Tag: EMC

IBM had an extremely health-focused week by announcing two acquisitions in the health space and making headlines with Watson’s medical diagnostic abilities.  IBM also deepened their Apple partnership with the announcement that they will collect medical related information from i-devices.

Oracle continues their braggadocios ways with claims of overtaking competitor SalesForce in the coming months while HP underwhelms with their new logo design.

IBM

• IBM’s vision for Watson in the medical arena:
  

  Take breast cancer. Two million new cases a year. You would guess, I think, given all of the progress of time in world, but mortality is up 14 percent. Incidents are up 20 percent. And the number of therapies for breast cancer approach 800 and more. What Watson can do, looks at all your medical records. He has been fed and taught by the best doctors in the world and comes up with what are the probable diagnosis, percent confidence, why, rationale, diagnosis, why, odds, conflicts

  http://www.businessinsider.in/This-is-CEO-Ginni-Romettys-biggest-hope-for-IBM/articleshow/46962849.cms

• What to Expect When IBM Reports Earnings on Monday
  

   Analysts are expecting the tech giant to post a year-over-year increase in earnings per share and a decline in revenue for the most recent quarter.

  http://www.thestreet.com/story/13117085/1/what-to-expect-when-ibm-reports-earnings-on-monday.html

• IBM buys Explorys
  

  Explorys provides health care companies cloud-based analytics, working with around 360 hospitals and 317,000 health care providers throughout the country. Terms of IBM’s acquisition were not disclosed.

  http://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/blog/2015/04/ibms-latest-buy-has-a-nashville-connection.html

  More information:

  Explorys’s technology runs on Hadoop, a data management system that relies on distributed computer clusters and allows for much faster processing and analysis of large, complicated data sets than conventional database systems can handle. The speed was important in the company’s pilot application, a search engine that gave physicians at the Cleveland Clinic a way to find data in medical records. Explorys has since built analytics tools that perform specific functions like identifying risk factors and common gaps in patient care that can lead to bad outcomes.

  http://www.technologyreview.com/news/536751/meet-the-health-care-company-ibm-needed-to-make-watson-more-insightful/

  They are also buying a company called Phytel – a population health company:
  http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ibms-big-buy

• They are also beefing up their health partnership with Apple:
  

  The new Watson Health unit plans to aggregate health information from a large number of devices and providers in the cloud and offer insights to health companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic Inc.  In deepening its partnership with Apple, IBM will make use of health information gathered by millions of Apple devices.

  http://www.macworld.com.au/news/ibm-beefs-up-healthy-partnership-with-apple-137323/

• HortonWorks, IBM, Pivotal Align Hadoop Platforms on ODP Core
  http://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/hortonworks-ibm-pivotal-align-hadoop-platforms-on-odp-core.html
• More on IBM’s cyber-threat platform:
  

  IBM said it will make its library of security intelligence data available via the IBM X-Force Exchange, a new cyber threat intelligence sharing platform powered by IBM Cloud. The collaborative platform provides access to IBM and third-party threat data from across the globe, including real-time indicators of live attacks, which can be used to defend against cybercrimes.

  http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ibm-shares-intelligence-data-on-new-cyber-threat-platform–1077221

• Australian firm having issues with IBM softlayer availability:
  

  Australian-owned e-commerce platform provider Bigcommerce has written a scathing blog post criticising IBM SoftLayer over availability problems affecting its customers.

  http://www.crn.com.au/News/402665,ibm-softlayer-slammed-for-failing-on-every-level-after-outage.aspx

Oracle

• Oracle’s Mark Hurd: On Ellison, the cloud and bouncing back
  http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Oracle-s-Mark-Hurd-On-Ellison-the-cloud-and-6207830.php
• ORACLE TO DETHRONE SAAS LEADER SALESFORCE BY YEAR’S END (hype headline, no facts):
  

  Oracle is looking to propel that growth even further. In the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report call, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison predicted an influx of SaaS and PaaS use as the company experiences more than 100 percent yearly growth of its cloud services. The figures have led Ellison and Oracle to revise their predictions to reflect the expectation that Oracle will surpass Salesforce this year in SaaS and PaaS sales. “It’s going to be close but we are going to sell more,” said Price.

  http://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2015/oracle-to-dethrone-saas-leader-salesforce-by-years-end/

HP

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise Branding introduced (kind of “meh”)
  http://sdtimes.com/hp-introduces-new-hewlett-packard-enterprise-branding/
• Visa marketing chief moving to HP
  http://www.prweek.com/article/1343031/visa-global-marketing-chief-antonio-lucio-quits-hp-spinoff
• Wait…HP still DOES have a public cloud… where exactly?
  

