Tag: IBM

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Supplier Report: 6/6/2015

sn_jeffreyjones

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

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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

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Supplier Report: 5/23/2015

sn_sparklers

Several companies are moving into the OpenStack cloud platform. In last week’s report, I covered Oracle’s openstack plans, this week both IBM and EMC released offerings as well.

HP’s recent performance earnings indicate that the company is in a slump.   Down 21% from this time last year, the company seems to be in a daze before its historical split.

The rumors of Salesforce being purchased reached a peak with reports that Microsoft making a $55B offer for the company, which was rejected due to SalesForce wanting something closer to $70B.

IBM

  • Unusual IBM Breach Could Make Coverage Ruling An Outlier

    In a closely watched case, the Connecticut high court unanimously found Monday that Federal Insurance Co. and Scottsdale Insurance Co. don’t have to cover losses stemming from a data breach that occurred when a cart holding computer tapes with IBM employees’ sensitive information fell out of the back of a transportation contractor’s van near a highway exit ramp. About 130 of the tapes, which contained the Social Security numbers, birth dates and contact information of 500,000 past and present IBM workers, were taken from the roadside by an unknown person.

    http://www.law360.com/articles/657168/unusual-ibm-breach-could-make-coverage-case-an-outlier

  • IBM is bringing OpenStack to SoftLayer (Oracle last week and IBM this week)

    Rather than using a single cloud provider, enterprises want to hedge their bets and spread workloads across multiple providers, or between a cloud provider and an in-house deployment. This year, 82 percent of organizations will adopt a multi-cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014, according to a survey from cloud management services provider RightScale.

    http://www.cio.com.au/article/575370/ibm-brings-openstack-its-softlayer-cloud/

  • Around 90 Inverclyde jobs axed as IBM moves roles to Bulgaria

    Most of the affected workers are employed by agency Manpower on behalf of IBM, which refused to comment on the employees facing the cuts.

    http://news.stv.tv/west-central/1321243-around-90-inverclyde-jobs-axed-as-ibm-moves-roles-to-bulgaria/

  • Dubuque officials say national IBM article was a ‘hatchet job’

    Both articles cited the decline in workers from a peak of 1,300 to 625, as well as the state and local incentives offered prior to the company’s arrival. The articles also referenced a recent letter from U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that questioned company leaders’ request to hire workers on temporary foreign visas while laying off other employees.

    http://www.thonline.com/news/dubuque/article_433b7c36-0015-11e5-8fae-0b042e6f27ae.html

  • And so it begins: The first IBM/Apple iWatch app:

    Hospital RN is an app that allows nurses to do their jobs more efficiently by providing them with on-the-go data and alerts.

    http://www.techradar.com/us/news/wearables/apple-and-ibm-mobilefirst-apps-hit-the-apple-watch-1294759

EMC

  • EMC also offers two OpenStack solutions

    EMC’s rapid acceleration into the OpenStack community and open source communities in general is in part due to its OpenStack Cloud reference architectures, its new software defined storage controller CoprHD, EMC {Code}, its newly launched EMC CloudFoundry Dojo, and EMC’s recent OPNFV Sponsorship. EMC also recently releases two new driers for the Kilo release, Cinder and Manila.

    http://www.storagereview.com/emc_announces_two_new_openstack_solutions

HP

Other

Posted on

The Supply Chain: 5/20/2015

sn_SupplyChainManagement_o2

  • IBM Empower 2015: The Evolution of Supplier Engagement General Session
    The Empower event took place last week, I have been scanning the web to see if any video was released:

    The recent CPO study from the IBM Institute for Business Value highlights the changing relationship between the enterprise and their suppliers. The procurement organization and its internal stakeholders are the conduit to innovation and value held within the supply chain. Unlocking that potential is key to driving the next wave of transformation and evolution. Join us in the Empower general session to hear the debate about what’s next for procurement and learn from your peers on what they are doing to release the value from their supply base.

