Tag: HP

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Supplier Report: 7/4/2015

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As the nation celebrates its birthday, most companies are taking a break from major news (although some didn’t).  It is more of the same as we enjoy a long weekend.

IBM’s big data is transcending the hype and people are expecting great things, so great that Watson and his automated cousins could eliminate 47% of US jobs over the coming decades (because that’s not an alarmist factoid to get more readers).

Oracle is still talking about deep cost reductions to compete with Amazon, while HP keeps singing their breakup song (and released a monstrous 316 page exchange commission report). Speaking of reports, there are more stating EMC had a good Q1 in traditional storage (which has been consistent with reports over the last few weeks).

There was an office chat about how SAS is beloved by their employees and I found an article discussing that culture. Xerox apparently has the opposite situation…recently being named the 5th worst company to work for.

IBM

  • Watson’s next feat? Taking on cancer

    Among the most ambitious projects is a partnership with 14 cancer centers to use Watson to help choose therapies based on a tumor’s genetic fingerprints. Doctors have known for years that some treatments work miraculously on some patients but not at all on others due to genetics. But the expense and complexity in identifying genetic mutations and matching them up with potential therapies has made it difficult for more than a handful of patients to benefit from this new approach. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/06/27/watsons-next-feat-taking-on-cancer/

  • But it isn’t all wonder and good news, the same article states:

    While there’s much debate about the extent to which technology is destroying jobs, recent research has driven concern. A 2013 paper by economists at the University of Oxford calculated the probability of 702 occupations being automated or “roboticized” out of existence and found that a startling 47 percent of American jobs — from paralegals to taxi drivers — could disappear in coming years. Similar research by MIT business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee has shown that this trend may be accelerating and that we are at the dawn of a “second machine age.”

  • New Report Shows the Internet of Things’ Economic Impact Could Surpass Its Hype — But There’s Just One Problem

    While a host of devices such as smartphones, wearable technologies, connected industrial equipment, automobiles, and smart agriculture sensors can collect massive amounts of data, the McKinsey report notes that most of the information currently being collected isn’t being put to use: “Most IoT data collected today are not used, and the data that are used are not fully exploited. A critical challenge is to use the flood of big data generated by IoT devices for prediction and optimization.” McKinsey isn’t the only organization to discover this. IBM (NYSE:IBM) says 90% of data collected by smart IoT devices goes completely unused, and that the data starts losing its value just a few seconds after being gathered.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/01/new-report-shows-the-internet-of-things-economic-i.aspx

  • IBM explains its new (mobile) philosophy

    Matt Candy, managing partner, Europe IBM Interactive Experience, global business services, is one of the brand’s major spokespeople on the topic, and he believes that digital media is changing the way in which businesses and consumers interact: ‘The last, best experience that anyone has becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they have everywhere. These experiences transcend industry – this shift is changing the challenge that brands face when interacting with the customer. Traditional boundaries are dead, it’s time for businesses to focus on human-to-human interactions. This makes experience the new competitive battleground in which businesses will have to work. 

    http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/news/b2b/36371/-ibm-explains-its-new-philosophy.aspx#.VZXhfPlVhBc

  • GlobalFoundries Takeover of IBM Chip Unit Is Official

    The two companies announced last October that IBM would pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over its money-losing chip unit, which includes the plant in Essex. But the deal had to clear hurdles first. Because GlobalFoundries is owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, it needed to obtain clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel charged with reviewing major business deals to safeguard national security. The companies announced Monday that the committee had approved the deal.

    http://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2015/07/01/globalfoundries-takeover-of-ibm-chip-unit-official

Oracle

  • Will Oracle Corporation’s New Cloud Push Pay-Off?

    A few days ago, Ellison and a few other Oracle execs announced the introduction of the company’s new, comprehensive “PaaS [Platform-as-a-Service] Launch and Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration” suite of services. Ellison didn’t hold back when asked what the objective of Oracle’s new Cloud Platform hopes to accomplish, saying “Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/06/27/will-oracle-corporations-new-cloud-push-pay-off.aspx

Hewlett Packard

EMC

Other

  • Marc Benioff blasts SAP CEO: “He’s scared of Salesforce”

    On Thursday, during an event in SAP’s home country Germany, Benioff said Bill McDermott, the CEO of the $US90 billion German software maker, recently snubbed Benioff’s outreach efforts. “We offered an olive branch to them. I’ve told Bill I’ve wanted to have a deeper relationship with them. Yes we’re competitors, we should also be partners,” Benioff said, according to Bloomberg. “He’s scared of Salesforce.”

