Supplier Report: 1/30/2015

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IBM
Even though IBM has refuted reports of a massive layoff, reports continue to come in.  Something to keep an eye on.

[Note: The blogger who broke the story still maintains that major reductions (10k) have started]

Oracle

  • Is Ellison overpaid?
    Another scenario of investor shenanigans…

    Jackson said that in their view, even if PGGM and Railways Pension do not own a massive stake in Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) between the both of them, they are representing the majority of shareholders in the company which may have these issues with the way the software company is run. She said that they could have partnered with other substantial shareholders, but PGGM and Railways Pension are the groups which have been consistently been bringing up these issues in the past years.

    http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/is-oracle-corporation-orcls-ellison-overpaid-catherine-jackson-thinks-so-338531/

  • Oracle stock remains strong:

    Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) dropped slightly amid mild profit booking and the last known price was $43.9 per share. The price decreased by -0.29 points or -0.66% which made the investors to buy on weakness. For the latest trading session, the net money flow was recorded at $19.39 million. The total upticks were valued at $78.32 million and the total downticks aggregated to $58.93 million, thereby putting the up/down ratio at 1.33, implying that stock remains inherently strong. The counter has seen a change in the share price of -0.66% on a weekly basis.In a big block trade which occurred today, the total uptick value was $27.18 million and the total downtick value was $13.89, resulting in an up/down ratio of 1.96. The net money flow for the block trade was calculated to be $13.3 million.

    http://stafforddaily.com/oracle-corporation-witness-large-inflow-of-money/322095/

HP

Other

Supplier Report: 1/24/2015

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IBM

Oracle

  • CEO Larry Ellison on New Oracle Hardware Technique: ‘The way to compete is to have the lowest cost’

    “Home-constructed systems can be high priced you have to do the integration and make it all perform collectively,” stated Ellison. “Our strategy has generally been to engineer all the layers – compute, storage, and networking – together, so you don’t have to. Having said that, we actually under no circumstances aimed at the lowest achievable purchase price with our tiered systems.”

    http://www.wpxnews.com/technology/ceo-larry-ellison-on-new-oracle-hardware-technique-039the-way-to-compete-is-to-have-the-lowest-cost039-h435.html

  • More on Oracle’s price war – specifically going after VMWare…

    In his classic trash-talking style, Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison specifically slammed EMC (VMware’s parent company) during the presentation, claiming, “Our list price is less than half of their discount prices.” Then he laughed and made it clear. “We will negotiate and will discount prices” even more.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/analyst-vmware-rips-out-oracle-for-sap-2015-1

HP

Other

  • Microsoft’s Consent To Poaching Of Employee Brings Rapprochement With Salesforce

    “I told him I wanted to hire one of his technologists as head of our infrastructure. What would be in it for Microsoft is the foundation of a partnership that would give us more kinds of ideas of things that we can do together. And he said okay. Now we’re learning about things that we could do with Microsoft’s file-management technologies and Office that we would never have known on our own”, the CEO said, according to Fortune.

    http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/01/23/microsofts-consent-to-poaching-of-employee-brings-rapprochement-with-salesforce/

Supplier Report: 1/17/2015

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IBM

There is ALOT Of mainframe chatter this week from IBM.

  • Softlayer’s IaaS standing up to Amazon’s AWS:

    “IBM SoftLayer does some things well and some things cheaper,” Linthicum said. “And if people say, ‘should we consider them?’ I say ‘sure. Why not?’ If you need a bare-metal cloud, you don’t want to pay for network traffic, those sorts of things, they seem to rise to the top.”

    http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/2240238356/IBM-SoftLayer-IaaS-stands-up-to-AWS-with-free-support-networking

  • A counter-point to an article I shared last week: Don’t tell IBM the mainframe is dead…

    It’s very likely true that companies relying on Linux, Java, and databases to support their cloud computing, analytical, and transactional workloads would experience higher levels of performance at a lower overall cost if they deployed a small number of IBM z13 systems, rather than a larger number of any vendor’s industry standard x86 offerings to do the same work.

