Tag: Amazon

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News You Can Use: 3/30/2016

sn_leaves_Scott Webb

  • Design for the Supply Chain Pt 5: Understandable

    I think it’s obvious to all of us that supply chains are continuing to become more and more complex. This is due in part to the ever changing number of nodes/links in the supply chain as companies become more global. That in turn impacts processes (internal and external), interactions with suppliers and customers, focus on metrics and risk analysis, etc. The volume of data necessary to manage these interactions from end-to-end is staggering. We generally create all kinds of reports and applications to sit on top of databases, ERP systems, and spreadsheets to capture the data. The challenge though is not so much how to capture the data but how to get our arms around it in a meaningful way. The goal is to help the supply chain professional understand the situation quicker so they can make better decisions.

    http://blog.kinaxis.com/2016/03/design-for-the-supply-chain-pt-5-understandable/

  • Is It Okay to Cry at Work?

    Personal opinion: Nope nope nope
    http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/474195/is-it-okay-to-cry-at-work/
  • Rewiring the Supply Chain to Improve Results

    Alignment plagues the functional organization with large gaps between operations and commercial teams. Closing this gap is paramount to start the journey for supply chain excellence. As long as we hire consultants that advocate harvesting the “low-hanging fruit” in operations and driving growth in commercial teams, we perpetuate the gap. Instead, we must build operational competency cross-functionally with a focus on market sensing, shaping and customer satisfaction. The supply chain needs to be redefined outside-in with a focus on the customer. Pitting operations and commercial teams against each other is detrimental to driving business results.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/loracecere/2016/03/18/rewiring-the-supply-chain-to-improve-results/#42498dc1c568

  • Four Things To Do When Your Team Is Smarter Than You
    I would think any manager would WANT this…

    PRESENT OBJECTIVES, NOT STRATEGIES
    Throughout his 21-year career, Siegel has managed teams that were filled with smart people. Recently, he managed a computer engineering team from Israel who were working to complete high-level systems architecture programming for ZipRecruiter. “Many had come out of the Israeli military and were beyond elite,” he says. “They had been writing code to save lives. They were the best of the best—off-the-charts smart.”

    Instead of being intimidated, Siegel tapped into their motivation and changed the way he delivered his tasks. “I would start each project with the mission,” he says. “I would say, ‘This is the goal. This is the strategy. This is what success looks like.’”

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3058080/lessons-learned/four-things-to-do-when-your-teams-smarter-than-you

  • Why Dropbox dropped Amazon’s cloud

    Not every company has the scale Dropbox operates at. And most companies would not see a huge benefit from customizing infrastructure to tailor it to their specific needs, Gupta says. Dropbox’s journey took two and a half years and required investments in personnel to figure out how infrastructure should be customized and other workers to manage their data centers.

    http://www.cio.com/article/3045641/cloud-computing/why-dropbox-dropped-amazons-cloud.html#tk.rss_all

  • People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy

    That people would value autonomy over influence jives with self-determination theory, a psychological theory that suggests autonomy is one of humans’ basic psychological needs, along with relatedness and competence. Influence is not aneed under this theory. Another study suggests that while striving for power lowers people’s well-being, once they have power, they really are happier, because they feel more authentic—the power makes them feel like the circumstances of their lives are more in line with who they feel they are inside. That may be because the power gives them the freedom to make their own decisions, and their sense of well-being grows when they do what they want.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/people-want-power-because-they-want-autonomy/474669/

  • Why Your Next Procurement Vehicle Should Be a Bus

    In San Francisco, under our Startup In Residence program, we’re experimenting with how to remove the friction associated with RFPs for both government staff and startups. For government staff, that means publishing an RFP in days, not months. For startups, it means responding to an RFP in hours not weeks.