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-sap-ceo-bill-mcdermott-2015-7

  • Xerox is the 5th worst company to work for

    Under Burns’ leadership, the company’s earnings have declined from more than $1.3 billion in 2011 to $992 million in 2014, a 25% drop. These figures support recurring employee complaints about leadership — only 32% of surveyed employees approved of Burns. Many employees also complained about a culture of favoritism in the company, saying that personal relationships are more important than work ethic when it comes to promotions and raises. Another recurring complaint was related to compensation. Employees cited low pay and years without cost of living raises as reasons for the company’s high turnover. Less than a third of Xerox employees would recommend a job at the company to a friend.

    http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/06/29/the-worst-companies-to-work-for/3/

  • Xerox Is Not the Problem, the Whole IT Services Industry Is

    If we look at it from a labor perspective (Xerox should be pretty bad considering it is the fifth worst company to work for), we do see that the company does have low expenses per employee. Annualizing results from last quarter, Xerox pays about $7,100 per employee per quarter, and squeezes out about $5 in revenue for every dollar spent on labor (including general expenses). Accenture, surprisingly, spends even less per employee per quarter at about $4,100, earning about $5.56 per dollar spent on labor.

    http://247wallst.com/services/2015/07/02/xerox-is-not-the-problem-the-whole-it-services-industry-is/

  • What’s Wrong With Software Licensing Models?

    http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/video/300077310/whats-wrong-with-software-licensing-models.htm
  • This is an old article that Bobby C mentioned this week, but considering how customers are down on SAS, I thought I would find it:

    HOW SAS BECAME THE WORLD’S BEST PLACE TO WORK

    At 70 years old, Goodnight holds the conviction that “what makes his organization work are the new ideas that come out of his employee’s brains.” He therefore holds his employees in the highest esteem. So while he fully anticipated that the recession would constrain the firm’s short-term revenues, he instinctively knew that his team would produce breakthrough products while his competitors were cutting costs.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3004953/how-sas-became-worlds-best-place-work

Posted on

Supplier Report: 6/20/2015

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It was relatively quiet this week in supplier news.  No acquisitions, no mergers.  The major news coming out of the suppliers was stock performance.

Oracle had a weak Q4 due to a strong US dollar.   Red Hat moved up based on good performance news while Teradata is downgraded.

IBM continues clear messaging around data management, cloud, and mobile.  They expand their support of open source platforms while growing their cloud offerings internationally.

IBM

  • TCS and IBM lead race for Volvo’s $500 million IT contract

    “The deal should be finalised within a month—at the moment Volvo is facing a lot of heat to cut costs and any business which is non-core and not making money for the company is under the pump right now,” one of the persons quoted earlier said. “Volvo IT is more of a cost centre for the company, and for them it makes sense to hand it out to professional outsourcing firms.”

    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/tcs-and-ibm-lead-race-for-volvos-500-million-it-contract/articleshow/47698785.cms

  • IBM inks Bluemix cloud deal with Capgemini’s Sogeti

    By connecting sensors that use different protocols and data formats on Bluemix, Sogeti can provide clients with insights on the performance of their heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, lighting and other energy-producing processes. Sogeti will use the same combination of its smartEngine and IBM’s Internet of Things service on Bluemix to provide insights on data for clients in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, utilities management and more.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/ibm-inks-bluemix-cloud-deal-capgeminis-sogeti-2303166.html

  • It sounds like IBM layoffs are still going on (Australia)

    While it doesn’t sound like IBM is targeting a massive number of employees right now, its layoffs tend to occur in dribbles and drabs, laid-off employees report. IBM won’t disclose the number of people it cuts and doesn’t have to report that figure under the WARN act unless it conducts a layoff that cuts 500 people or more at once.

