Tag: IBM

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Supplier Report: 11/14/2015

sn_shoreline_The Pic Pac

EMC and Dell are in some rough waters with the IRS.  Will their creative use of “tracking shares” be able to keep their deal afloat or will it crash and sink the mega-purchase?

On the topic of purchases, IBM finalized the acquisition of two companies:  Meteorix & Cleversafe.  Outside of that news, it was a fairly quiet week for big blue, with standard articles (at this point) of the medical research potential of Watson.

Oracle is getting good press about their cloud attempts and the fact that they are going after Amazon hard.  Will they win?  Who knows, but the spectators are excited to see this fight happen.

IBM

  • IBM adds two new company acquisitions
    They finalized Meteorix:

    Yesterday, IBM announced that it has closed a deal to acquire Meteorix LLC, a premier Workday services partner.

    They also finalized the acquisition of Cleversafe

    Last week, IBM announced that it closed a deal to acquire Cleversafe, Inc., a leading developer and manufacturer of object-based storage software and appliances. According to a statement from IBM, the acquisition will strengthen IBM’s leadership positions in storage and hybrid cloud and support clients’ drive to next generation mobile, social and analytics applications.

    http://wraltechwire.com/ibm-adds-two-new-company-acquisitions/15102318/

  • Watson to help kids battling rare diseases

    IBM’s cognitive learning platform will be integrated into Boston Children’s Hospital to help researchers at the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research in their study of steroid-resistant neophrotic syndrome (SRNS), a rare genetic form of kidney disease. Watson will first scour all available literature and related information on SRNS, then be used to process genomic data from patients at Boston Children’s to help researchers identify and develop treatment options for the disease.

    http://www.mhealthnews.com/news/watson-help-kids-battling-rare-diseases

  • More Partners Sign On to IBM Cloud

    Meanwhile, IBM said HCL would use its Bluemix to develop IoT sensors deployed to collect and exchange data from networks of sensors. HCL is developing IoT networks as an adjunct to its flagship IT services and “enterprise digitalization” businesses.

    http://www.enterprisetech.com/2015/11/12/more-partners-sign-on-to-ibm-cloud/

  • IBM, Apple, and Watson: You are about to become obsolete
    I like this post due to the insights of a former employee versus his thoughts about their current state.

    As this first set of sessions ended we had the guy running Watson speak on the fact that—for many professions—the professionals don’t know what they need to know. For instance, even attorneys that specialize don’t know the majority of the laws that define their specialty, let alone all of them. At the core of the IBM Watson effort and its general analytics push is to fix that problem. The time is coming when any professional that doesn’t have access to, and know how to use a tool like Watson will have inadequate skills to gain employment in the developed world.

    http://techspective.net/2015/11/13/ibm-apple-and-watson-you-are-about-to-become-obsolete/

  • Switch to Macs from PCs reportedly saves IBM US$270 per user

    While 40 percent of IBM’s PC users call the helpdesk for troubleshooting, on average only 5 percent of the company’s Mac user do the same, according to Previn. “The longer this program runs, the more compelling the business case becomes,” he says. “I can confidently say that every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money.”

    http://www.mis-asia.com/tech/mobile-and-wireless/switch-to-macs-from-pcs-reportedly-saves-ibm-us270-per-user/

EMC

  • Dell targets simpler cloud experience with EMC

    Kelly points out that many of Dell’s and EMC’s businesses are complementary. For example, EMC storage and Dell servers aid the adoption of converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud; EMC’s RSA controls for identity assurance, fraud detection and data protection; security analytics; and GRC capabilities with Dell’s SecureWorks network security and managed security services; AirWatch mobile device, application and content management with KACE systems and device management; and the Pivotal open cloud platform and agile software development tools with the Boomi platform as a service.

    http://www.networksasia.net/article/dell-targets-simpler-cloud-experience-emc.1447295769

  • Dell’s EMC Acquisition In Danger Over Tax Problems – ($9B Tax Bill)

    The use of this ‘tracking stock’ is intended to offset the amount of debt Dell would have to take on, and also help it avoid avoid a heavy tax bill. But it depends on the American IRS interprets the use of this tracking stock. According to the report, tracking stocks were commonly used during the dot.com boom years in the 1990s, and its use in the deal could invite scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service.