    So what did we learn from our experience with the airport? We combined 17 RFPs into one; utilized general “challenge statements” in place of highly detailed project specifications; leveraged modern technology; and created a simple guide to navigating the process.

    http://www.techwire.net/news/why-your-next-procurement-vehicle-should-be-a-bus.html
    Copy of the procurement guide:
    https://startupinresidenceorg.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/stircontractingguideocareviewed1-28-2016-docx.pdf

Photo: Scott Web

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News You Can Use: 3/23/2016

sn_bridge_Simon Stratford

  • Why 2016 Is The Year Of The Hybrid Job

    The 21st-century workplace demands versatility. Big data, for example, is becoming increasingly important to the success of businesses, and every industry is making considerable investments. “Not surprisingly, occupations pertaining to data analysis are the fastest growing today across multiple industries,” says Brennan. “The ability to compile, analyze, and apply big data to everyday business decisions is driving major change. In the IT space, big data roles have seen a nearly 4,000% jump in demand. But with the availability of data comes the requirement to analyze and visualize data.”

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3057619/the-future-of-work/why-2016-is-the-year-of-the-hybrid-job

  • An interesting post on the history of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

    At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach to creating intelligent life was to focus on designing simple computational building blocks, called primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behaviors emerge.

    The book…helped to crystallize the debate over the problems with the company’s own infrastructure. If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives — the building blocks of computing — and then getting out of the way. In other words, it needed to break its infrastructure down into the smallest, simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them with as much flexibility as possible.

    https://stratechery.com/2016/the-amazon-tax/

  • Rebranding The American Man

    According to research from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, single, unmarried women under 30 are now out-earning single, unmarried men across the country. In New York City, Los Angeles, and San Diego, women make 17%, 12%, and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. A big part of this shift has to do with the fact that women now earn 60% of higher education degrees, so this trend is likely to continue. And women are the primary jobholders in 13 out of the 15 job categories projected to grow in the United States over the next 10 years.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3057609/rebranding-the-american-man

  • The Air You Breathe at Work May Be Slowing You Down

    The culprit is carbon dioxide, according to a series of studies since 2012. The most recent research, led by Joseph Allen, who teaches at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, analyzed the performance of knowledge workers, including engineers, programmers, creative marketing professionals and managers. For several hours each day, unbeknownst to those employees, the researchers raised and lowered the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and then tested everyone on nine different kinds of cognitive ability, like responding to a crisis, strategic thinking and applying their knowledge to a practical task.

    The higher the concentration of CO2, the lower the test scores. Even allowing for uncontrolled factors such as diet, previous night sleep quality and mood, employees’ overall sharpness fell by an average of 15 percent when CO2 levels reached “moderate” levels of about 945 parts per million (ppm). In modern office buildings, designed to maximize energy efficiency by letting in as little outside air as possible, CO2 levels around 1,000 ppm are common.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272519

  • IT workers dispute Disney rehiring claims

    “This is nothing more than corporate speak intended to muddy the waters,” Perrero said. “New more exciting jobs were promised by Disney that acted as a carrot to keep us around just long enough to have us Americans be the trainers and the foreign workers as the trainees.”

    http://www.cio.com/article/3044098/outsourcing/it-workers-dispute-disney-rehiring-claims.html#tk.rss_all

  • John Oliver on Encryption (NSFW language… don’t watch this in the office!)

    Related:
    WhatsApp’s Other Encryption Dilemma

    The messaging app has made clear it hopes to sell businesses on using WhatsApp as a way to communicate with consumers. Tests of WhatsApp business accounts are expected to start by the end of this year, Facebook has said. But WhatsApp has told potential clients that one of its biggest challenges is how to roll out a customer service application for businesses without giving up end-to-end encryption protecting messages on the app, according to a person briefed by WhatsApp.

    https://www.theinformation.com/whatsapps-other-encryption-dilemma

  •  D.C., San Francisco tech leaders aim for ‘future-proof’ procurement

    The idea of future-proofing procurement, Vemulapalli said, is to make it easier for city governments to procure technology from a diverse group of vendors — from massive international companies to local startups in the civic innovation space.

    http://statescoop.com/d-c-san-francisco-tech-leaders-aim-for-future-proof-procurement 

Photo: Simon Stratford

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/19/2016

sn_MexicanStandoff

I know this is going to come as a surprise to frequent readers… IBM bought another company. GASP! How could we have predicted such a move?