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/ibm-watchdog-more-layoffs-this-month-2015-6

  • IBM commits to open source Spark

    As data and analytics are embedded into the fabric of business and society –from popular apps to the Internet of Things (IoT) –Spark brings essential advances to large-scale data processing. First, it dramatically improves the performance of data dependent apps. Second, it radically simplifies the process of developing intelligent apps, which are fuelled by data.

    http://it-online.co.za/2015/06/18/ibm-commits-to-open-source-spark/
    Andrew Brust says Spark won’t replace Hadoop:

    Spark is best known as a sort of in-memory analytics replacement for iterative computation frameworks like MapReduce; both employ massively parallel compute and then shuffle interim results, with the difference being that Spark caches in memory while MapReduce writes to disk. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Spark offers a simpler programming model, better fault tolerance, and it’s far more extensible than MapReduce. Spark is any form of iterative computation, and it was designed to support specific extensions; among the most popular are machine learning, microbatch stream processing, graph computing, and even SQL.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/hadoop-and-spark-a-tale-of-two-cities/

  • IBM Debuts New Cloud Data Center in Italy

    The new data center helps businesses in Italy fast track their cloud migration plan without having to host their data outside of their own country. Businesses in Italy will now be able to use IBM’s award winning cloud infrastructure while simultaneously being compliant with local data sovereignty regulations.

    http://www.cloudwedge.com/ibms-debuts-new-cloud-data-center-in-italy-1985/

Oracle

 

Hewlett Packard

Other

  • Red Hat Profit Rises 28%

    “Our solid start to fiscal year 2016 was evidenced by strong constant currency revenue growth of over 20%,” said Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. “This strong growth reflects in part the demand for our open, hybrid cloud technologies across four footprints: bare metal, virtualization, private cloud and public cloud deployments.”

    http://www.rttnews.com/2513835/red-hat-profit-rises-28.aspx

  • Teradata Downgraded by JMP Securities (TDC)

    Teradata (NYSE:TDC) last released its earnings data on Thursday, May 7th. The company reported $0.30 earnings per share for the quarter, missing the analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.42 by $0.12. The company had revenue of $605.80 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $605.80 million. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $0.54 earnings per share. Teradata’s revenue was down 7.3% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, analysts predict that Teradata will post $2.44 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

    http://www.wkrb13.com/markets/638731/teradata-downgraded-by-jmp-securities-tdc/

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Supplier Report: 6/13/2015

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Rumors dominated the news again this week with talk that Oracle could buy Splunk and (once again) that HP could be purchasing EMC.  IBM actually went out and bought ANOTHER company called Blue Box to add to their OpenStack offerings (this is a major trend developing).

IBM also scored new long term business while HP finally settles on past mistakes.

IBM

  • IBM buys another company: IBM acquired Blue Box to retain its dominance in the hybrid cloud space

    IBM said that the inclusion of Blue Box to its services portfolio will strengthen its OpenStack lineup with a remotely managed OpenStack offering. Clients can now integrate cloud-based applications and on-premise systems into OpenStack-managed clouds, thus simplifying the deployment of workloads across hybrid cloud environments.

    http://marketrealist.com/2015/06/ibm-continues-acquisition-spree-blue-box/?source=google

  • IBM’s Expanding Margins: Overly Aggressive Cost Cutting Or Change In Business Mix
    sn_ibm_margins_2014
    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3253235-ibms-expanding-margins-overly-aggressive-cost-cutting-or-change-in-business-mix
  • We Need Only Three Hadoops, And Maybe Three Systems

    We are also starting to think that IBM, which is trying to revitalize and open up its Power chip architecture, might be better served if it would anoint one of the larger Hadoop distros as its preferred stack and to get it all tuned up to run on Power-based servers. Such an approach is probably necessary to take on Intel in the datacenter, which was the really the point of IBM selling off its System x server division to Lenovo Group last fall.

    http://www.theplatform.net/2015/06/11/we-need-only-three-hadoops-and-maybe-three-systems/

  • IBM signs 5-year IT services deal with Citizens Bank

    IBM will be using a hybrid IT approach to optimize the bank’s existing IT infrastructure. IBM will be integrating automation and predictive analytics technologies to standardize and streamline many of its internal IT systems and processes.

    http://www.infotechlead.com/bpo/ibm-signs-5-year-it-services-deal-with-citizens-bank-31037

