object storage, and CDN become the backbone of IoT. All IBM has to do is to add real-time streaming and high volume data ingestion capabilities to SoftLayer to turn it into a viable backend infrastructure for storing and processing massive datasets.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2015/04/09/can-the-elephant-dance-to-the-iot-tune/
17 IBM Rock Stars: Listicle hat focuses on the people of IBM
This is an interesting post in light of the criticisms that IBM has an aging workforce. Nobody in this article looks older than 40.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-rock-star-employees-2015-4
Speaking of aging workforce, IBM had a tape storage innovation this week…

IBM scientists have demonstrated an areal recording density of 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch on low cost, particulate magnetic tape – a breakthrough that represents the equivalent of a 220 terabyte tape cartridge that could fit in the palm of your hand.

http://www.information-age.com/technology/data-centre-and-it-infrastructure/123459293/major-ibm-storage-breakthrough-proves-tape-still-setting-records-63-years
IBM is working with the US Army on cloud powered logistics: (it is bigger than the stock exchange)

The system is a hybrid model comprising IBM’s cloud and the US military’s on-premise servers to power the Army Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) system, which provides integrated logistical support for worldwide operations.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2403323/ibm-loads-us-army-with-hybrid-cloud-tech-aimed-at-military-logistics

Oracle

Stock: Oracle projecting large revenue growth

Regardless of margin impact triggered by cloud shift, the sell-side firm expects accretion in earnings. Revenue will benefit in terms of growth attributed by “12c refresh”, while adding $2.8 billion in new revenue from multitenant – a software architecture in which a single instance of a software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants – and in-memory add-on modules. The increased usage of hardware attached to the server will optimize performance of in-memory modules and assist Oracle to support its growth rate.

http://www.bidnessetc.com/38918-oracle-corporations-orcl-revenue-to-accelerate-bernstein-reiterates-buy-rat/
Here is an interview with Shawn Price (Oracle Sr. VP) on their cloud strategy (it is nice to hear from someone other than Hurd)http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/oracle-will-be-the-world-largest-cloud-company-shawn-price/1/217949.html

HP is backing off public cloud:

On Tuesday, Bill Hilf, HP SVP of cloud product management, told The New York Times that “it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head” with the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the battle to sell on-demand computing to businesses.

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/hp-retreats-from-public-cloud/d/d-id/1319866
PC Sales are slumping again

Worldwide shipments totaled 68.5 million during the first quarter of the year, down 6.7 percent from the first quarter of 2014, according to IDC. Gartner reported a smaller year-on-year decline of 5.2 percent to 71.7 million units. (The two firms count differently: IDC includes Chromebooks, for example, while Gartner excludes them.)

http://recode.net/2015/04/09/dont-look-now-but-the-pc-market-is-going-south-again/

Other

Amazon is going after IBM’s Watson:

Unveiled on Thursday, Amazon Machine Learning gives developers the chance to extract much more meaningful insights from their Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted data without needing a background in data science and it is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/amazon-delivers-its-answer-to-ibm-watson-analytics-1290785
The other side of the shoe: Hypocrisy of Big Companies Practicing Inconsistent Moral Outrage
http://guardianlv.com/2015/04/hypocrisy-of-big-companies-practicing-inconsistent-moral-outrage/
Splunk getting an influx of money
http://www.tradejourno.com/high-inflow-of-money-witnessed-in-splunk-inc/36168/

They also were awarded business by Lockheed to monitor F-35’s:

Splunk has provided Lockheed Martin with Splunk Enterprise to monitor and analyze IT systems and network behavior for the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), which supports the F-35 Lightning II, a 5th generation fighter jet.

http://www.defenseworld.net/news/12655/Lockheed_Chooses_Splunk_Software_To_Monitor_F_35___s_ALIS
Tableau in healthcare analytics partnership with Cerner

The solution pairs Tableau’s data visualization tools (widely praised for having an intuitive UI that non-IT personnel can work with) with Cerner’s healthcare analytics and data warehousing software. Tableau: “Combining Cerner’s leading health care [IT] expertise with Tableau’s advanced data discovery capabilities will support organizations in making data-driven decisions through face-up, meaningful information.”

http://seekingalpha.com/news/2416646-tableau-cerner-strike-healthcare-analytics-partnership
Intel can’t sell their chips to China:

In a notice published online the US Department of Commerce said it refused Intel’s application to export the chips for Tianhe-2 and three other Chinese supercomputers because the machines were being used for “nuclear explosive activities”. The relevant section of US export regulations reveals that this covers technologies used in the “design, development or fabrication” of nuclear weapons.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32247532

March 25, 2015January 30, 2016

The Supply Chain: 3/25/2015

Amazon and the extended supply chain

“Well, [Amazon] does have very strong supply chain and financing capabilities, and it knows a little something about managing information given that it has dominant share in the infrastructure as a service industry with Amazon Web Services … Amazon also knows how to sell its value to suppliers, to enable suppliers, to integrate them and to offer them tons of value-added services. The biggest of these services include inventory management and financing.”

https://spendmatters.com/2015/03/11/the-wonders-of-amazon-and-the-extended-supply-chain/
Jaguar leverages supply chain to drive growth:

It is working in collaboration with government on automotive strategy. “We are going to grow the supply chain – we want new technologies to flow through. For example, he said: “We have a proving factory to take a prototype and work out the manufacturing steps to get it produced.”

http://www.supplychainstandard.com/2015/03/jaguar-harnesses-supply-chain-to-drive-growth/
Reverse auctions draw criticism in Capitol Hill:

Both Gordon and the Government Accountability Office see potential in reverse auctions to drive down agency costs, and promote contracting competition. But after five years of increased reliance on the tactic, as of 2013 “the potential benefits … had not been maximized by the agencies” that use them, reported GAO.