  Hilf was saying HP must stick to the thing it can do, which is to provide an alternative data center and self-service provisioning to its regular customers. HP doesn’t want to compete, let’s say, in the ruthless price war that Amazon,Google, and Microsoft are waging with each other, or in the many features that Amazon is piling on top of its infrastructure platform.

  http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/hps-still-in-public-cloud-but-where/a/d-id/1319948

Other

• Article about CEO pay (Microsoft’s Nadella is top paid)
  http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/04/microsoft-ceo-top-paid-ceo-us/
• EMC Acquires Hybrid Cloud Encryption Company
  

  CloudLink, a 20-employee firm based in Ottowa, encrypts workloads across multiple cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and EMC subsidiary VMware’s vCLoud Air and other vCloud powered clouds, according to CloudLink’s web site.

  http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300076560/emc-acquires-hybrid-cloud-encryption-company.htm

• This is timely: After SaaS: Opportunities for Next-Gen CRM
  

  The CRM market is ripe for disruption and the combination of the mobile-social revolution and the demand created by sellers of peer-to-peer marketplaces is creating a perfect storm. For a while, Salesforce would likely ignore the threat of a company providing such service much the way its predecessors ignored Salesforce. This will result in many opportunities for marketplaces and their developers to innovate and create value.

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sophiecharlotte-moatti/after-saas-opportunities-_b_7067632.html

• A Closer Look At Tableau’s Customer Base Growth
  

  Tableau had approximately 4,400 customers by the end of 2010 and this increased to 26,000 in 2014. [1] We expect this number to be north of the 60,000 mark by the end of our forecast period, facilitated by a strong sales and marketing team that is striving for expansion in domestic and international markets. Tableau’s focus on innovative products and its popularity in the market also will be a deciding factor in achieving the predicted growth. There could be a 10% downside to our price estimate if the number of customers do not grow beyond 54,000. This could happen if the business intelligence and analytics market becomes overcrowded with competing big and emerging small innovative players.

  http://seekingalpha.com/article/3070416-a-closer-look-at-tableaus-customer-base-growth

IBM

• The SoftLayer CEO (Lance Crosby) resigned last week:
  

  IBM acquired SoftLayer in July of 2013 for $2.1 billion and made it the foundation of its  cloud strategy. Crosby was deeply involved in the integration of SoftLayer into IBM and was key to transitioning IBM’s overall cloud strategy with SoftLayer.

  http://www.eweek.com/it-management/softlayer-ceo-lance-crosby-resigns-from-ibm.html

• Marriott International is moving to IBM Cloud:
  

  Marriott will migrate a significant portion of its core IT systems and apps to IBM’s open cloud platform within the next few years. The SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service offers a flexible, scalable platform, which minimizes the need for on-site IT support and upgrades and enables faster deployment of new Marriott digital capabilities.

  http://mobileenterprise.edgl.com/news/Marriott-International-Migrates-to-the-Cloud98107

• Pro-IBM post about their perceived growth issues:
  

  There is nothing wrong with repurchasing stock if the price is right, and there is money to pay for it. Both conditions have been true for IBM, and a depressed stock price means the company gets more for its money with each share. And the idea that IBM should spend less on its own shares and more on acquisitions is misguided. Its aversion to expensive purchases of hot tech companies, which often trade at many times sales with little or no profit, is a good quality.

  http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/02/07/myth-busting-ibms-growth-problem.aspx

• IBM signs nine year IT outsourcing deal with Birla Sun Life Insurance
  Indian company: No disclosure on what the deal is worth…