  • Doctor Evidence to Supply IBM Watson Health with Cancer Research Data

    Doctor Evidence will contribute 2 million additional data points from highly structured, peer-reviewed content, including thousands of clinical papers, conference proceedings, abstracts on remissions, patient survival cases, epidemiology, and drug label data from the U.S. and Europe. This medical information will be added to Watson’s existing corpus of health data that includes content from partners such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Cancer.gov, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

    http://hitconsultant.net/2015/06/11/doctor-evidence-ibm-watson-health-cancer-data/

    sn_doctorevidence_ibm

  • IBM introduces SuperVessel open access cloud service

    IBM has introduced SuperVessel, an open access cloud service created by Beijing’s IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs. The system is available to all developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem. The cloud acts as a virtual R&D engine for the creation, testing and pilot of emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.

    http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ibm-introduces-supervessel-open-access-cloud-service–1086689

Oracle

Hewlett Packard Enterprises

  • HP Abandons Medellin Global Center and Has No One to Blame But Itself

    With triumphant platitudes and self-congratulatory praise, Hewlett-Packard made history by opening a US$14 million global services captive in Medellin, Colombia back in 2012. Plans called for employing over 1,000 professionals, with the center positioned to become the backbone for HP’s regional back-office, HR and call center operations.Three years later and the entire project is being dissolved to the utter dismay of staunch supporters in Medellin and Bogota who bent over backwards to “seduce” (the word local media used at the time) HP into selecting Medellin during a highly competitive, global selection process where several other geographies were considered.

    http://www.nearshoreamericas.com/hp-kills-medellin-global-services-center-blame/

  • HP pays big bucks to settle class-action lawsuit over botched deal

    HP said June 9 that its insurance would pay the $100 million settlement fund to resolve the lawsuit from a Dutch pension fund PGGM Vermogensbeheer B.V. The lawsuit stems from an impairment charge after HP purchased the software company Autonomy.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/06/11/hp-pays-big-bucks-to-settle-class-action-lawsuit.html

EMC

  • HP will stomp EMC’s disks into the dust, babble storage mystics

    Networked storage array revenues are shrinking while server-SAN and hyper-scale storage revenues grow strongly, IDC said in its latest worldwide disk storage tracker. Total worldwide disk storage revenues in the first 2015 quarter were almost $8.8bn, up 6.8 per cent year-over-year, with 28.3EB shipped, which was 41.1 per cent higher year-on-year.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/08/hp_overtake_emc_in_disk_storage_revenues_says_idc/

  • We think HP will buy EMC, says analyst

    “While management’s messaging around the size of M&A in HP Enterprise continues to refer to Aruba as a benchmark (~$3bn), CEO Meg Whitman explained that from an academic perspective, technology hardware is an industry that should consolidate due to declining revenues and slowing growth rates. This sounds like EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s answer. Have they been talking? We think so. Pro forma financial leverage is manageable at a $32-$33 takeout price (less than 3x net debt/EBITDA). There are so many reasons this makes sense.”

    http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2411970/we-think-hp-will-buy-emc-says-analyst

Other

Posted on

Supplier Report: 6/6/2015

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For the 3rd straight week, OpenStack is a major news item.  Both IBM and Cisco announced acquisitions of OpenStack firms.  Acquisitions were the major news driver in general as CA also acquired Grid Tools while HP is making news for what they didn’t (and might) buy.

IBM

  • IBM Acquires Managed Private OpenStack Cloud Startup Blue Box

    The Seattle-based cloud provider simplifies private cloud for enterprises by offering it as a managed service. Its turnkey private clouds are hosted in customers’ data centers but managed by Blue Box, similar to Cisco’s Metacloud. Blue Box gives IBM capabilities to deliver public cloud-like experience within a data center of the client’s choice.

    http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/06/04/ibm-acquires-managed-private-openstack-cloud-startup-blue-box/

  • When Watson meets procurement

    Another example that Michael provided might best be described as the category/supplier “briefing book” on steroids. The idea behind “the complete procurement overview” is to aggregate information on a real-time basis when anyone within procurement (or outside of it) needs a briefing document or related auto-generated deliverable.

    https://spendmatters.com/2015/06/05/when-watson-meets-procurement-ibm-uses-big-data-to-tackle-big-supply-challenges/

  • IBM Extends Watson Platform Capabilities

    IBM revealed the existence of a Tradeoff Analytics API that developers can invoke via the IBM Watson Cloud running on the IBM Bluemix cloud service. This particular API, said Vince Padua, director of the IBM Watson platform, makes it easier for developers to create applications that filter large amounts of content. Similar in concept to the filtering tools commonly used in e-commerce applications on the Web, Padua said the goal is to enable end users to weight different types of content in way that enable Watson to deliver better answers based on the personal preferences of the end user based on multiple criteria.