    “Dell’s plan to create tracking shares in a company it does not yet own (that’s VMware) would, if successful, amount to a clever threading of a needle in US tax laws,” said Re/code. “It is intended as neither a distribution of shares nor the spinoff of a subsidiary, both of which are typically taxable events. Instead, EMC shareholders will face taxes in the range of 20 percent to 40 percent for the gains on the cash and the value of the tracking shares.”

    http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/e-enterprise/merger-acquisition/dell-emc-tax-problems-180378
    Read More:
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/10/emc-us-ma-dell-idUSL3N1354VS20151110

Oracle

  • Oracle’s Cloud Prospects Look Positive

    Oracle has embarked on an aggressive strategy to win market share in the cloud market. However, the company is a late entrant and questions have surfaced on whether Oracle could succeed against early entrants such as Microsoft and market leader Amazon who established themselves in the cloud market years earlier than Oracle.

    sn_oracle_wsj_2015_11_13
    Credit: Wall Street Journal
    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3675736-oracles-cloud-prospects-look-positive

  • Oracle Is About to Eat Amazon’s Lunch

    Now, Oracle is acting as much out of envy and perhaps even desperation as anything else. While AMZN stock has doubled in 2015 despite a rough market, ORCL stock is down over 11%. And longer term, Oracle stock is up just 40% or so in the last five years vs. over 290% for Amazon stock and 70% for the broader S&P 500 in the same period.

    But with some $56 billion in cash and investments and a will to roll out an ambitious suite of cloud products, AMZN investors should be looking over their shoulder at Oracle as it ramps up in the next six months.

    http://investorplace.com/2015/11/amzn-stock-amazon-web-services-oracle/

Other

  • Why Meg Whitman’s ‘Hmm …’ emails make HP managers scramble

    So she told the whole company they were to follow a new rule. If they saw an issue they were to “escalate in 24 hours and resolve it in 48 hours. If that problem is not solved in 48, everyone has the right to send me an email. I’m an expert forwarder. When I forward an email on, things get done,” she said.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/employees-fear-meg-whitman-hmm-email-2015-11

  • Red Hat enhances containers across open hybrid cloud

    “The datacenter is heterogeneous, and the cloud is hybrid”, said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has been there for close to two years, and many enterprise customers are finding the benefits of deploying workloads on Linux in the public cloud. These offerings help developers to build and integrate faster and adaptable applications with familiar, supported open source tools with significantly less “ramp-up” time and a unified experience across hybrid architectures.

    http://observerleader.com/2015/11/red-hat-enhances-containers-across-open-hybrid-cloud/

  • A Closer Look At Microsoft And Red Hat Partnership

    Meanwhile, Red Hat has gone through interesting times. Canonical Ubuntu gave it a tough competition as the most preferred Linux distribution in the public cloud. Minimalistic, container-optimized operating systems such as CoreOS and RancherOS started to gain popularity. Red Hat’s ambitious plan to repeat the magic with OpenStack, the open source cloud management platform, didn’t translate due to the lack of enterprise adoption. OpenShift, Red Hat’s PaaS was going through a major revamp to embrace containers and Kubernetes. The virtualization market has been shrinking, and there was enough pressure from VMware in this market. Given that Red Hat doesn’t have its own public cloud, its success comes from making RHEL a ubiquitous OS for enterprise workloads across multiple clouds. These factors forced Red Hat to consider partnering with Microsoft.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2015/11/11/a-closer-look-at-microsoft-and-red-hat-partnership/

  • Teradata Cuts Ties With The Marketing Stack

    Some speculate private equity investors will step in and divest key marketing assets, similar to the path eBay Enterprise took. Others suggest any number of enterprise companies could serve as potential acquirers.