IBM purchased Optevia, a British CRM integration company that is based in the UK. Their focus has historically been government-based CRM configurations… so this is a very specific acquisition and I am curious to see how this asset will play globally.

Microsoft is trying to play nice and win friends, and that means the (formerly) mean kid on the block is giving away free cake SQL seats. HPE and Dell are looking to sell off a few unwanted assets (and by assets I mean whole companies).

Apple is taking business away from Amazon and giving it to Google.  Microsoft and Amazon are teaming up to go after Oracle (on hosting and software).  IBM’s Watson is under attack from one of its founders.

IBM

  • Is the Latest Acquisition by IBM a Game Changer?

    The addition of Optevia is likely to benefit IBM considering the fact that its current SaaS CRM products lack focus on public sector entities right now. Optevia, being a specialist in the field will provide IBM with much needed diversification and potential growth in its cloud portfolio.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/28272-is-the-latest-acquisition-by-ibm-a-game-changer/
    Related:
    IBM buys CRM SaaS firm – no, not Salesforce

    It’s an interesting purchase. Consulting giant Accenture last year bought Salesforce partners Tquila and Cloud Sherpas, also on G-Cloud. Salesforce, of course, is the fastest-growing and best known of the CRM-as-a-service lot.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/18/ibm_buys_microsoft_dynamics_crm_partner/

  • IBM is battling hard to save Vodafone’s $1-billion outsourcing deal

    “Even if IBM does retain most of the contract, the renewed deal will come at the cost of margins. They are being forced to fight on price as well,” said one of the sources. As of now, Vodafone hands out $190-200 million of annual business to IBM.

    http://www.businessinsider.in/IBM-is-battling-hard-to-save-Vodafones-1-billion-outsourcing-deal/articleshow/51424229.cms

  • IBM Board Paid Itself $4.9 Million

    IBM’s board members are A.J.P. Belda, W.R. Brody, K.I. Chenault, M.L. Eskew, D.N. Farr, A. Gorsky, S.A. Jackson, A.N. Liveris, W.J. McNerney Jr., J.W. Owens, J.E. Spero, S. Taurel and P. Voser.

    http://247wallst.com/technology-3/2016/03/11/ibm-board-paid-itself-4-9-million/

  • Watch out Watson, Google’s DeepMind is getting smarter…

    For AI researchers and Go aficionados, it is as big a moment as 1997, when Garry Kasparov lost a chess match to Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM. It is much harder to program a computer to play Go than chess—the sheer number of options in every move makes the sort of “brute-force” approach adopted by IBM unfeasible. But DeepMind has managed it. After the match its program, called AlphaGo, was awarded the top professional rank by the Korean Baduk Association (“baduk” being the Korean word for Go.) And it has entered the world rankings in 4th place (see chart).

    http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21694883-alphagos-masters-taught-it-game-electrifying-match-shows-what

  • IBM quietly built the world’s largest digital agency — here’s how it got there (good summary of all of their marketing moves)

    Unlike the competition, iX isn’t trying to ‘bolt on digital’. IBM is not alone in recognizing the business requirements for digital transformation agencies. France-based advertising-agency holding group Publicis Groupe, for example, bought US-based digital-marketing consultancy Sapient for $3.7 billion in 2014, creating what it called the “largest and most advanced” platform focused exclusively on digital transformation.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-quietly-built-the-worlds-largest-digital-agency-heres-how-it-got-there-2016-3

  • IBM server sales surge, closes in on leaders HPE, Dell

    Strong growth for IBM’s Power systems and double-digit growth for its z System mainframes have seen IBM record 8.9% server revenue growth in Q4 of 2015, helping it close the gap slightly leaders HPE and Dell. IBM saw its market share rise from 13.7% in Q4, 2014 to 14.1% according to the latest figures from IDC. However, its growth spurt wasn’t enough to oust the incumbents from their top spots, with Dell also recording growth – at 5.3% – which enabled it to hold on to its 16.7% market share, while HPE declined 2.1% but still holds the lead with 24.9% market share, down from 26.8% a year ago.