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/517/3823322/Reverse-auctions-draw-strong-criticism-on-Capitol-Hill
Innovation and supply chain remain key for Nike:
http://www.just-style.com/analysis/innovation-and-supply-chain-remain-key-for-nike_id124712.aspx?utm_source=article-feed&utm_medium=rss-feed&utm_campaign=rss-feed
The five ingredients of ‘the whole enchilada’ of supply chain sustainability

The idea of category management and working with suppliers over a longer term is not new. I was doing it in the oil and gas sector in the 1990s and Japanese industries were doing it long before this. Incorporating sustainability is a bit harder because it is a complex and ever-changing subject which needs some knowledge from the buyer and for them to be properly advised by competent internal or external experts, which are in short supply.

http://www.supplymanagement.com/blog/2015/03/the-five-ingredients-of-the-whole-enchilada-of-supply-chain-sustainability

March 21, 2015March 20, 2015

Supplier Report: 3/21/2015

IBM

IBM going after healthcare market with Watson

Florida-based Modernizing Medicine provides structured data and clinical decision assistance as well as billing, revenue and inventor management solutions. The solution provider also uses Watson to enable its mobile app schEMA, which provides physicians with “rapid clinical decision support at the point of care,” IBM said.

http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/2400780/ibm-looks-to-woo-healthcare-market-with-watson
This is the second study IBM has been involved in regarding mobile security in the last 4 months:

Hackers are now taking advantage of the popularity of insecure mobile apps, public Wi-Fi networks, and more to break into the highly valuable data often housed on BYOD and corporate mobile devices. Further, they’re also tapping mobile devices as an entry portal into an organization’s broader, highly confidential internal network.

http://www.domain-b.com/companies/companies_I/IBM/20150320_cyber_attacks.html
Another follow-up to a previous post – IBM’s big data analytics on twitter:

IBM intends to “isolate the signal from the noise” found in social media conversations by enhancing Twitter data with information from millions of data points from other streams such as sales information, product inventory statistics and ever weather forecasts. IBM will also use its analytics technology to make sense of the information.

http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/ibm-taps-twitter-data-for-new-cloud-based-analytics-service/288688
Speaking on analyitcs, here is an interview with IBM’s Global VP for Data Analytics:

I think the biggest disruption or change that we’ll see will be the intersection of analytics and mobility. There are many reasons why I believe that. When we look at the world at large, there’s much more pervasiveness of people using mobile than people using computers or other computational devices.

http://www.datanami.com/2015/03/19/one-on-one-with-ibms-global-vp-for-data-analytics/
IBM is trying to build a custom bitcoin for banks

“It’s sort of a bitcoin but without the bitcoin. These coins will be part of the money supply. It’s the same money, just not a dollar bill with a serial number on it, but a token that sits on this blockchain. We are at a tipping point right now. It’s making a lot more sense for some type of digital cash in the system, that not only saves our government money, but also is a lot more convenient and secure for individuals to use.”

http://www.digitaljournal.com/business/business/ibm-planning-a-custom-version-of-bitcoin-for-central-banks/article/428482
Valuing IBM’s Software Business:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3004476-valuing-ibms-software-franchise

Oracle

Oracle Takes Aim at Salesforce.com as Currency Headwinds Eat Into Q3 Revenues

Oracle emphasized that its primary focus is to expand the cloud business aggressively and overtake the cloud computing leader and Oracle’s fierce rival, Salesforce.com. Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison stated that the company is on track to exceed $1billion in new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) business in fiscal 2015, which may help it overtake Salesforce as the global leader in cloud computing ahead of Oracle’s 2016 target.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/03/18/oracle-takes-aim-at-salesforce-com-as-currency-headwinds-eat-into-q3-revenues/
Oracle Rising: Ellison Boasts Passing Salesforce, Passed Workday; Op Margin In Focus

Oracle reported a combined $1.518 billion of cloud revenue through the first three quarters, almost as much as it earned in all 12 months of the prior fiscal year.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/03/18/oracle-rising-ellison-boasts-passing-salesforce-passed-workday-op-margin-in-focus/

HP on target to split by November 2015
http://www.bidnessetc.com/37389-hewlettpackard-co-will-split-business-into-two-parts-by-november-2015/
But questions remain about the split:

“The two companies once they’re split are really going to be functioning in the way they are today: Today we have separate authorizations in PPS and for the enterprise group and I suspect that with the exception of the marketing dev funds and how that’s all construed and overall account coverage, that to me is something that will remain to be seen as to how it’s going to continue.”

http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/analysis/2400642/hp-partners-split-questions-remain
HP wins approval for shareholder settlement over Autonomy deal

The ruling, from US District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco, comes after HP failed to win approval of two previous proposed deals. Mr Breyer had written that the last deal may not have been fair for shareholders because it could have forced them to give up claims beyond the Autonomy deal.

http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/analysis/2400642/hp-partners-split-questions-remain

Other

Amazon the best public cloud for software development

The capabilities of AWS’ application services, coupled with its mature infrastructure services, vast ecosystem of partners, including many of the rapid dev and coder-focused platforms in this analysis, gave it high current offering and strategy scores across all but the rapid dev segment, where its degree of abstraction does not rise to the needs of this user,” the study said. “It also excels in breadth of security, reliability, and compliance characteristics.”

http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/03/19/aws-named-top-public-cloud-for-software-development.aspx

Tag: Amazon

News You Can Use: 8/5/2015

Supplier Report: 4/25/2015

Supplier Report: 4/11/2015

The Supply Chain: 3/25/2015

Supplier Report: 3/21/2015