Supplier News: 12/19/2015

sn_spiral_Alexandre Perotto

Tis the season to reflect and embrace friends and close relations.  IBM is no different, celebrating a long-time relationship (AT&T) and a relatively new one (Apple).

While IBM shows the strengths of their partnerships, EMC and Dell are struggling in their new family unit. Funding continues to be an issue as Dell looks to sell Perot systems and IPO SecureWorks now that VMWare is definitely out of the VirtuStream deal.

It is a cold time of year, and Oracle is feeling the chill.  Oracle’s cloud business is growing, but their core business is flat and declining (slightly).  Last year Oracle rallied during the holidays, but analysts are not expecting another Christmas miracle.

IBM

EMC/Dell

  • Michael Dell will IPO SecureWorks trying to raise cash for his $67 billion EMC deal

    In 2011, Dell bought a company called SecureWorks for $612 million and now it’s officially spinning it off in an IPO.

    Dell hasn’t revealed in the SEC paperwork how much it hopes to earn from the IPO. Sources told the Wall Street Journal in October that Dell was hoping to raise $1 billion and would start its roadshow in December.

    Dell CEO Michael Dell (and his family trust) essentially own SecureWorks himself, gaining it when he took Dell private in 2013. He controls 71%, the paperwork says. It didn’t reveal whether he would be selling any of his stake as part of this IPO. Sources told the WSJ that he wasn’t planning on it.

    http://www.businessinsider.in/Its-official-Michael-Dell-will-IPO-SecureWorks-trying-to-raise-cash-for-his-67-billion-EMC-deal/articleshow/50226658.cms

  • Dell is looking to IPO SecureWorks because…
    VMware (VMW) Cancels Virtustream Joint Venture with EMC

    Along with their earnings release this October, VMware and EMC had announced plans to spin out Virtustream following the acquisition. The new company was expected to be owned jointly by EMC and VMWare with each having a 50% stake.

    However, this news added to investors’ concerns as Virtustream was still not profitable. A 50% stake would have required VMware to invest a huge amount for the development of hybrid-cloud solutions of Virtustream, which would weigh on VMware’s financials.

    All these concerns had together resulted in dwindling investor confidence in VMware, as can be seen from the fall in share prices. In the last three-month period, the company lost nearly 30% of its market cap in contrast to the S&P 500 index’s gain of over 2%.

    http://www.barchart.com/headlines/story/12814666/vmware-vmw-cancels-virtustream-joint-venture-with-emc

  • Will Dell look to raise cash for EMC by selling Perot Systems?

    Dell is reportedly looking to sell its professional services arm Perot Systems to help fund its takeover of EMC. Since the deal between Dell and EMC was announced, VMWare’s shares have dropped 27%. It provides IT services to government agencies and health care providers, including handling media claims, and was founded by billionaire businessman Ross Perot. The company is in the process to search for potential buyers, some of which include Indian Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), French IT outsourcing firm Atos, Genpact-a former General Electric company, and Canadian IT company CGI. However, the negotiations came to a close when both parties could not settle on a price.

    http://theindianrepublic.com/will-dell-look-to-raise-cash-for-emc-by-selling-perot-30588.html

HP Inc/Hewlett Packard Enterprise

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise increases hybrid Cloud and IoT play

    “From a channel perspective, this will be geared towards large enterprises or mid-market customers that are typically sitting between what to run themselves and what to put on the Cloud. We have a lot of channel partners that operate within that space and they can offer it as a next generation solution for the datacentre or offer it as a managed service themselves.”

    The solution will be available from June next year and Hewlett Packard Enterprise has already started enabling channel partners in terms of technical and sales training to take it to market.

    http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/591011/exclusive-hewlett-packard-enterprise-increases-hybrid-cloud-iot-play/

  • HPE grows enterprise data center hardware business and extends lead over Dell and Cisco

    It appeared to be a good quarter for HPE, especially. According to Synergy’s report, HPE grew its lead over Dell and Cisco, the second and third place enterprise data center infrastructure vendors, respectively. It also grew its market share to 24 percent. Not bad for a company that was in the midst of splitting itself into two.

    The enterprise side accounts for more than half of the data center infrastructure market. In comparison, the service provider market is small. But in the service provider space, the leading hardware vendors are having a much tighter race, led by – in descending order – Cisco, HPE and Dell.

    http://www.fierceenterprisecommunications.com/story/hpe-grows-enterprise-data-center-hardware-business-and-extends-lead-over-de/2015-12-14

Oracle

  • Oracle: A Chimera Or The Real Deal

    Is Oracle likely at some point in the foreseeable future to return to some reasonable level of growth-organic or inorganic perhaps defined as high single digits?

    I really don’t think that that is possible. Oracle essentially sells two major product families – databases and enterprise applications. Neither of these have a particularly high growth rate; indeed the growth rate for database seats is probably zero these days. Oracle already has a commanding market share in the database market. It is approaching a monopoly in some categories. And while relational databases will be around for a long, long time, at the margin specialized data stores such as those built around Hadoop and other technologies are starting to limit the market potential for relational technology.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3763596-oracle-a-chimera-or-the-real-deal

  • Oracle Corporation: After Such An Outlook, Where Can It Go?