    http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/06042015/ibm-extends-watson-platform-capabilities

  • IBM has been awarded an average of 21 patents per day so far in 2015

    Although the media (Quartz included) tend to focus on what wacky inventions companies like Google and Apple are patenting, IBM is still far and away the leader in patents in the US. The US Patent and Trademark Office releases its new patent awards on Tuesdays. After yesterday’s awards, IBM has been awarded an average of 152 patents a week—or 21 patents a day—in 2015, whereas Apple has only received about 42 a week, and Google about 64.

    http://qz.com/418068/ibm-has-been-awarded-an-average-of-21-patents-per-day-so-far-in-2015/

  • IBM is shutting Many Eyes data visualization service

    Launched 8 years ago by IBM Research, the project gave people a way to crowd-source their data analysis cheaply and easily. Users could upload data sets to Many Eyes, which would then present visualizations for other people in different specialties to assess.

    http://fortune.com/2015/06/02/ibm-shuts-many-eyes/

  • IBM Targets Specific Industries with Prebuilt Analytics

    The specially tailored solutions provide modeling patterns for predictive analytics — basing business decisions on Big Data gathered from different sources — and customized interfaces and dashboards so users can focus on industry-specific use cases. Data preparation capabilities are also specialized to handle unique industry-related data, collecting the information and massaging it for analytic investigations.

    https://adtmag.com/articles/2015/06/01/ibm-industy-data.aspx

 

HP

EMC

  • Enterprise storage share of EMC, NetApp, Dell and IBM drop, HP gains
    sn_storage_value
    http://www.infotechlead.com/it-statistics/enterprise-storage-share-of-emc-netapp-dell-and-ibm-drop-hp-gains-30789
  • Hewlett-Packard: They’ll End up Buying EMC

    HP to buy EMC? We think so. We have also held the belief that HP will ultimately buy EMC (including VMware) to strengthen its position in several key areas, including cloud (VMware and Virtustream), converged infrastructure (EMC), analytics (Pivotal), and mobility (VMware AirWatch). While management’s messaging around the size of M&A in HP Enterprise continues to refer to Aruba as a benchmark (~$3 billion), CEO Meg Whitman explained that from an academic perspective, technology hardware is an industry that should consolidate due to declining revenues and slowing growth rates. This sounds like EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s answer. Have they been talking? We think so. Pro forma financial leverage is manageable at a $32-33 takeout price (less than 3x net debt/EBITDA). There are so many reasons this makes sense. HP management has not commented specifically on acquiring EMC.

    http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/06/04/hewlett-packard-theyll-end-up-buying-emc-says-raymond-james-brean-sees-more-savings/

  • EMC’s Management Presents at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Tech Conference
    (Full Transcript)
    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3231396-emcs-emc-management-presents-at-bank-of-america-merrill-lynch-global-tech-conference-transcript
  • Is EMC cloud strategy a victory for customer choice or just confusing?

    Howard Elias: The long and short of it, is that customers really do need different cloud varieties depending on the task at hand, he said. “They may want on- or off-premises; managed or unattended; production or test-and-development; mission-critical or otherwise clouds,”  Elias acknowledged that vCloud Air could run the same workloads, but “you won’t get the self-provisioning, and there’s an SLA for the underlying infrastructure capability, but not in terms of resiliency, performance etc.” That is, vCloud Air is positioned to work very well with an existing VMware workload running in-house but “you won’t get the curation and attendedness” that Virtustream provides, he added.

    https://fortune.com/2015/06/01/is-emc-cloud-confusing/

Other

  • Cisco and IBM acquisitions highlight efforts to make OpenStack easier to use

     Cisco’s target, Piston, has developed CloudOS, which manages clusters of commodity servers as a single pool of resources. The software offers features for quickly deploying OpenStack, and by using automation functionality it promises to free up IT staff from time-consuming management tasks. On average, when using more than 50 nodes, running a private cloud environment using CloudOS with OpenStack costs less than one third the amount required to do the same thing on Amazon Web Services, according to an FAQ on Piston’s website.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/2931558/cloud-computing/cisco-and-ibm-acquisitions-highlight-efforts-to-make-openstack-easier-to-use.html