  This deal could help BSLI realize a cost reduction advantage from consolidation of IT vendors. IBM’s flexible pricing model will enable dynamic ramp up/down and consumption based operational spending along with a roadmap to modernize, consolidate and rationalize the application portfolio, bringing in speed and reduced time to market.

  http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-02-05/news/58838513_1_bsli-birla-sun-life-insurance-outsourcing-deal

• Why troubles at IBM (and HP) are good for your IT business:
  

  Yet starting from such a small base, IDC estimates the market for public IT cloud services was about $56 billion last year, given total enterprise IT spending of several trillion dollars, means cloud’s disruptive effects are slow to manifest themselves at large, established vendors. The tipping point has come and old tech firms, who can no longer hide the financial ramifications, now recognize that their business models, if not corporate survival, are in peril.

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtmarko/2015/02/04/bad-news-for-ibm-and-hp-is-good-news-for-it-and-your-business/
  PS: The street is fired up that Ginny got a large raise this year ($3,6M bonus,$13.3M in stock over 3 years, 6.7% raise in base salary (worth around 100k).

• IBM ranked best cloud provider in Q4 2014 by synergy research:
  http://www.infotechlead.com/cloud/ibm-no-1-cloud-provider-for-4q14-synergy-research-group-27994
  Yet AWS keeps the lead…
  http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/02/03/aws-keeps-lead-over-microsoft-ibm-google-in-cloud/
• Some more on the layoffs (IBM is going after recently released employees for small sums of money)
  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/05/ibm_chasing_exstaffers_for_20_payments/
  Note: Some are saying the reductions are intended to age the company down by targeting long-time employees.
  Note 2: IBM just announced 300 new jobs in England over three years focusing on services. 

Oracle

• Mark Hurd on Oracle’s transition to the cloud
  

  Hurd continued, “We are one of the few, few cloud companies that frankly we are not only getting bigger, but our growth rate is actually accelerating at the same time and I think that’s because of all the things I described: better training, better sales, more sales people, lots of great products in R&D, some good acquisitions and altogether its combined to this set of results.”

  http://www.benzinga.com/media/cnbc/15/01/5192062/oracle-ceo-on-transition-into-cloud-acquisition-of-datalogix-and-micros-sys

• Why did Oracle spend $1.2B on DataLogix?
  

  There are a certainly good reasons that pushed Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) to spend that huge amount of money to bring Datalogix under its control. Spending on advertising is increasing, and advertisers continue to look for better ways to target ads for better returns. Data analysis is important for advertisers as it provides greater insight about audiences for powerful ad targeting.

  http://investcorrectly.com/20150206/oracle-corporation-orcl-pay-1-2b-datalogix/

HP

• Meg Whitman also gets a raise ($19.6 million in cash and stock – base pay up from $1M to $1.5M)
  http://www.theday.com/national-business/20150203/hp-boss-gets-big-raise-despite-sales-slump
• HP making serious plays in 3D Printer space:
  http://seekingalpha.com/article/2887786-could-hewlett-packard-be-a-serious-3-d-printing-competitor

Other

• Investors leery of EMC this year:
  

  EMC’s fourth quarter was on target, but guidance for the next year included forex headwinds, VCE dilution, and not much optimism on high-end storage systems

  http://seekingalpha.com/article/2868806-patience-with-emc-has-yet-to-pay-off

• Tableau had excellent growth and stock performance based on strength of analytic  market:
  

  For its fourth quarter fiscal 2014, DATA posted total revenue of $142.9 million, a 75% increase year over year, and non-GAAP net income (excluding stock-based compensation expense, net of tax) of $31.8 million, or $0.42 per diluted common share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $14.0 million, or $0.20 per diluted common share in the same period the prior year, these results well above the Capital IQ Consensus Estimate of $0.11 earnings per share on revenues of $122.58 million for the period.

  http://www.gurufocus.com/news/314587/tableau-software-data-record-growth-on-strong-data-demand-glu-mobile-gluu-delivers-all-key-metrics-above-guidance