    While cloud revenues impressed the stockholders, guidance for the upcoming quarters was disappointing. Oracle expects 3Q EPS within $0.60–0.63 as compared to a consensus of $0.65. For 3Q, SaaS and PaaS revenue is expected to grow in the range of 49–53% YoY in constant currency terms. IaaS revenue growth is calculated to fall within 3–7%YoY.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/26847-oracle-corporation-after-such-an-outlook-where-can-it-go/

 

Supplier Report: 12/5/2015

sn_bridge_TimSwaan

This week seems to be all about the scrappy underdogs taking on the champs.  Rocana wants to take a piece of splunk, Google (okay not so scrappy) wants a chunk of Amazon’s cloud business, and Amazon (also not an underdog) wants to take a bite out of Watson.

Hewlett Packard Enterprises

  • The market responded well to the HPE/Microsoft partnership…

    Gartner predicts that IoT connected devices will represent 6.4M of the total devices connected to the internet in 2016. It is extremely similar to the same deal Microsoft cut with HPE’s arch competitor, Dell, back in October. HPE also serves as a conduit to Microsoft’s growing Azure cloud computing ecosystem. Analysts on the street covering shares of Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), are projecting a one-year target price of $15.153, according to Zacks Research.

    http://waltonian.com/2015/12/hewlett-packard-enterprise-shares-rally-on-expanded/

  • BT partners with HPE on Cloud services

    British Telecom has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to allow the telco’s IP VPN customers to connect directly to HPE Helion Managed Cloud Services. BT’s service will use HPE’s Rapid Connect capability to bypass the public Internet when connecting to HPE Helion Managed Cloud Services.

    http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/589846/bt-partners-hpe-cloud-services/

  • HP Inc exits low cost Android tablets, to focus on high-end devices

    HP’s new strategy is akin to that of Apple and Microsoft, which both offer more expensive, premium tablets. Dell has also scaled back its cheap tablet product line-up instead focusing on profitability. Dell says it wants to sell only premium tablets and hybrids with advanced features like hi-res screens and even 3D cameras.

    http://www.streetwisejournal.com/hp-exits-low-cost-tablet-market/
    Note: Hmmm… that sounds oddly similar to what I said on a certain podcast last week…

  • The Sad Story of HP Printers

    At HP Printers, they were fully aware back in the late 1970s that the market was moving to go paperless, but spent the following decades in denial rather than in pivoting to take advantage of the opportunities that this move would create. Recent surveys indicate that a majority of firms will be paperless shortly, yet with four decades of warning, HP doesn’t appear ready.

    HP Inc.’s numbers are out and they are getting pounded by the decline in printing supplies. As a result of this long-anticipated move, they now serve as a lesson of what not to do. They also showcase why so many dominant companies, even with lots of notice, don’t survive an industry event like the paperless office

    http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/the-sad-story-of-hp-printers.html

Other

  • Microsoft Overtakes IBM as Most Buggy Software Vendor

    “The reason so many Microsoft products are in the Top 20 lists this time is that both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge come bundled with Adobe Flash, adding the 35 Flash vulnerabilities listed in August to Windows 8 and upwards,” he said.

    http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/microsoft-overtakes-ibm-most-buggy/

  • Forrester: Google cloud business a concern for AWS, IBM

    Google does not break out its cloud revenues separately when reporting results, but at a recent event, the firm said it thinks its cloud revenue will surpass its sales from online advertising in five years’ time. Its aim is to be referred to as a cloud company by 2020.

    http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/2437017/forrester-google-cloud-business-a-concern-for-aws-ibm

  • So Larry Ellison wrote a book about Oracle

    I learned many important things from this book, but I found this quote to be most useful: “People — teachers, coaches, bosses — want you to conform to some standard of behavior they deem correct. They measure and reward you on how well you conform — arrive on time, dress appropriately, exhibit a properly deferential attitude — as opposed to how well you do your job. Programming liberated me from all that. I could work in the middle of the night. I could wear blue jeans and a T-shirt. I could ride my motorcycle to work. And I’d make more money if I could solve the problem faster and better than anyone else.”

    http://www.gurufocus.com/news/375356/the-oracle-of-software-

  • Startup Rocana wants to be everything Splunk is and more, bringing big data to DevOps

    Years back, Omer Trajman, Eric Sammer, and Don Brown met while working together at Cloudera. They were early executives and field employees charged with helping customers understand Hadoop and how to use it to solve business problems. They did this, possibly, hundreds of times and, while they were able to help many business better understand Hadoop, they always seemed to hit a snag when it came to getting it into production.

    The problem was that the operations team, the folks in the data center, didn’t know how to run it or weren’t able to. So, they started solving the operations problem as well. They screwed it up plenty of times, Trajman said, but they also got it right many times as well.

    http://www.techrepublic.com/article/startup-rocana-wants-to-be-everything-splunk-is-and-more-bringing-big-data-to-devops/

  • Teradata restructures leadership, cuts co-president

    Teradata (NYSE: TDC) said its board of directors moved Tuesday to dissolve its co-president management structure in light of the recent decision to exit the market applications business. The co-president position held by Hermann Wimmer has been terminated. The company has appointed Robert Fair as chief operating officer. Michael Koehler, CEO of the company, has additionally been named president.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/blog/morning_call/2015/12/teradata-restructures-leadership-cuts-co-president.html

  • Why Dell Might Sell Quest Software & SonicWall

    The rumors began flying Wednesday night that Dell is shopping its portfolio companies — Quest Software and SonicWall — to buyout firms KKR & Co LP, Thoma Bravo LLC and Vista Equity Partners Management LLC.

    http://www.cmswire.com/information-management/why-dell-might-sell-quest-software-sonicwall/

Photo: Tim Swaan