    https://datacenternews.asia/story/ibm-server-sales-surge-closes-leaders-hpe-dell/

Microsoft

  • Microsoft offering free SQL Server licenses to help customers “break free from Oracle”

    Microsoft has decided to offer free SQL Server licenses for its customers to help with migrating away from Oracle database software. It’s positioning this sale as an opportunity to “break free from Oracle”. This offer is only available to Software Assurance subscribers, which is an enterprise licensing agreement that Microsoft offers to large customers.

    http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-offering-free-sql-server-licenses-to-help-customers-break-free-from-oracle
    But what is the maintenance impact year-over-year? 🙂

  • Microsoft loves open source? Only when it’s convenient

    But while this has been going on, you’re not hearing about another part of Microsoft. Simultaneous with the Eclipse and SQL Server announcements, Microsoft announced it had successfully extracted patent licenses out of Wistron of Taiwan for its use of Android and out of Rakuten of Japan for use of Linux and Android. Though there’s been something of a lull in patent aggression lately, it has a long history and generates a significant revenue stream.

    Yes, that’s right: With one face, Microsoft wants us to forgive and forget the “cancer” comments, the dirty tricks, and the standards fixing. Even as the body of SCO lays slightly warm following the Redmond-financed fight against Linux, Microsoft wants us to overlook more than a decade of hostility and accept it as a full-status community member because it showed up with code, cash, and compliments. But with the other face, Microsoft wants members of the Android and Linux communities where it claims membership to pay up crates of cash for patent licenses or face destructive litigation.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/3042699/open-source-tools/microsoft-loves-open-source-only-when-its-convenient.html

  • What Is Sony’s Incentive To Play Nice With Microsoft For PS4-Xbox One Crossplay?
    I know it is odd to have a gaming item on here, but since we are talking about Microsoft’s embrace of open source and the fact that Sony is kicking their butts in the console market, this is a public relations move…

    For Microsoft to suddenly say “hey guys, don’t worry, you can play all your favorite multiplatform games with your friends on PS4 if you buy an Xbox” helps Microsoft, who is behind, but not Sony, who is ahead. But of course Sony has to agree to this partnership for it to exist at all. If they don’t, Microsoft gets to say “Sony, why are you standing in the way of progress?” but I’m not sure Sony has an adequate reason to agree to this partnership outside of “being nice.” They’re in the lead by a mile, so why let Xbox One get a foothold to try and close the gap by opening up their 35 million PS4 owners as potential playmates for XB1 owners?

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/03/15/what-is-sonys-incentive-to-play-nice-with-microsoft-for-ps4-xbox-one-crossplay/#e6671632fd31

Dell | EMC

  • Dell plans sale of non-core assets to reduce EMC buy debt

    The document is bullish on the synergies that will flow from Dell and EMC merging. But it also points out that Dell will soon have US$59.1bn of debt, which will mean it won’t be flush with cash for the next little while. The document says Denali Holding Inc (DHI), the company that owns Dell, “… has an objective of reducing its indebtedness in the first 18-24 months after completion of the merger and achieving an investment grade credit rating for such indebtedness. The cash necessary to achieve that objective is expected to come from divestitures of non-core businesses of the DHI Group, including EMC, cash flows from operations of the DHI Group and cash generated by reductions in the working capital needed to operate the DHI Group.”

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/15/dell_plans_sale_of_noncore_assets_to_reduce_emc_buy_debt/

  • Dell Aims To Grab Share From Cisco, HPE, Juniper With Aggressive New Rebate

    The Round Rock, Texas-based company introduced a 15 percent back-end rebate that effectively more than doubles similar existing rebates and encourages partners to take market share from Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks, according to Cheryl Cook, Dell’s vice president of global channels and alliances.

    http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300080014/dell-aims-to-grab-share-from-cisco-hpe-juniper-with-aggressive-new-rebate.htm

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc

Oracle

  • Microsoft attacks Oracle with SQL Server 2016 ‘free’ licences

    Microsoft is attempting to lure companies to SQL Server 2016 by offering ‘free licences,’ but there is a catch, as customers need to be part of Microsoft’s Software Assurance licencing scheme.This initiative is directed at those organisations which are running applications or workloads on non-Microsoft commercial relational database management systems and offers free SQL Server licences and help to migrate applications. When we look at the web page where the company has detailed the launch, we are able to see what it is planning to do with the free licences.

    http://theusbport.com/microsoft-attacks-oracle-sql-server-2016-free-licences/6189

  • Oracle Earnings: Can Rising Cloud Make Up For Legacy Fall?

