Supplier Report: 5/2/2015

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The big news this week is SalesForce potentially being up for sale.  There were hundreds of articles discussing potential buyers with IBM, Oracle, HP, and Microsoft being the only viable contenders.

Speaking of Oracle and HP, outside of the Saleforce news, there wasn’t much new information posted (same recycled stories).  Sometimes you are looking for the sizzle and the steak, so focus was shifted to other suppliers this week like EMC and Red Hat.

IBM

  • Apple and IBM are looking to get iPads in the hands of the elderly:

    The collaboration calls for Apple to provide iPads and IBM to deliver apps and analytics software to connect millions of Japanese seniors with services, healthcare, community and their families under the national Post Office Watch service. IBM will write software that alerts Post Office Watch customers to take their medicine, provide them with exercise and diet information and assist with tasks such as grocery shopping.

    http://thevarguy.com/business-technology-solution-sales/050115/apple-ibm-japan-post-supply-tablets-elderly-japanese

  • IBM introduces new quantum computing chip:

    IBM’s new chip is the first to integrate the basic devices needed to build a quantum computer, known as qubits, into a 2-D grid. Researchers think one of the best routes to making a practical quantum computer would involve creating grids of hundreds or thousands of qubits working together. The circuits of IBM’s chip are made from metals that become superconducting when cooled to extremely low temperatures. The chip operates at only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

    http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537041/ibm-shows-off-a-quantum-computing-chip/

  • IBM boosts divident by 18%

    The increase will cost the company an extra $197.7 million a quarter and brings the dividend yield to about 3%.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-boosts-quarterly-dividend-18-1430232709

  • Cloud is not a high margin business:

    AWS, which many thought was running at break-even or possibly at a loss, turns out to be for Amazon a $5 billion business generating a third of the company’s total profits. That’s good, right? Not if it establishes a benchmark for typical-to-good cloud service provider performance. In fact it suggests that some companies — IBM especially — are going to have a very difficult time finding success in the cloud.

    http://betanews.com/2015/04/28/aws-shows-cloud-is-not-a-high-margin-business/

  • Interesting “what if” post of IBM buying TCS…

    It’s simple – make a move on the largest, most aggressive and dynamic of the Indian-heritage providers:  TCS.   Together, they would crush the market across all aspects of delivery, all verticals, all technologies because their individual forays in the As-a-Service world could play off each other and get scale even quicker.  They would have skill at massive scale and could undercut the competition on key deals – almost at will – if they needed to.

    http://www.horsesforsources.com/ibm-tcs_042515

EMC

Other

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: 12/6/2014

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IBM

Oracle

HP

Other

  • How much did Microsoft lose on the BN Nook deal?

    That aside, the deal was announced 977 days ago, and an un-adjusted $180.4 million loss over that period works out to $188,331 per day. That is both a lot of money, and not much money at all. In real terms, burning nearly $200,000 per day is quite expensive. For Microsoft, however, the total loss amounts to a minute percentage of its ready cash, not to mention its quarterly net income, making the figure inconsequential.

    http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/04/heres-how-much-money-microsoft-lost-per-day-on-the-nook-deal/

  • How one woman helped Lenovo go global (story how they picked up desktop IBM business and a nice story about learning to do business with other cultures)
    http://fortune.com/2014/12/01/the-woman-who-helped-lenovo-go-global/
  • 2015 acquisition predictions (they are still calling for an HP-EMC merger)
    http://www.zdnet.com/article/2015-it-vendor-upheaval-ahead/
  • Tableau to spend 28% of revenue on research. CEO Christian Chabot on their direction:

    Here’s an amazing thing you can do with Tableau Online [the company’s first cloud foray]. You can just be at your desk. Let’s say you’re a teacher or a nurse or a journalist—you’re some inspired and critical-thinking person, but you definitely wouldn’t call yourself an analyst and you definitely wouldn’t call yourself an IT person. There you are, sitting with a spreadsheet full of data, with every article, or every student with every test they’ve ever taken, or every patient and every shift and every covering nurse. You can open Tableau’s software, and you can create an interactive, visual summary of everything going on. How patients are falling in and out of beds. Which students appear to be at risk. Or which articles on which days are producing the highest click-through rates.

    http://fortune.com/2014/12/02/tableau-software-ceo-research/