    “Aprimo [a campaign manager Teradata bought for $525 million in 2010] was a good acquisition for them and they’ve done a lot with the marketing piece,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research. “If you’re a company that wants to build out marketing apps on top of a database and analytics, it would make sense for that.”

    http://adexchanger.com/digital-marketing-2/teradata-cuts-ties-with-the-marketing-stack/

Photo: The Pic Pac

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Supplier Report: 11/7/2015

sn_edisonbulb_JoshByers

IBM purchased another company named Gravitant this week.  It helps customers select cloud services from a variety of providers (and is a cloud service itself).  I know I keep saying this, but IBM is consistent with their purchases: Cloud, Analytics (Big Data), and IoT.  Now I want to see all the pieces put together.

And when you have it all together, then you break it apart.  HPE announced the departure of their CIO on the first official business day as Hewlett Packard Enterprises.  The market seems to be down on HPE at the moment, while their sister company HP Inc gained on their opening day despite concerns about the health of the PC and printer markets.

The Dell/EMC acquisition continues to befuddle me.  Rumor has it that Dell is looking to sell off $10B in assets (wise move) to pay down their massive debt.  They are also looking to rush a startup that EMC and VMWare (and GE) created called Pivotal to IPO to help generate additional funds.  So… Dell goes private and loves it, they are buying EMC and taking them private (presumably), but they are KEEPING VMWare public, and starting another company with the EMC asset and doing an IPO… that made my fingers hurt.

IBM

  • IBM’s Shopping Spree Continues As It Buys Cloud Brokerage Firm Gravitant

    With Gravitant, it gets cloud brokerage, which helps companies manage cloud purchases across multiple suppliers. IBM plans to fold the new bauble into its IBM Global Technology Services unit. In addition, IBM Cloud plans to add the capabilities to its growing SaaS catalogue.

    That’s like a two for one sale because Gravitant gets sold as an old fashioned service offering, and also as a SaaS product, which plays well into IBM’s overall strategy.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/ibms-shopping-spree-continues-as-it-buys-cloud-brokerage-firm-gravitant/

  • The Mainframe Is a Vampire

    If you looked at the recent IBM numbers, which were pretty painful but in line with what generally happens when a company is adapting to a major industry change, you saw one bright light: their mainframe business was growing faster than the server segment in general is growing.

    In fact, with the massive growth of web services, it has been hard for the server segment to get out of the low single digits. But once you adjusted for currency fluctuations, mainframes (IBM’s System Z) were up a whopping 20 percent. That’d be impressive server growth in a good year, for what has been a really soft year for servers, 20 percent growth is outstanding.

    http://www.datamation.com/commentary/the-mainframe-is-a-vampire.html

  • Why the IBM – Weather Company purchase is a big deal (shameless plug: I cover this topic on the SourceCast podcast episode #3, which will go live tomorrow… so visit again!)

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-11-05/ibm-to-buy-weather-company-why-that-s-a-big-deal
  • IBM Watson is going to change how you think about the weather (Here is a non-video article that says similar (internet of) things)

    The focus at IBM is not so much in getting Watson involved in making better weather forecasts, but in putting the world’s most famous supercomputer to work in mining epic amounts of data in order to help businesses come up with actionable insights about the weather on both a real-time and long-term basis.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/11/05/ibm-watson-is-going-to-change-how-you-think-about-the-weather/

EMC/Dell

  • Pivotal IPO Could Make Dell-EMC Deal Even More Complicated

    As a reminder, EMC owns 80 percent of VMware, which is operated and traded as an independent company. When Dell agreed to buy EMC for $67 billion last month the deal included VMware, which Dell has said it wants to continue operating in the same fashion.

    Pivotal is itself a joint venture of EMC and VMware along with GE (which owns around 10 percent). The plan could call for EMC to sell about 20 percent of its ownership stake as an IPO, which is similar to what it did when it took VMware public in 2007, according to the re/code article.