    “The stock is down 1.1% since (fiscal 2016’s second-quarter) earnings, outperforming the S&P 500, down 4.0%, given the general rotation out of growth stocks into more value names like Oracle,” wrote Nomura analyst Frederick Grieb in a research note Thursday. “While metrics for cloud revenue growth have been solid, investors remain concerned by what the potential cost will be to the legacy business, as well as the potential impact to margins during the transition.”

    http://www.investors.com/news/technology/can-oracle-puff-up-cloud-faster-than-losing-legacy-software-wind/

  • Oracle Corporation: Cloud Growth a Stark Warning for Its Rivals

    The highlight of the entire earnings call was the remarkable growth in the cloud business. Revenue from cloud solutions, which includes both software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), grew by 57% year-over-year (YoY) to $583 million. Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, commenting on the revenue growth from cloud services stated: “This dramatic revenue increase drove our non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS gross margins up to 51% in Q3 as compared with 43% in Q2. Our cloud business is now in a hyper-growth phase.”

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/28233-oracle-corporation-cloud-growth-a-stark-warning-for-its-rivals/
    Related:
    Larry Ellison explains why Microsoft and Amazon are going for Oracle’s throat

    Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Corporate VP Takeshi Numoto tells Business Insider that its offer has generated a lot of excitement among Oracle customers: “The level of frustration I’ve seen in their customers has been very high.”

    Meanwhile, at the very moment Ellison was downplaying Amazon, the company had issued a press release announcing that, during the beta phase alone, it had already moved 1,000 databases to AWS.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-on-microsoft-amazon-offers-2016-3

  • Oracle says Oregon is obstructing its pursuit of information

    Oracle claims that Senior Vice President Ken Glueck and Brian Shipley, Gov. Kate Brown’s then-chief of staff, reached a deal late last year to settle all litigation. Oracle would drop its suits and give the state $25 million worth of products and services. Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has said only she has the authority to settle the lawsuits, not the governor.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/blog/health-care-inc/2016/03/oracle-says-oregon-is-obstructing-its-pursuit-of.html

Other

  • Former Executive on IBM’s Watson to Start Own A.I. Firm

    But for Mr. Pratt, leaving to start Noodle meant being able to build a new analytics and A.I. business from the ground up. The company will be based in San Francisco and Bangalore, relying on teams around the world to handle workloads.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/business/dealbook/former-head-of-ibms-watson-unit-to-start-own-ai-firm.html?_r=0

  • Check Out Amazon’s New Secret Weapon for Winning the Cloud Computing Wars

    AWS vice president Adam Selipsky told The Wall Street Journal that “many hundreds” of companies have used an earlier version of the new tool to migrate more than 1,000 databases. “You can clearly see that we’re now getting into the meat of enterprise adoption of the cloud,” he told The Journal.

    Last week, Microsoft said the next version of its own database program would include a similar tool. But Amazon’s head start and experience should continue to pay off, according to Hottovy.

    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13495642/1/amazon-adds-to-appeal-of-its-cloud-computing-platform.html

  • Apple Signs On With Google, Cuts Spending With AWS

    Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, which last November hired VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene to lead its cloud business, is said to be aggressively forming partnerships and swinging deals to bring in large enterprise customers. Last month, Google signed up Spotify, which runs part of its streaming music service on AWS, as a cloud customer.

    http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300080062/cloud-makes-for-strange-bedfellows-apple-signs-on-with-google-cuts-spending-with-aws.htm

