SourceCast: Episode 12: Don’t Touch It Twice
Supplier Report: 1/16/2016
IBM is looking for trouble… or at least fraud. The company purchased Iris Analytics, a company that developed a real-time fraud engine for machine learning. I guess Watson really will be Watson-esque. IBM also topped US patent creation list (again).
HPI did not have good news during the holidays, PC sales slipped (except for Apple), while HPE looks to sell of their stake in MPhasis ($1B).
EMC has a new CIO and Microsoft dropped their cloud fees to be more competitive with Amazon.
IBM
- IBM buys fraud sniffing biz for real-time protection
IBM has assimilated a German payment fraud prevention business, IRIS Analytics, a provider of a real-time fraud analytics engine using machine learning algorithms, for undisclosed terms.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/15/ibm_slurps_up_fraud_detection_biz_for_realtime_protection/
- IBM tops US patent list again
The computer company was granted 7,355 patents in the US. According to its statement, IBM inventors generated more than 2,000 patents in areas related to cognitive computing and the company’s cloud platform.
http://ipprotheinternet.com/ipprotheinternetnews/article.php?article_id=4738
- IBM Introduces Dynamic Pricing to Help Retailers Navigate Online Price Wars
“At any given moment, a retailer is no more than one click away from losing a customer online. IBM Dynamic Pricing executes real-time pricing recommendations at the scale and speed needed to ensure competitiveness in a volatile shopping environment,” saidStephen Mello, Vice President, IBM eCommerce & Merchandising. “This intuitive and dynamic pricing system improves visibility into what’s happening in the market, allowing retailers to make decisions that are best for their businesses and customers alike.”
- IBM’s Profits Hit An All-Time High
While stagnant on a nominal basis, IBM’s per-share profitability has hit an historical high in the most recent trailing 12-month period. This improvement can be attributed to two factors: value-accretive share buybacks and the firm’s shift in focus to less asset-intensive businesses. Uncertainty remains as to how soon the company will be able to generate revenue growth, but growth in profits and cash flow are arguably more important to valuation.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3810366-ibms-profits-hit-an-all-time-high
More on this:
Outstanding! In fact, IBM’s profit per share increase works out to roughly a 9% compound annual growth rate of profits since 2006 and the most recent trailing twelve-month figure is the highest in the company’s history.
HP Inc | Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Apple leads holiday PC shipments despite market contraction
Market leaders Lenovo, HP Inc. and Dell all faced decreases, with Lenovo’s shipments declining to 15.4 million from 16.1 million, HP’s dipping to 14.2 million from 15.4 million and Dell’s dimming to 10.2 million from 10.8 million. The fourth quarter marked the fifth straight quarter of worldwide PC declines, and Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, said holiday sales “did not boost” the market.
http://www.forextv.com/market-news/apple-leads-holiday-pc-shipments-despite-market-contraction/
- HP Inc. Is Cheap, But Is That Enough?
In the medium to longer term, it’s also worth thinking about whether the strong improvements in battery life enabled by newer generations of chips will continue to extend the refresh cycle over time. Think about it – old laptops that had 2-3 hour battery life to start with left you with battery anxiety within a few years. Now that smaller, more power-efficient laptops can get double or triple that battery life, there may not be as much need for personal users to replace laptops as quickly. This article from Digital Trends demonstrates the rapid improvements in battery life over just the past few years – and indications are that Intel’s Skylake chips will continue the trend of Haswell and Broadwell toward greater efficiency.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3803146-hp-inc-is-cheap-but-is-that-enough
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to Sell ($1B) Stake in Mphasis?
Hewlett-Packard purchased Mphasis when it acquired Electronic Data Systems in 2008 for approximately $13.9 billion. At the time, the company’s Technology Solutions Group segment shifted its outsourcing services operations and a part of its consulting and integration activities to Electronic Data. The Indian company has since functioned as an independent subsidiary of Hewlett Packard. The sale of Mphasis comes at a time when the company is attempting to restructure its IT consulting and services group. Hewlett-Packard stated that it was planning to shed around 25,000 to 30,000 jobs in its enterprise business.
http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/203493/hewlett-packard-enterprise-hpe-to-sell-stake-in-mphasis
EMC | Dell
- EMC gets new CIO in midst of Dell purchase
ML Krakauer took the reins as EMC’s CIO last week, replacing Vic Bhagat, who joined EMC as CIO in 2013.
http://www.ciodive.com/news/emc-gets-new-cio-in-midst-of-dell-purchase/411931/
- How Will EMC’s Once Pivotal Ambitions Play Out?