    If this is true, it’s just another case of this deal getting ever more muddled with multiple layers of ownership, all pointing back to Dell, which if this closes is the ultimate decider here. Let’s not forget, however that EMC has a clause in its agreement that if it gets a better offer than the $67 billion that Dell offered it, it could take that deal.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/pivotal-ipo-could-make-dell-emc-deal-even-more-complicated/

  • Dell planning to sell off $10 billion in assets (rumor)
    It is too early to say I called it, but keep watching for news like this…

    Reuters reports the PC vendor is planning this to reduce the heavy debt load it will be taking on to buy data storage company EMC for around £44 billion. In 2007, EMC sold 19 percent of VMware shares in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. A successful Pivotal IPO could potentially raise billions in new capital

    http://financialspots.com/2015/11/04/dell-planning-to-sell-off-10-billion-in-assets-rumour/

    Here is more information on the sell off providing possible asset targets:

    Unnamed sources told Reuters that Dell will take on about $49.5 billion after it completes the $67 billion acquisition of EMC and its federated companies sometime next year. Selling such assets as its Quest software business (for systems management), SonicWall (network security) and AppAssure (data backup) will help the company reduce the debt load, according to the sources.

    http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/dell-reportedly-to-sell-software-assets-to-ease-debt-from-emc-deal.html

Hewlett Packard (HPE & HPI)
Note: I suspect my coverage of HP Inc will dwindle with time, but for now, I will cover both companies.  

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise Loses CIO As It Charts New Course

    Ralph Loura, who had served as chief information officer of the enterprise business of HP for the past 15 months, has left the company. “I had an impact while there [and] I helped design the new op model for IT, and designed myself out of it because it was what the new company needed (move from a federated model with group CIOs, to a unified/centralized model with a single CIO),” he wrote to CRN.

    http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/300078699/hewlett-packard-enterprises-loses-cio-as-it-splits-from-the-former-hp.htm

  • Why JPMorgan Is Cautious On HP Inc (HPQ)

    The skeptical view taken by the firm comes on the back of PC data, which is hardly reassuring. Seagate and Western Digital both guided for a decline in HDD TAM for the fourth quarter. Intel reported a 19% YoY decline in its PC shipments for 3QFY15 worse than the 10% decline witnessed in 2QFY15. Desktops and Notebooks posted even worse numbers and there is scarcely anything notable that stirs confidence. While HDD companies see signs of stabilization, analysts at JPMorgan are far from convinced and expect more macro instability.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/25953-why-jpmorgan-is-cautious-on-hp-inc-hpq/

    However, On Monday, the stock market reacted like this (per USA Today):

    HPQ, which sells PCs and printers, soared 13%, to $13.83; HPE, responsible for commercial computer systems, software and services,  fell 1.6% $14.49. Both stocks are trading on the S&P 500.

Other

  • Why Billionaire Trader Stan Druckenmiller Believes In Amazon And Not IBM

    “We are in a bubble in what I would call short term behavior,” Druckenmiller said. To reinforce the point Druckenmiller gave a negative assessment of IBM, which he said has missed earnings only three times over the past nine years and is in the process of buying back billions in stock, and a bullish view on Amazon.com… the difference? While IBM is cutting R&D spending against a shrinking base of sales, Amazon has doubled that spending as a percentage of sales even as they’ve grown at double digit rates. “I love Amazon. They are investing on the future,” Druckenmiller said, before quipping, “Bezos is a serial monopolist.”

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/11/03/billionaire-trader-stan-druckenmiller-says-hes-long-growth-stocks-short-value-stocks/

  • Will NoSQL be the undoing of Oracle’s database reign?

    What’s most interesting in all this is how database popularity, broadly measured, compares with Gartner’s newly released Operational Database Magic Quadrant. TechRepublic contributor Janakiram MSV has captured five big takeaways from Gartner’s report, but here’s a sixth:The database vendors that embrace NoSQL are destined to be the long-term winners.