  • Why businesses should combine NPS with analytics

    Alec Gardner, general manager ANZ, Teradata, says, “Businesses should be using data analytics in conjunction with NPS to enhance customer satisfaction, and in many cases, even help predict NPS.” “Doing this lets companies use data analytics to proactively seek customer sentiment using channels such as social media well ahead of the customer’s intention to contact the company,” Gardner says. ”Discovery analytics from big data sources lets companies gain new insights about competitors as well as their own products or services.”

    http://itbrief.co.nz/story/why-businesses-should-combine-nps-analytics/

  • What to Ask, and Not Ask, Your Cloud Hosting Provider

    Don’t Ask: What is the provider’s availability record? This may seem like a very important question, and it is. However, it should be noted that if you’re researching a reputable hosting provider, many of the organizations that report on downtime don’t look at the clients of the provider, but only at the provider’s website. This can create false positive or negative results, since it isn’t a customer production environment.

    http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/from-under-the-rug/what-to-ask-and-not-ask-your-cloud-hosting-provider.html

  • I read this Fast Company article this morning and thought it would be good to share (I think this will sound very familiar to something happening in July):
    THE MESSY BUSINESS OF REINVENTING HAPPINESS

    It is a tale of corporate politics, personal feuds, and turf wars. But it also the story of a success, even though the project didn’t fully deliver on its massive ambitions. This is what happens when a huge corporation tries to reinvent itself. This is what you have to do when you better make it work.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3044283/the-messy-business-of-reinventing-happiness#!

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/16/2015

sn_theprisoner2

IBM news continues to be dominated by Watson Health.  Nothing new was announced this week, but analysts are catching up with the news and highlighting the trends.

Oracle and EMC continue their less-than-graceful transition to the cloud.  Oracle is looking at lower cost (from their own hardware) Open Stack framework, while EMC also focuses on bringing a more flexible cloud solution to market.

And just because… Verizon buys AOL (for their content like Huffington Post and TechCrunch…probably).

IBM

Oracle

  • Oracle Trying On OpenStack For Size

    Still, even if Oracle can define $7 billion of its revenue as “cloud” this year, it would still represent less than 20% of last year’s $38.3 billion in revenue. Having its own true cloud, built on an open source infrastructure like OpenStack, would accelerate the move to true cloud economics. So might buying a profitable, growing OpenStack cloud provider like Rackspace(NYSE:RAX), but that’s purely speculation

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3183236-oracle-trying-on-openstack-for-size

  • The incredible rags-to-riches story of Oracle founder Larry Ellison

    “The very first version was Oracle Version 2,” he admitted at a customer conference last year. Their ploy worked. Oracle’s first customer was a big one: the CIA. It later became the most popular database ever sold. That success paid off for Ellison — according to the Wall Street Journal, he was the highest paid executive in the US before he stepped down as CEO in 2014.

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/rags-to-riches-story-of-larry-ellison-2015-5

  • In Google Versus Oracle, Obama’s Administration is Torn

    It’s a complicated and very technical issue, something that is not necessarily the forte of the Supreme Court. The fight over what is defensible as copyrighted work or not is far from resolved at any level, this is just the most high-profile manifestation of it. If the Supreme Court does take the case and rule on it one way or another, it could have a lot of long-term implications for how patents and trademarks on API code are treated. If Oracle wins, expect plenty more claims of ownership and a lot of litigation to come, at least in the short term. If Google wins, there will be less of that. That’s why Google’s argument includes the idea that without that code, the company wouldn’t have succeeded, meaning that innovation would be slowed if Oracle were to win.

    http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2015/05/15/obama-torn-over-google-googl-vs-oracle-orcl-court-fight/

EMC

  • Why ‘Project Horizon’ spells long-term gains for EMC

    According to Clarke, Project Horizon is a “big departure” for EMC from the extensive ECM platform it has become associated with over the past few years. “With one of the largest portfolios of ECM capabilities, its platform has often been criticized as being too complex and expensive to implement,” Clarke claims. “By contrast, Project Horizon is built on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and will offer a choice of cloud deployments.

    http://www.reseller.co.nz/article/575000/insight-why-project-horizon-spells-long-term-gains-emc/

  • EMC “eating its young” to survive say analysts

    Above all, Furrier suggested, “They need to take care of their current situation — they need to get out of the box business.” In the current competitive market, Furrier advocated that EMC “build an OS for the data center and enterprise,” despite the disruption this might cause. Furthermore, Furrier put forward the notion that “EMC has to become a utility platform with a business model that can compete in the current era.” The “game-changing moves” that EMC needs to make, said Furrier, should be “real-time, API-based” and include “unlimited compute.”

    http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/05/11/emc-eating-its-young-to-survive-say-analysts-emcworld/

  • EMC: Rise of third platform could spell end for businesses unwilling to adapt

    As alluded to by Goulden, the rise of the Information Generation and their preference for third-platform apps and services poses a major challenge for enterprises, which will need to adapt the way they work to the way this group of users likes to consume services.

    http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500246008/EMC-claims-rise-of-third-platform-could-spell-end-for-businesses-unwilling-to-adapt

Other