To be fair, that may never have been Pivotal’s vision, though there’s little question that EMC and VMware had to offer their customers a reason to stick with their more expensive, proprietary solutions instead of rushing to Amazon. Whether they succeeded with that is unclear, but we’ll leave it to Michael Dell to craft the rest of that story. Pivotal, on the other hand, may have the chance to write its own story if reports of its immanent IPO are true. In the mean time, it went shopping — but more on that later.
http://www.cmswire.com/information-management/how-will-emcs-once-pivotal-ambitions-play-out/
- EMC exec reacts to criticism of proposed Dell merger
“Vinod is a smart venture capitalist and I don’t doubt his ability to recognize innovation in startups, but his view on our ability to innovate at scale is not entirely accurate,” according to a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. ” … As a roughly $80B entity, Dell+EMC will need more than just one source and method of innovation. Our model provides exactly that.”
- EMC’s Stock Fell 14% in 2015
the share price of EMC fell 14% in 2015 from $29.83 to $25.68. Its share price fell 6.2% on October 21, 2015, as it reported an 8.3% YoY (year-over-year) drop in EPS (earnings per share) in its 3Q15 earnings results. Its reported revenues of $6.1 billion were in line with analyst estimates.
Other
- Microsoft Drops Prices For Some Azure Instances By Up To 17%
Microsoft has long said it would match AWS’s prices for compute, storage and bandwidth. Earlier this month, Amazon dropped the priceof some of its general purpose, compute- and memory-optimized EC2 machines. It doesn’t come as a major surprise then that Microsoft is now also dropping the prices for some of its virtual machines by between 10 and 17 percent.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/microsoft-drops-prices-for-some-azure-instances-by-up-to-17/
Photo: Greg Rakozy
Supplier Report: 1/9/2016
We are back to work and the news is flowing! It is a new year and that means changes. IBM announced the departure of three long-time executives while Oracle quietly snapped up two companies.
The realities of the Dell/EMC merger are hitting EMC with the announcement of job eliminations. IBM is also expected to announce job reductions in the GTS space.
Meanwhile, HPE is opening a private bar in London…
IBM
- Why IBM just lost three key executives
That, in fact, is just what apparently happened at IBM in December, when it reportedly lost Steve Mills, the 43-year company veteran who was most recently executive vice president of IBM Software and Systems, along with Danny Sabbah, its chief technology officer for cloud, and Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security.
Bottom line? “Keep an eye on these three,” Enderle said. “The fact they left together suggests they have something else they want to do together, and given their powerful skillset, that ‘something’ could be really interesting.”
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3020616/why-ibm-just-lost-three-key-executives.html
More on Steve Mills:
http://fortune.com/2016/01/06/ibms-steve-mills-retires/ - More IBM job cuts to services unit expected by Alliance
In one form or another, the workers group Alliance@IBM is bracing for downsizing in the Global Technology Services unit at IBM Corp. “We’re hearing rumors of (GTS) being sold off,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator of Alliance@IBM. “As with everything inside IBM, we don’t get confirmation until just before it happens. If the company says anything, they will wait until the last moment.” Sale or not, Conrad said cuts to the GTS units most likely will happen sometime this month.
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/money/2016/01/07/more-ibm-job-cuts-services-unit-expected-alliance/78405848/
More on Alliance who is also folding:After trying since 1999 to turn IBM into a union shop, the Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America local, is “suspending” its organizing efforts. The Alliance, which had 400 dues-paying members at its peak, now has about 200.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3019552/it-industry/ibm-union-calls-it-quits.html
- IBM cuts new Watson deals that push it deeper into health
Medtronics:IBM and Medtronic are using Watson’s analytics as the back-end for an app which they say could help the roughly 400 million people in the world with diabetes.
SoftBank:
Rometti was also joined by the president of Softbank, to talk about how the companies will combine Watson’s analytics with Softbank’s Pepper robot to market services to businesses.