    Photo: DB-Engines
    Photo: DB-Engines

    http://www.techrepublic.com/article/will-nosql-be-the-undoing-of-oracles-database-reign/

  • Why Did Microsoft Corporation Paint Its Cloud Red?

    As part of the deal, Microsoft will feature Red Hat’s Linux as a “preferred” option for enterprise computing jobs on Azure. The deal comes in as a surprise for many as the companies have historically had differing stances on software patents and usage. Red Hat has always encouraged open-source softwares that can be distributed widely and can be modified. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been against it. Interesting to note is the fact that a separate technical team will be built from employees of both companies to solve the customer issues more efficiently.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/25978-why-did-microsoft-corporation-paint-its-cloud-red/

  • Teradata Plans to Sell Its $200 Million Marketing Application Business. Any Takers?

    According to financial statements within the Teradata announcement, Marketing Applications revenue was down about 9% this year, which is surprising in a generally strong martech market but in line with the rest of Teradata’s business. Teradata told me separately that their marketing cloud business grew 22% year-on-year this quarter, suggesting that the decline came in the older, on-premise products and/or related services. As you may know, Teradata’s marketing applications business was a mashup of the original Teradata marketing products, developed over the past 20 years and largely on-premise, and the Aprimo cloud-based systems acquired for $525 million in 2010. The Aprimo group was dominant in the years immediately following the acquisition but control shifted back to the older Teradata team more recently. One bit of evidence: the Aprimo brand was dropped in 2013.

    http://customerthink.com/teradata-plans-to-sell-its-200-million-marketing-application-business-any-takers/

Photo: Josh Byers

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Supplier Report: 10/31/2015

sn_spark_JosephYoung

Oracle World happened and as expected, Hurd and Ellison made plenty of amusing remarks about their competitors.  As Ellison remarked that IBM is not a competitor, big blue went out and bought the Weather Company… for $2B.

Hewlett Packard is officially and finally splitting this weekend.  The two companies are facing unique market conditions in light of the Dell-EMC deal.

IBM

  • IBM Will Acquire The Weather Company’s Digital Business

    IBM announced this morning it’s acquiring The Weather Company, the parent company to the The Weather Channel, as well as the company’s B2B, mobile and web properties. The deal is being valued at more than $2 billion, according to a report from The Wall St. Journal. The companies are not disclosing the financial terms, however. The deal will see The Weather Company licensing weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract. The Weather Channel is not included in the acquisition.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/28/ibm-will-acquire-the-weather-companys-digital-business/

  • Why does this keep happening to IBM?

    For the second time in a little over two years, Big Blue faces an investigation into how it records revenue. The company disclosed on Tuesday that the SEC is looking into the “accounting treatment of certain transactions in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.”

    The stock dropped 4 percent to $137.86 after the revelation and was down 14 percent for the year at Tuesday’s close before bouncing back a bit Wednesday morning.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/why-does-this-keep-happening-to-ibm.html

  • IBM: The Line In The Sand

    One of the items that is hindering IBM from making a large acquisition is the fact that the company has $32 billion in long-term debt. This is the exact time IBM needs all of its resources to try to generate revenue growth, however they will be hindered by debt maturities in 2016. The following chart fromMorningstar shows that IBM has a large number of debt maturities coming in the next five years. Specifically next year, IBM has $5 billion in debt due and while they can easily pay off the debt, it is a drain on potential cash and cash flows that could be used to invest in the business or make an acquisition.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3609866-ibm-the-line-in-the-sand

  • IBM Cloud Opens To Apache Spark

    IBM will provide Apache Spark as a service onBluemix, IBM’s cloud platform. IBM will also be pushing Spark into BigInsights on Bluemix, as well as IBM’s Data Science Workbench and its SPSS Analytics Server and Modeler.

    http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/ibm-cloud-opens-to-apache-spark/d/d-id/1322827

  • Intel, Oracle Working Together To Take On IBM

    A few months ago, the head of engineering and products at Oracle, Thomas Kurian, and Doug Fisher from Intel’s Software and Services Group decided to set up a joint team of engineers codenamed Project Apollo near Intel’s facilities in Oregon, the report said.