  • Red Hat’s CEO is dead wrong about the cloud

    Maybe AWS chief Andy Jassy started it all, deriding the private cloud as “archaic” and not really cloud at all. Then Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told me that public clouds like AWS become “obscenely expensive at scale” — which, of course, sent public cloud advocates into a frothing rage.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2931412/cloud-computing/red-hats-ceo-is-dead-wrong-about-the-cloud.html

  • CA Buys Grid Tools

    Information technology management software maker CA, Inc.said Thursday it has bought privately-held Grid Tools Ltd., a provider of enterprise test data management, automated test design and optimization software solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/ca-buys-grid-tools-20150604-00733

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/30/2015

 

sn_vikingfuneral

This is a week of unexpected actions.  HP Enterprise purchases ConteXtream to enable cloud SaaS telecom, EMC purchases Virtustream to act as the centerpiece of their cloud offerings.  Now there are rumors (again) that EMC might buy HP Enterprises post split.

CA bought Rally Software and SalesForce purchased Tempo.

Meanwhile, IBM gets both good and bad news about their cloud offerings and deepen their overall relationship with Apple.

IBM

  • IBM to distribute 50,000 Apple machines to employees

    With this announcement, IBM has not only become one of the biggest purchasers of the Macs, it has also become one of the strongest supporters of Apple. The company has currently distributed around 15,000 Macs in the organization, however, now it plans to provide 50,000 machines to its employees by the end of 2015.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/22545-ibm-plans-to-distribute-50000-apple-inc-machines-to-its-employees/

  • Microsoft and Google rise while IBM sinks in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud providers

    IBM achieved some scale in the IaaS business by buying SoftLayer. However, Gartner says SoftLayer “typically sold to Mode 2 customers (specifically start-ups and gaming companies with a strong interest in bare-metal dedicated hosting). Since the acquisition, IBM has increasingly focused on acquiring Mode 1 customers, but SoftLayer better meets the needs of Mode 2 customers.” Gartner also notes that “IBM’s aPaaS (BlueMix) is hosted in SoftLayer data centers but the offerings are not integrated.”

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-and-google-rise-while-ibm-sinks-in-gartners-latest-magic-quadrant-for-cloud-providers/

  • IBM cloud computing services earns $7.7 billion over the past year

    IBM’s most recent quarterly earnings report indicates that the company is seeing rapid growth in its cloud business revenues, which increased 75 percent year-over-year, resulting in total cloud revenues of $7.7 billion in the twelve months leading up to the end of 2015’s first quarter. Even given the recent success of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, these most recent financial figures show that IBM’s cloud computing services are outperforming Amazon’s by more than $2.5 billion over the last year.

    http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/05/29/ibm-cloud-computing-services/id=58034/

  • IBM is Most Popular Hosted Private Cloud Provider: Survey

    Forrester noted that survey respondents were concerned about vendor lock-in. However, the report said “standards like OASIS’s TOSCA and open source projects like OpenStack provide enterprises the future hope of less lock-in and greater adherence to standards.” IBM is a major supporter of open cloud computing and a key contributor of code to the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry projects.

    http://www.eweek.com/cloud/ibm-is-most-popular-hosted-private-cloud-provider-survey.html

  • IBM ships new predictive analytics suite

    IBM today announced 20 new industry-specific solutions with pre-built predictive analytics capabilities that will make it easier and faster for organizations across industries like retail, banking, telecommunications, insurance and others, to uncover and act on critical business insights.

    http://www.finextra.com/news/announcement.aspx?pressreleaseid=59924

  • Xamarin, IBM Expand MobileFirst Partnership, Add Security

    Xamarin said interoperability with IBM MobileFirst Protect enables enterprises to more securely deploy, manage and monitor business applications. IBM MobileFirst Protect, formerly IBM MaaS360, is a secure enterprise mobility management platform that provides mobility management and security of mobile devices, applications, documents, emails, plus access to the Web from a single portal.

    http://www.eweek.com/developer/xamarin-ibm-expand-mobilefirst-partnership-add-security.html