    http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2015/01/16/ibm-says-mainframe-not-dead.aspx

  • IBM is named a Hadoop leader:

    “In a survey of more than 1,000 Big Data developers, analyst firm Evans Data Corp. found that IBM is the leading provider of Hadoop among developers, with more than 25 percent of respondents identifying IBM’s Hadoop as their principle distribution,” the company announced Tuesday. “The survey also focused on key growth areas such as machine learning and streaming analytics, where 18 percent of developers cited IBM InfoSphere Streams as their preferred application for machine learning, making it the second most popular choice in the category.”

    http://adtmag.com/articles/2015/01/15/ibm-big-data.aspx

  • Mainframe with Mobile focus:

    The z13 also claims to be the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale and the first mainframe system with embedded analytics to offer real-time insights on all transactions. The latter capability helps drive real-time fraud Relevant Products/Services detection on business transactions by delivering “on the fly” analytic insights that IBM said are 17 times faster than comparable competitive systems.

    http://www.cio-today.com/article/index.php?story_id=03200113GNCW

  • IBM ranks first in registered patents (again)
    http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/01/12/4471247/ibm-ranks-first-in-us-patents.html?sp=/99/104/

Oracle

  • The man to watch at Oracle:

    Kurian’s sway within Oracle, as evidenced by the dynamic in these meetings as well as his growing responsibilities, has some current and former company executives convinced that he will one day succeed Ellison and run the technology company, which has a market cap of about $190bn. Even after Ellison named Hurd and Catz as co-CEOs in September, insiders said they believed Kurian was the man to watch at Oracle. One senior Oracle executive said that after Hurd and Catz were promoted, top executives worried about keeping Kurian motivated and happy. He continued to report directly to Ellison, now executive chairman of the board, along with Hurd, Catz and two others.

    http://www.gulf-times.com/opinion/189/details/423074/the-man-to-watch-at-oracle

HP

 

Supplier Report: 1/10/2015

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IBM

Oracle

  • Thomas Kurian is new Oracle president

    The appointment of Kurian, 48, comes in the wake of Larry Ellison moving over from the role of chief executive officer (CEO) of the $38-billion software, solutions and hardware company to that of executive chairman, having handed the reins of the company to Safra Catz and Mark Hurd. The Indian spokesperson of Oracle confirmed the elevation but declined to comment further.

    http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/thomas-kurian-is-new-oracle-president-115010900724_1.html

  • Oracle’s Data Domination

    Oracle Corporation has in over a year, gone through extensive acquisitions, Responsys, Comendium, Eloqua, Bluekai – to have a well-evolved cloud-based marketing platform in Data Cloud. Therefore, Oracle Corporations intention of building marketing solutions around its data-driven acquisitions will position it as a leader in this segment. As most technology companies begin to recognize ‘big data’ as the way forward and engage in different verticals of data analytics.

    http://www.opptrends.com/2015/01/oracle-corporation-nyseorcl-data-domination/

HP

  • Why the PC isn’t quite dead yet…
    I am going to take this a step further to get on my soapbox about computing.  I don’t get why people think desktop machines should go away.  For work purposes, when you expect people to go home and log back in, sure a laptop is a good solution (unless you buy cheap clients and access a remote desktop).  But for home use – I prefer a desktop.  I have a tablet for my mobile computing.  I want a nice monitor and a proper keyboard and decent place to sit when I sit down to work.  I rarely use the laptop screen (unless it is a 2nd screen) and I need a real keyboard.
    http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/ces-2015-why-the-pc-isnt-quite-dead-yet-20150107-12jvmn.html
  • Another example of HP failing to deliver on a services contract (covered the initial dispute a few weeks ago):

    Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is getting a $7.5 million refund from the information technology company hired nearly nine years ago to develop a massive software program intended to run New Jersey’s multi-billion-dollar network of social service programs, a state spokeswoman confirmed tonight.

    http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/01/it_company_will_refund_nj_75_million_but_will_not_deliver_on_contract_to_automate_social_service_pro.html

Other