Pepper is already being used by Nestle in about a hundred of its stores, where it greets customers, asks them what type of coffee they like and makes recommendations for the type of coffee machine they might want to buy. But Pepper can gather all kinds of data, including how many people interact with it, their gender, and even their emotion. The idea is to take all that data and use it to hone marketing and sales strategies.
- IBM’s Watson flexes muscles with Under Armour partnership
Powered by Watson technology, Under Armour’s application, UA Record, aggregates and analyzes an individual’s health and fitness data to provide personalized coaching and advice. A few examples include the app telling a user the average steps taken daily and bed time for a person their age.
- Ginni Rometty 2016 CES Keynote speech
What exactly is that leather “thing” she is wearing? That isn’t a jacket.
http://www.aol.com/article/2016/01/07/ibm-ceo-artificially-intelligent-computers-will-change-who-you/21293693/
Oracle
- Oracle purchases AddThis for $200M
Oracle continues to ramp up its business in the area of marketing tech. Today the enterprise software giant announced that it has acquired AddThis, which makes sharing features (i.e., those buttons on web pages that let you share stories or follow accounts on Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and audience tracking technology for online publishers and marketers. AddThis says it currently covers activity data for 1.9 billion monthly unique visitors and over 15 million mobile and desktop web domains.
http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/oracle-addthis/
I want to make a connection. Two months ago, we covered the news that TeraData is getting out of the marketing cloud space, with Oracle looking to purchase more marketing assets, could they be a possible buyer? - Oracle also quietly purchased StackEngine two weeks ago…
StackEngine was founded just last year by a couple of industry veterans. In fact, it emerged from stealth in October, 2014 with a plan to operationalize Docker, the open source container system. While Docker has been a hot commodity for the last several years, StackEngine recognized that it lacked an administrative layer for IT pros to manage their containers.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/22/oracle-stackengine-acquisition-part-of-expanding-cloud-strategy/
- Is Oracle’s ‘supergraphic’ a super problem?
Oracle has a giant sight up on their building in San Jose just in time for the Super Bowl, city officials are not pleased:“They will have to take the sign down,” Cheryl Wessling, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, said Friday after this newspaper contacted her department about the colorful sign that can be seen as far away as Interstate 280.
http://www.mercurynews.com/health/ci_29361163/oracles-new-super-bowl-sign-is-illegal-san
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise on Track to Dominate the Flash Storage Market
He further went to say that HPE will dominate the flash storage market as its latest series of all-flash storage arrays, the 3PAR StoreSev Storage family, makes storage affordable for businesses. The cost will fall to $1.50 per GB as compared to $2 per GB. New Zealand and Australia were identified by Mr. Davis as the leaders in flash adoption in the Asia-Pacific region, but early indicators point towards increased adoption in Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong.
- HPE’s London boozer dubbed the ‘Hewlett You Inn?’
This is an absolutely useless article, but… HPE has a private drinking club in London?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/06/hpe_boozer_poll_result/
EMC | Dell
- EMC tightens grip on converged infrastructure subsidiary VCE as job cuts loom
According to sources cited by The Register, VCE is also expected to announce job cuts with around 250 staff likely to be let go this week.
According to the source, the cuts will hit all levels including some senior managers; this move would make sense as EMC brings VCE closer to its own operations, perhaps believing that it can cut costs.
- Feeling jitters as Dell-EMC marriage approaches
How will the two cultures mesh? “EMC was built on engineering innovation and high-touch sales” that require lots of personal attention, says Peter Bell, who spent a decade at the company and is now a venture capitalist at Highland Capital Partners in California. (EMC chief executive Joe Tucci is known to keep the last day of every quarter free so that he can make phone calls to customers and help personally close deals that are hanging in the balance.) That meant fat profit margins for EMC, and hefty earnings for its workers.
In contrast, “Michael Dell knows how to run a big business in a low-cost way. He knows how to compete in a commodity business, and he knows there’s a lot of cost to be taken out of EMC,” Bell says. Not surprisingly, that has created a lot of anxiety among EMC employees.
http://www.betaboston.com/news/2016/01/08/feeling-jitters-as-dell-emc-marriage-approaches-2/
Other
- Why Red Hat, Inc. Gained 20% in 2015
Shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) gained 19.8% in 2015, according to data from S&P Capital IQ. Lifted by three fantastic quarterly reports to overcome the general market jitters in August, the open-source software veteran is finding its sea legs and growing into its nosebleed price to earnings ratios.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/01/06/why-red-hat-inc-gained-20-in-2015.aspx
- What’s in Store for Big Data in 2016?