  • Tableau Acquires HyPer in a Quest to Enhance Database Computing

    Tableau Software has announced the acquisition of HyPer, which is a high-performance database system. HyPer was initially developed as a research project in Technical University of Munich (TUM). Tableau plans to start a research and development center in Munich with the help of key personnel, and expand its research work on high-performance computing. The idea is to integrate HyPer’s technology into Tableau’s products. This will help its customers with faster transaction processing, and in improving the analytics results generated by its own software.

    http://www.martechadvisor.com/news/tableau-acquires-hyper-in-a-quest-to-enhance-database-computing/

Posted on

Supplier Report: 12/26/2015

ThinkstockPhotos-516115823

We are half-way through the holidays, and our favorite suppliers (thankfully) didn’t make too much noise going into the break.

The tone of the articles are shifting away from “what we did” and are focused on “what we are going to do”.

IBM is going leverage BlockChain, HPE is going make some awesome computer called “The Machine”, Dell is going to figure out a way to pay for EMC (maybe)… and Amazon is going to take over your house?

IBM

  • IBM’s Opportunity In The Telecom Industry And Rivalry With Intel

    IBM is targeting the CSPs (communication service providers), such as telecom operators, cable service providers, satellite broadcasting operators, content and applications service providers and cloud service providers, to help them generate revenue from the big data value chain. Internal telecom data combined with third-party data has tremendous potential that CSPs can exploit to drive their revenues with the help of advanced analytics. Third-party data include data from various social media like Facebook and Twitter.

    As I said above, the challenges telcos are facing today are resulting in softer revenue growth and decreasing profit margin. The only way to boost revenue growth and profit margin is adopting business-focused big data initiatives. Well, what is a business-focused big data initiative? The answer is building customer focus and improving operational efficiencies for expanding revenue and profitability via prudent use of big data analytics and other solutions.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3768996-ibms-opportunity-in-the-telecom-industry-and-rivalry-with-intel

  • Why Box Needs Friends Like IBM And Salesforce

    Things must be going pretty well: Last Friday, the two announced a “long-term commitment” that could last at least a decade. Box hasn’t actually generated much in the way of new revenue from its IBM  relationship yet, but it has at least 100 deals in the pipeline and could close some of them during its current quarter (which ends January 2016).

    http://fortune.com/2015/12/21/box-ibm-salesforce/

  • Blockchain – Goldman and IBM care, should you?

    Why is this even a topic for a DCD conference that focuses solely on infrastructure? Because “it points to two important factors: first, it demonstrates how quickly technology innovation can go from largely unheard of to attracting business start-ups and investors,” says Bruce Taylor, DCD executive vice president. “That has an impact on full-stack infrastructure planning – even if small right now. Secondly, it suggests a new cloud model that wasn’t even in the lexicon two years ago, but may be a massive boost in decentralized computing productivity.”

    http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/events/blockchain-goldman-and-ibm-care-should-you/95402.article

  • TCS, Cognizant at top of outsourcing industry; snatch market share from IBM, Accenture

    More significantly, the performances Cognizant, which is US based but has most of its 219,000 employees in India, and TCS also comfortably eclipsed that of global technology behemoths such as IBM and Accenture during the same period, according to data compiled from company reports and regulatory filings. “India’s Top 5 providers have been gaining market share over the last several years. Within the set, there are growth variations with some growing faster. That said, the battle is now shifting to who can adapt faster to ‘as a service economy’. This is such a potent shift that can tilt the scales and create a new set of winners in services industry,” said Dinesh Goel, partner and India head at outsourcing advisory and research firm ISG.

    http://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/tcs-cognizant-at-top-of-outsourcing-industry-snatch-market-share-from-ibm-accenture/50319165

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc

  • Can HPE’s “The Machine” Deliver?