    The team has been assigned the task of figuring out how massive cloud computing data centers could be set up that make use of Oracle’s hardware and Intel’s chips to take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Project Apollo has successfully completed its mission, and the team members are now sharing “how to” documents to convince enterprise customers to use their technology in building data centers, the report said.

    http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/10/intel-oracle-together-take-on-ibm/

Oracle

Hewlett Packard (the split happens this weekend)

  • Meg Whitman bets that a smaller HP will be able to beat Dell

    But in the server space, Dell is waiting. With EMC, it gets the No. 1 provider of storage gear, making it a one-stop shop for corporate customers. If Dell’s strategy works, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will just continue the former HP’s fate, where sales have declined for 15 of the past 16 quarters. PC shipments, where HP is No. 2, fell 7.7 percent in the third quarter, according to Gartner. For servers, where Hewlett-Packard is the market leader, second-quarter shipments slowed to 8 percent from 13 percent in the prior period.

    http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article41966259.html

  • Why Hewlett-Packard Company’s Troubles May Not End With Breakup

    Post breakup, there is a fair chance that the resulting HP companies will acquire to compensate for their various shortcomings. While acquisitions might add some important assets (technology and talents), any kind of acquisition comes with a certain level of risk. Integration is one of the challenges that companies meet after they acquire a new asset. History shows that many of Hewlett-Packard’s past acquisitions never happened smoothly, a problem that may carry into the resulting entities.

    The other risk is that acquisitions predicated on desperation to catch up with the competition could fail to live up to expectations, be costly or unnecessarily disruptive. The two resulting HP businesses may not stay clear of these acquisition risks.

    http://investcorrectly.com/20151030/hewlett-packard-company-nysehpqs-troubles-may-not-end-breakup/

EMC

  • Dell acquisition of EMC could jostle Microsoft’s plans

    Dell, clearly, cannot risk this in the long term. It needs an operating system of its own. VMware’s Photon Stack is a great start, but it is only a start. It would not shock me at all to see Dell buy Red Hat in the next two years. It would be the final piece of the puzzle for a fully vertically integrated play.

    Microsoft doesn’t want to see that happen. And after seeing the tab for the Dell acquisition of EMC, I am sure Dell doesn’t want to spend the money either. Ample time and effort is going to be spent trying to find amicable solutions that allow both companies to coexist.

    http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/opinion/Dell-acquisition-of-EMC-could-jostle-Microsofts-plans

Other

  • Workday Inc Becoming A Cause Of Concern To Oracle Corporation’s Cloud Business

    However, Workday Inc (NYSE:WDAY) built its business on the cloud from the ground upward, giving it an edge in competition with Oracle in HR and Finance applications delivered through the cloud. Because of its nature and the steps it has already made, Workday could cause more grief for Oracle and other legacy software vendors as enterprises shift from on-premise installations to the cloud.

    http://investcorrectly.com/20151028/workday-inc-nysewday-becoming-cause-concern-oracle-corporation-nyseorcls-cloud-business/

  • Red Hat is boring — and more open source companies should emulate it

    But whether such companies like it or not, the minute they base their success on an open source project, their revenue potential is hampered compared to a proprietary competitor. Sure, companies like Cloudera, MongoDB, and DataStax sell proprietary value around an open source project, but most are still somewhat constrained by their need to compete with the free project they sponsor. None of which is to suggest these companies will hurt for revenue. Rather, it’s a reminder that the best way for an open source company to grow is like Red Hat: steady, consistent, boring.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2998810/open-source-tools/red-hat-is-boring-and-more-open-source-companies-should-emulate-it.html