(On Teradata) Organizations hit reset on Hadoop. As Hadoop and related open source technologies move beyond knowledge gathering and the hype abates, enterprises will hit the reset button on (not abandon) their Hadoop deployments to address lessons learned — particularly around governance, data integration, security and reliability.
https://adtmag.com/articles/2016/01/06/2016-big-data-predictions.aspx
Photo: Thomas Ulrich
Supplier Report: 1/2/2016
Another week of scraps. The suppliers didn’t make any noise during the last week, which was expected. As a result, news outlets took to speculation for 2016.
The major news coming out of the week is that EMC is expected to reduce headcount early in 2016 and some sites are predicting that Meg Whitman might step away from HP some time in 2016.
IBM
- As Vodafone looks for new vendors, this time IBM may have to share the $1 billion contract
The contract discussions will enter the final round of negotiations over the coming weeks and at the moment IBM is battling hard against domestic and multinational rivals to save a lion’s share of one of its largest telecom outsourcing contracts in Asia, the people mentioned above said. All of them requested anonymity as these discussions are confidential.
- IBM CFO Schroeter on the company’s innovation strategy
“With that we get [data on] about a hundred million lives … and we get a few billion images that describe all sorts of medical conditions. When you put that into Watson, you now have a system that can help doctors understand what they’re dealing with, so you get to outcome faster,” he said. “You can help payers understand what courses of treatment have worked the best and find insights in that data. And you get a system and an ability to change an industry from a pay-for-service to a pay-for-value.”
- Air pollution in China could be big biz for IBM, Microsoft
Leader of IBM’s Green Horizon initiative: Dr. Jin Dong, Distinguished Engineer & Member of IBM Industry Academy, Associate Director, IBM Research – China. Business clients – in particular renewable power generation companies – are another target, along with consumers. IBM’s tech is also already being used by solar farms in China for its ability to predict sunlight availability.
http://hexanews.com/2015/12/31/air-pollution-in-china-could-be-big-biz-for-ibm-microsoft.html
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc
- Prediction: Meg Whitman Will Leave HP
Count on this one. Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Chairman of HP Inc. HP will initiate a search for a replacement (if she hasn’t already), find one, and take a victory lap before departing.
http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/5-predictions-for-2016/?xid=gn_editorspicks
EMC | Dell
- EMC To Cut Jobs Ahead Of Dell Deal
The workforce reduction is expected to be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2016 and fully completed by the end of 2016. The total charge resulting from the plan is expected to be approximately $250 million, with total cash payments associated with the plan expected to be $220 million.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/emc-to-cut-jobs-ahead-of-dell-deal-20160101-00005
Other
- Why Salesforce.com Wants SteelBrick
In the last part of this series, we looked at Salesforce.com’s (CRM) acquisition target—SteelBricks. SteelBrick’s Quote-to-Cash software, which is aimed primarily at SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), is attracting a lot of attention. SteelBrick managed to raise $48 million funds in its Series C round in October 2015, largely due to this software. Apttus, a company that’s built on the Salesforce App Cloud, managed to raise $108 million in September 2015.
http://marketrealist.com/2015/12/salesforce-com-wants-steelbrick/
- Tableau in 2015: Year in Review
The year 2015 was expected to be a tough one for leading business intelligence company Tableau, but the company powered through the fears of increased competition eating into its growth. The year saw major updates in the business intelligence tools offered by software giantsSalesforce.com and Microsoft. At the same time, Tableau’s biggest riva lQlik released Qlik Sense Enterprise, a visualization tool for businesses that competes directly with Tableau. Despite the tightening race in the business intelligence and visualization market, Tableau consistently achieved solid performance throughout the year. We believe that a strong product portfolio and dominant position in the industry will help it continue to perform well in 2016.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/12/30/tableau-in-2015-year-in-review/
Photo: Natasha Vasiljeva
Supplier Report: 12/26/2015
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.
- 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).
- 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.
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.
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.
- 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/