Tag: IBM

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Supplier Report: 10/24/2015

sn_storm_Pavel Badrtdinov

It was a rough week for the companies usually covered on this report.  IBM missed earnings expectations AGAIN.  The press has been brutal predicting the end of days for big blue.  Rometty says she will stay the course and focus on cloud and analytics.

HP has not reacted well to the EMC news and has been trolling the acquisition in the press and with their channel customers.   While they throw attention to other companies, they officially announced their decision to put the Helion cloud platform out of its misery.

Speaking of cloud, EMC announced they are creating a joint venture with VMware based on their Virtustream technology.

IBM

  • IBM in Hot Water as Earnings Continue Downward Spiral

    IBM has continued its down ward spiral, with revenues falling by 14 percent in the third quarter, year on year. The company’s revenues has come down to $19.28 billion in the third quarter, much lower than the $22.4 billion it earned in the third quarter last year. This is the 14th continuous quarter loss for IBM, once the doyen of computer hardware makers everywhere. The earnings have even disappointed analysts forecasts, who were expecting the company to earn $19.6 million. As expected, the markets reacted strongly and punished the company by scrapping 5.5 percent of its share price, at the end of the day.

    http://www.financialbuzz.com/ibm-in-hot-water-as-earnings-continue-downward-spiral-350193

  • 42 percent of IBM’s SoftLayer outbound emails found to be spam

    “We believe that SoftLayer, perhaps in an attempt to extend their business in the rapidly growing Brazilian market, deliberately relaxed their customer vetting procedures,” Spamhaus suggested.

    http://www.scmagazineuk.com/42-percent-of-ibms-softlayer-outbound-emails-found-to-be-spam/article/449004/

    Hmmm… I didn’t know that Brazil was a spam hub… but it is (#4):
    http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/09/02/0211_spam_countries/18.htm

  • IBM bags Wipro

    Wipro, on its part, said it will train 15,000 of its developers to use Bluemix via an online open course across 58 countries. Wipro is to use over 100 services in IBM’s public Bluemix catalogue but will also use Bluemix Dedicated. That’s a private cloud version for developers to build apps that access sensitive data.

    http://www.techeye.net/business/ibm-bags-wipro

  • IBM CEO Pledges to Stay the Course

    Ms. Rometty said she didn’t take the decision to reduce IBM’s outlook lightly. The reason was a slowdown in what the company calls “transactional” businesses, which is shorthand for deals that require customers to make sizable upfront commitments—like big contracts for hardware, software or services contracts.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-pledges-to-stay-the-course-1445360608

  • IBM Raises Eyebrows, Opens Source Code Access To China: Here’s Why

    The demos are reportedly done inside a secure room without an Internet connection, where China’s IT experts view the source code on an IBM security application to prevent other people from poaching the company’s IP. Moreover, the demos are done only for a few hours, keeping anyone from thoroughly going through the code to find back doors that may have been implanted to allow the U.S. government to secretly infiltrate the system, suggesting that the demos are highly symbolic more than anything else.

    http://www.techtimes.com/articles/96776/20151018/ibm-raises-eyebrows-opens-source-code-access-to-china-here-s-why.htm

EMC

  • EMC and VMware Creating a Jointly Owned Hybrid Cloud Company

    EMC and VMware are creating a new jointly owned hybrid cloud company that will be based on the Virtustream business that EMC acquired earlier this year. EMC and VMware officials announced the new company—which will carry the Virtustream brand—Oct. 20 during the releases of their respective quarterly earnings. The new business will be added to the list of companies that make up EMC’s federation. EMC and VMware each will own a 50 percent share of Virtustream.

    http://www.eweek.com/video/emc-and-vmware-creating-a-jointly-owned-hybrid-cloud-company.html

  • EMC to retain some autonomy after acquisition (this is just VMware, which everybody already knew)

    EMC’s virtualization software subsidiary VMware will “remain an independent public company,” Dell said. Many of VMware’s current clients provide servers and related services, putting them in direct competition with Dell’s key operations. Fears that clients could drop VMware after it is transferred to Dell sank the former’s share price around 30% in the wake of the announcement of the acquisition.

    http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/EMC-to-retain-some-autonomy-after-acquisition

HP

  • HP Split Could Mean ‘Deal or Die’ for H-P Enterprise

    The tax-free split of HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise includes an agreement that restricts deals that could undo the financial engineering and require a bill to the Internal Revenue Service. Burgess suggested the provision is effectively a poison pill that could thwart a takeover. An outright buyout of the company or a deal involving more than 50% of the stock in Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, for example, could create problems.

    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13334251/1/hp-split-could-mean-deal-or-die-for-h-p-enterprise.html

  • Hewlett-Packard spreading FUD over Dell-EMC merger (sharing this because I am glad someone called HP out for their lack of subtlety.  If you have to FUD, do it with nuance)

    Hewlett-Packard hopes to draw away enterprise data storage customers from Dell and EMC using the classic approach of spreading FUD, business shorthand for “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” about its rivals. Last week, HP CEO Meg Whitman criticized Dell’s planned $67 billion acquisition of EMC. HP later launched an opportunistic marketing campaign warning customers about potential upheaval in the storage business of the combined Dell-EMC.

    http://news.investors.com/technology-click/102315-777303-hp-spreads-fear-uncertainty-doubt-over-dell-emc-merger.htm

  • HP is giving up on competing with Amazon’s cloud (HPQ)

    That’s something HP has found out the hard way, with HP Helion constantly coming under fire for being too small and too unfocused on the market to seriously make a dent. And so, HP is going to shut down HP Helion to stick with what its good at: Helping customers run their own data centers with hardware, software, and services to run at cloud levels of efficiency. The industry term for that concept is “private cloud,” and it plays into HP’s experience in servers and software.

    http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/ZZ/20151021/BUSINESS/310219918/-1/business

Other

  • IBM: Can A Red Knight Save Big Blue?