Oracle

HP

  • Mphasis Hung Out to Dry by Parent Company Hewlett-Packard

    The Indian Economic Times has reported that, despite owning just over 60 per cent of Mphasis, HP has no plans to offer further financial support to the software services company. However, Mphasis chief executive Ganesh Ayyar insists that his organisation will not be stepping back from the BPO arena.

    http://www.sourcingfocus.com/site/newsitem/8743/

  • HP acquires Israel’s ConteXtream to liberate telcos from hardware (HP has been snapping up quite a few networking companies lately)

    “In the networking world there are countless functions — firewalls, caching, all kinds of activities — and we have all kinds of monolithic hardware boxes to do these things. NFV is about saying, ‘Why can’t we put these various functions in the cloud? Why does each function need to be on specialized and dedicated hardware?’”

    http://www.geektime.com/2015/05/27/hp-acquires-israels-contextream-to-liberate-telcos-from-hardware/

  • HP enterprise services told to cut $2bn over three years (Cathie Lesjak on some of their accounting plans)

    In particular, the infrastructure technology outsourcing (ITO) business was severely dented by competition from cloud providers. Government austerity programs in the United States and Europe have forced a business model transformation, HP said in its results.

    http://www.itnews.com.au/News/404384,hp-enterprise-services-told-to-cut-2bn-over-three-years.aspx

  • With the reduction comes…EMC Deal Makes Post-Split HP More Vulnerable

    Making all that happen will require an enterprise salesforce, and a lot of engineers with experience building actual clouds. Those are two things HP has. With the personal computer pieces of the company jettisoned, HP Enterprise becomes affordable to EMC, which starts to trade today with a market cap of $52 billion.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3214566-emc-deal-makes-post-split-hp-more-vulnerable

EMC

  • EMC buying Virtustream for $1.2B

    When the deal closes (expected in Q3), Virtustream will form EMC‘s new managed cloud services business. “The acquisition represents a transformational element of EMC’s strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments,” says the company

    http://seekingalpha.com/news/2543006-emc-buying-virtustream-for-1_2b

  • Why EMC’s Acquisition of Virtustream Is Good News

    With increasingly more businesses migrating applications to the cloud, Virtustream gives EMC the needed expertise and offerings to help its customers manage this transition. “It’s a game changer,” said EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci.

    http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/052915/why-emcs-acquisition-virtustream-good-news-emc.aspx

  • EMC and Canonical expand OpenStack Partnership

    For the last two years, EMC has been a part of Canonical’s Cloud Partner Program and OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). During this time EMC created a new Juju Charm for EMC VNX technology. This enables deployment by Canonical’s Juju modeling   software. This past week, we specifically announced the availability of a new OpenStack solution with Ubuntu OpenStack and Canonical as part of the Reference Architecture Program announced last November in Paris. The solution is built in close collaboration with Canonical in EMC labs then tested, optimized, and certified.

    http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/emc-and-canonical-expand-openstack-partnership/

Other

  • CA is buying Rally software for $480M

    CA, which is looking to cut its dependence on a slow-growing system management software market (pressured by cloud competition), states Rally’s Agile Development tools will “complement and expand CA’s strengths in the areas of DevOps and Management Cloud.” Rally’s clients include over 35 Fortune 100 firms.

    http://seekingalpha.com/news/2547046-ca-buying-rally-software-for-480m-raly-plus-42_5-percent

  • In the middle of these buyout rumors, Salesforce buys Tempo

    Tempo launched in 2013 as part of an emerging trend of “smart assistant” mobile apps for email, calendars, and such. Tempo connects to a user’s calendar, contacts, and other apps to provide helpful information and suggestions like sending an email if they’re running late for a meeting, or flight and weather details ahead of a trip. It competed with similar apps like Cue, Sunrise, Donna, and others.

    https://fortune.com/2015/05/29/salesforces-acquires-tempo/

  • Splunk Stock Too Expensive Despite Exceptional Cloud Growth

    At around $68 a share, Splunk’s price-to-earnings ratio is 766 factoring in Splunk’s 9 cent-a-share earnings in its last fiscal year. That P/E is 36 times the average earnings multiple of companies in the S&P 500 (SPX) index. And even when compared with the more expensive iShares North American Tech-Software ETF (IGV), which has an average P/E of 30, Splunk stock still trades 25 times higher.

    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13164029/1/splunk-stock-too-expensive-despite-exceptional-cloud-growth.html