IBM is making headlines with their one billion dollar purchase of healthcare imaging company Merge. Merge will help Watson learn to look at medical images. That picture ability could very well be developed at on a Mac as IBM agreed to purchase 200,000 Apple computers to replace more than half of their current workforce’s systems.
EMC might get bought by VMware (you heard that right) in some attempt to reorganize post-Tucci. Informatica is going private again taking investment funds from SalesForce and Microsoft.
IBM
- IBM is buying Merge for $1B
IBM’s deal with Merge will give them access to over 7,500 U.S. healthcare-related websites. They view the platform as giving them the ability to create more personalized approaches to gather data, analyzing, diagnosing and monitoring specifically in orthopedics, cardiology and radiology.
http://www.morningticker.com/2015/08/ibm-buys-medical-image-company-merge-healthcare/
- With $1B Merge buy, IBM hopes to open Watson’s eyes to medical imagery
Right now, Watson can parse unstructured mathematical data and can employ natural language processing to read large data sets in written form. But IBM researchers estimate that medical images account for at least 90 percent of all medical data today, and images aren’t currently something Watson can work with. Using Merge’s software and datasets, Watson will be able to scan medical images, like X-rays, brain scans, or dermatological images, and compare them to a database of historical images, in order to detect anomalies or historical correlations.
http://mobihealthnews.com/45887/with-1b-merge-buy-ibm-hopes-to-open-watsons-eyes-to-medical-imagery/
- IBM’s Mac-Friendly Cloud Service Targets Enterprise IT
This new offering from IBM MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services is designed to help large enterprises incorporate Macs within their IT infrastructures – a rising requirement, as more clients adopt or allow the use of Macs by their employees. Shipments of Macs are growing faster than the industry average, and the Mac has outgrown the PC industry every year for the last decade.
- IBM is full of hot air (US gives IBM $4.5M on Methane research)
IBM will work closely with Princeton and Harvard universities to develop “An Intelligent Multi-modal Methane Measurement System” to enable low-cost methane sensing to improve on existing methods that tend to use lots of energy and costly processes.
- Over half of IBM’s 380,000 workers could soon be on MacBooks (I was right, it was over 100,000K)
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/5/9099451/ibm-apple-enterprise-macbooks
EMC
- VMware to acquire EMC?
Inverting the company to make VMware the pinnacle would send a message that says storage hardware is not the future and virtualisation/cloud (whatever that means) is where the world is headed. How would the partner relationship be affected? I suspect potentially less than in the case of an EMC acquisition as VMware would be selling storage and co-operating with partners, so called co-optition.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vmware-acquire-emc-chris-m-evans
- EMC II, VMware and the future: Unpicking the house that Joe built
There’s a case to be made that part of the reason for the Federation structure was that Tucci could not pick a single successor who would obtain the respect of the others and keep the EMC house that Joe had built in one piece. Only Joe could hold the whole caboodle together, and so the Federation came into being, with David, Pat, and Paul all getting CEO rank – and real, or near-as-dammit CEO responsibility – under Joe’s control.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/06/emc_federation_future_musings/
Other
- A first: Microsoft inches past IBM in annual revenue
Microsoft revenues now stand at $93.58 billion annually, compared to $92.79 billion for IBM.
http://fortune.com/2015/08/05/microsoft-inches-past-ibm-in-revenue/ - Gartner Seeing Steady Increase in Inquiries About Cancelling Maintenance Agreements with ERP Vendors
“Enterprise software licensees are struggling with the low value and poor service received from increasingly expensive vendor annual maintenance fees and this report verifies that many licensees are actively considering independent support options,” said Seth Ravin, CEO, Rimini Street. “Rimini Street offers Oracle and SAP licensees a more robust service offering, a more responsive service model, exceptional client value and the ability to free up funds to drive innovations the business needs today. We are proud to have already helped nearly 1,100 clients, including more than 100 Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 organizations, achieve maximum value from their IT investments.”
- Microsoft and Salesforce take a piece of Informatica
Informatica has been taken back into private hands at a price of $5.3 billion (around £3.42 billion, or AU$7.18 billion) that was part funded by Microsoft and Salesforce. It isn’t a surprise that Microsoft and Salesforce are on the purchase bandwagon given that both already do a fair bit of work with Informatica on data integration technology and Informatica’s cloud tools are built on Amazon Web Services.
- We should drop the term ‘big data’, experts suggest
Teradata Corp chief technology officer Stephen Brobst said that one of the biggest mistakes companies make is that they tend to put too much focus on the technology. “It’s not just about the technology; it’s more about value creation. Big data initiatives should not be technology-led; they should be led by value creation,” he said at a roundtable discussion in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.