    Two things excite me about Jim. First, the performance of Red Hat under his leadership. Since he became CEO of the company in January, 2008, the shares are up 275%, a market cap of $14.75 billion for a company that doesn’t really sell anything. Red Hat offers support for open source software, stuff you can download for free, yet revenues are growing at nearly 20% per year, and software engineers consider it a great place to work.

    The second thing that excites me about Jim is that he has a philosophy, a way of managing his business, one that is proven to work, and one that can scale to a company of IBM’s size. I have read his book, The Open Organization and you should too. It’s a manual for 21st century software management, and software is where IBM needs to be.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3589406-ibm-can-a-red-knight-save-big-blue

Photo: Pavel Badrtdinov

Posted on

Supplier Report: 10/17/2015

sn_watch_FrankPark

Everybody is talking about EMC. Meg is. Ginny is. The news (clearly) is.  Nobody knows what the end picture will look like, but wow… that sure is a chunk of debt (interest payments alone are $2.5B annually).

While attention is focused on EMC, IBM is about to release their Q3 results.  Could this be the bottom for their losses?

Microsoft is making grounds in the cloud space against Amazon while Red Hat announces a new acquisition in Ansible.

IBM

EMC

  • Dell-EMC: What Storage Customers Should Do

    This shouldn’t panic users, but users — especially big ones and those whose software or infrastructure stacks are dependent on particular Dell or EMC products —  should take the year or so that it will take before Dell-EMC is fully baked to reevaluate their infrastructure vendor list and product choices. One of my close friends, who runs storage at a company that spends several million dollars a year with EMC told me he got an email from senior management asking how the deal might affect their company; their plan is to add another storage vendor to hedge their bets.

    http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/dell-emc-what-storage-customers-should-do/a/d-id/1322681

  • Why Did VMware (VMW) Plunge 8.1% on EMC-Dell Deal?

    An important thing to note here is that Dell will not be offering the regular trading stocks for VMware. Instead, the company will be issuing tracking stock that would reflect the performance of the trading stock. This will entitle EMC shareholders to have only economic interest in the trading stock but not own them (that is no voting rights or dividends). The absence of rights also makes some analysts speculate that the tracking stock might likely trade at a discount to the trading stock.

    http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/193486/why-did-vmware-vmw-plunge-81-on-emcdell-deal

  • EMC acquisition: Is it a good deal for Dell?

    Both vendors have acquired higher value software, although VMware eclipses all the software deals of Dell such as SecureWorks and Quest. Yet for the deal to work, its needs to benefit from economies of scale and this will probably mean a reduction in headcount and product portfolio where there is duplication. Mid-level marketing, sales and administrative tasks are also ripe for some cost cutting. But nobody should expect a repeat of the bloodbath happening at HP which says it expects to cut 58,000 jobs by end of fiscal year 2015. Dell is already pretty lean as is EMC. The federation model of EMC also means that that headline staffing numbers are relatively svelte as it stands.

    http://www.channelpro.co.uk/opinion/9496/emc-acquisition-is-it-a-good-deal-for-dell

HP Enterprises

Other

Photo: Frank Park

Posted on

Supplier Report: 10/10/2015

sn_axe_danedwards

It was a very interesting news week.  The big talk going into the weekend is that Dell is making a play for EMC.  Dell would have to borrow a substantial amount of money to make this happen, and the rumor is that they are only interested in certain pieces, potentially breaking up Joe’s empire.

Speaking of empire building, Amazon is coming on strong this week with the announcement of their own IoT environment strategy AND a strategic partnership with Accenture to sell services.  This is a very interesting combination that demonstrates Amazon’s desire to overtake the enterprise market.

Microsoft also made waves with their laptop announcement.  As Microsoft unleashes their own products and hardware to go against Apple, what is left for HP Inc, Lenovo, and Dell?

Oh yeah, and IBM is creating AI to eliminate everybody’s job… just kidding (or so Ginny says).

IBM

EMC

  • Wait… there is EMC talks that don’t involve divesting or mergers with HP?

    The details surrounding this proposed merger are still very sketchy, with CNBC reporting that Dell would have to pay north of $27 a share, and the WSJ suggesting that Dell may only be interested in “parts” of EMC. Regardless, if Dell acquires EMC or picks off its best parts, there isn’t much investment upside beyond the short-term buyout pop that is likely already priced in EMC stock. However, if EMC acquires Dell, it could be a different story. Further, the Dell and EMC merger would be bad for the likes of HP and IBM.

    http://investorplace.com/2015/10/dell-emc-merger-great-fit-bad-hp-ibm/

  • More on the potential merger:

Hewlett Packard

  • Apple Can’t Kill Microsoft But It’s Crushing HP

    PC sales have declined as consumers flock to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Android devices instead. Gartner’s data is just the latest example of the personal computer’s secular fall and is bad news for Lenovo, the top PC maker with 20% market share, and Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ), the PC maker in second place. Weak PC sales have been killing Hewlett-Packard as shares are off more than 26% year to date. Microsoft has done reasonably well with its shares up 4.23% year to date, as the company’s Office and Server products are more than offsetting Windows’ decline. Investors can only hope Hewlett-Packard’s additional layoffs and cost control measures will turn things around for the giant.

    http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/apple-cant-kill-microsoft-but-its-crushing-hp-376244/

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