    When HP announced The Machine in Las Vegas in 2014, it presented the project as a near-complete overhaul of traditional computer architecture. Gone were the CPU-centric architecture, the slow copper communications, and the messy hierarchy of traditional memory. In their place, specialized computing cores, speedy light-carrying photonic connections, and a massive store of dense, energy-efficient memristor memory. The resulting computer, its designers say, will be efficient enough to manipulate petabyte-scale data sets in an unprecedented fashion, expanding what companies and scientists can accomplish in areas such as graph theory, predictive analytics, and deep learning in a way that could improve our daily lives.

    http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/can-hpes-the-machine-deliver

EMC | Dell

  • Dell filing shows why it really needs the EMC merger — it lost money last year and revenue is shrinking

    Annual revenues went from $56.9 billion in its fiscal year ended February 1, 2013, to $58.1 billion in its fiscal year ended January 30, 2015. But they haven’t bounced back to the 2012 peak of $62.1 billion in the fiscal year ended February 3, 2012.

    For the six months ended July 31, 2015, revenues were down about 6% compared to the year-ago quarter, from $29.5 billion to $27.5 billion.

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/dell-reveals-losses-revenue-shrinking-2015-12

  • Dell to Spin Off Security Division (more on SecureWorks)

    “While SecureWorks has shown both expansion in its top line, and gross margin, it also posted increasing losses,” TechCrunch noted. “Investors have shown smaller appetite for company’s going public that fail to show falling losses and increasing revenues.”

    People familiar with the matter have said the business could be valued at $2 billion because of the healthy growth rate, the WSJ said.

    http://ww2.cfo.com/credit-capital/2015/12/dell-spin-off-security-division/

Oracle

  • Oracle to build new cloud campus in Austin, Texas

    Oracle plans to build a 295-unit apartment complex next to the new campus to give employees affordable living options. The company has also acquired an Austin-based startup called StackEngine Inc. for developing its Oracle Public Cloud domain.

    Jobs at the new campus will be primarily sales-oriented, including direct selling, lead qualification, prospecting and technical support. The company plans to hire a lot of recent university graduates and people early in their career.

    http://presstelegraph.com/2015/12/24/oracle-to-build-new-cloud-campus-in-austin-texas.html

  • Oracle Settles ‘Deceptive Java Updates’ issue with FTC

    FTC said that Oracle failed to disclose the security issue to consumers. Even if the issue was disclosed to customers, it was inadequate, the FTC added. Oracle acquired Java in 2010. The older versions of Java have been targeted by hackers as it has many security loopholes. Oracle has provided updates and plugged the security loopholes in Java. However, the older version of Java, before SE version 6, update 10, were still causing security issues. Oracle will be required to inform customers about the security risks involved with running older versions of Java SE.

    http://northerncalifornian.com/content/55471-oracle-settles-%E2%80%98deceptive-java-updates%E2%80%99-issue-ftc

Other

  • Here’s how Amazon plans to run your home — before IBM, Microsoft get there

    Amazon’s platform will compete directly with Microsoft’s, adding a dimension to the two companies’ cloud rivalry. Microsoft has had more time to work on its Internet of Things platform, but Amazon Web Services has far more cloud customers.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2015/12/22/heres-how-amazon-plans-to-run-your-home-before-ibm.html

  • NetApp buys SolidFire for $870 million in cash

    Hardware company NetApp will buy SolidFire, a startup known for selling fast all-flash storage hardware, for $870 million in cash. The deal is considered to be an important one in the storage market especially when EMC has taken up flash by acquiring XtremIO and DSSD.

    Not only EMC, Cisco has also purchased all-flash storage maker Whiptail in 2013. Though NetApp announced about its first all-flash storage hardware product two years back only, the company is not especially known for flash storage.

    http://northerncalifornian.com/content/55462-netapp-buys-solidfire-870-million-cash

  • Red Hat CEO: ‘State of the Red Hat Union is secure’

    As we think about 2016 and beyond, it’s critical to recognize that we are building tomorrow’s IT legacy today. The next generation of technologists will inherit the decisions we make now just like we are dealing now with the legacy decisions made by the generation before us. Taking short-cuts and making decisions that get you up and running today – especially if it promises to save you some money – may be tempting. But, it needs to be a balance. You don’t want to be locked into technology you can’t escape – many enterprises are now confronting this pain from decisions made many years ago.

    http://wraltechwire.com/red-hat-ceo-state-of-the-red-hat-union-is-secure-/15191748/