Tag: Oracle

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Supplier Report: 12/5/2015

sn_bridge_TimSwaan

This week seems to be all about the scrappy underdogs taking on the champs.  Rocana wants to take a piece of splunk, Google (okay not so scrappy) wants a chunk of Amazon’s cloud business, and Amazon (also not an underdog) wants to take a bite out of Watson.

Hewlett Packard Enterprises

  • The market responded well to the HPE/Microsoft partnership…

    Gartner predicts that IoT connected devices will represent 6.4M of the total devices connected to the internet in 2016. It is extremely similar to the same deal Microsoft cut with HPE’s arch competitor, Dell, back in October. HPE also serves as a conduit to Microsoft’s growing Azure cloud computing ecosystem. Analysts on the street covering shares of Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), are projecting a one-year target price of $15.153, according to Zacks Research.

    http://waltonian.com/2015/12/hewlett-packard-enterprise-shares-rally-on-expanded/

  • BT partners with HPE on Cloud services

    British Telecom has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to allow the telco’s IP VPN customers to connect directly to HPE Helion Managed Cloud Services. BT’s service will use HPE’s Rapid Connect capability to bypass the public Internet when connecting to HPE Helion Managed Cloud Services.

    http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/589846/bt-partners-hpe-cloud-services/

  • HP Inc exits low cost Android tablets, to focus on high-end devices

    HP’s new strategy is akin to that of Apple and Microsoft, which both offer more expensive, premium tablets. Dell has also scaled back its cheap tablet product line-up instead focusing on profitability. Dell says it wants to sell only premium tablets and hybrids with advanced features like hi-res screens and even 3D cameras.

    http://www.streetwisejournal.com/hp-exits-low-cost-tablet-market/
    Note: Hmmm… that sounds oddly similar to what I said on a certain podcast last week…

  • The Sad Story of HP Printers

    At HP Printers, they were fully aware back in the late 1970s that the market was moving to go paperless, but spent the following decades in denial rather than in pivoting to take advantage of the opportunities that this move would create. Recent surveys indicate that a majority of firms will be paperless shortly, yet with four decades of warning, HP doesn’t appear ready.

    HP Inc.’s numbers are out and they are getting pounded by the decline in printing supplies. As a result of this long-anticipated move, they now serve as a lesson of what not to do. They also showcase why so many dominant companies, even with lots of notice, don’t survive an industry event like the paperless office

    http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/the-sad-story-of-hp-printers.html

Other

  • Microsoft Overtakes IBM as Most Buggy Software Vendor

    “The reason so many Microsoft products are in the Top 20 lists this time is that both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge come bundled with Adobe Flash, adding the 35 Flash vulnerabilities listed in August to Windows 8 and upwards,” he said.

    http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/microsoft-overtakes-ibm-most-buggy/

  • Forrester: Google cloud business a concern for AWS, IBM

    Google does not break out its cloud revenues separately when reporting results, but at a recent event, the firm said it thinks its cloud revenue will surpass its sales from online advertising in five years’ time. Its aim is to be referred to as a cloud company by 2020.

    http://www.channelnomics.com/channelnomics-us/news/2437017/forrester-google-cloud-business-a-concern-for-aws-ibm

  • So Larry Ellison wrote a book about Oracle…

    I learned many important things from this book, but I found this quote to be most useful: “People — teachers, coaches, bosses — want you to conform to some standard of behavior they deem correct. They measure and reward you on how well you conform — arrive on time, dress appropriately, exhibit a properly deferential attitude — as opposed to how well you do your job. Programming liberated me from all that. I could work in the middle of the night. I could wear blue jeans and a T-shirt. I could ride my motorcycle to work. And I’d make more money if I could solve the problem faster and better than anyone else.”

    http://www.gurufocus.com/news/375356/the-oracle-of-software-

  • Startup Rocana wants to be everything Splunk is and more, bringing big data to DevOps

    Years back, Omer Trajman, Eric Sammer, and Don Brown met while working together at Cloudera. They were early executives and field employees charged with helping customers understand Hadoop and how to use it to solve business problems. They did this, possibly, hundreds of times and, while they were able to help many business better understand Hadoop, they always seemed to hit a snag when it came to getting it into production.

    The problem was that the operations team, the folks in the data center, didn’t know how to run it or weren’t able to. So, they started solving the operations problem as well. They screwed it up plenty of times, Trajman said, but they also got it right many times as well.

    http://www.techrepublic.com/article/startup-rocana-wants-to-be-everything-splunk-is-and-more-bringing-big-data-to-devops/

  • Teradata restructures leadership, cuts co-president

    Teradata (NYSE: TDC) said its board of directors moved Tuesday to dissolve its co-president management structure in light of the recent decision to exit the market applications business. The co-president position held by Hermann Wimmer has been terminated. The company has appointed Robert Fair as chief operating officer. Michael Koehler, CEO of the company, has additionally been named president.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/blog/morning_call/2015/12/teradata-restructures-leadership-cuts-co-president.html

  • Why Dell Might Sell Quest Software & SonicWall

    The rumors began flying Wednesday night that Dell is shopping its portfolio companies — Quest Software and SonicWall — to buyout firms KKR & Co LP, Thoma Bravo LLC and Vista Equity Partners Management LLC.

    http://www.cmswire.com/information-management/why-dell-might-sell-quest-software-sonicwall/

Photo: Tim Swaan

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/14/2015

sn_shoreline_The Pic Pac

EMC and Dell are in some rough waters with the IRS.  Will their creative use of “tracking shares” be able to keep their deal afloat or will it crash and sink the mega-purchase?

On the topic of purchases, IBM finalized the acquisition of two companies:  Meteorix & Cleversafe.  Outside of that news, it was a fairly quiet week for big blue, with standard articles (at this point) of the medical research potential of Watson.

Oracle is getting good press about their cloud attempts and the fact that they are going after Amazon hard.  Will they win?  Who knows, but the spectators are excited to see this fight happen.

IBM

  • IBM adds two new company acquisitions
    They finalized Meteorix:

    Yesterday, IBM announced that it has closed a deal to acquire Meteorix LLC, a premier Workday services partner.

    They also finalized the acquisition of Cleversafe

    Last week, IBM announced that it closed a deal to acquire Cleversafe, Inc., a leading developer and manufacturer of object-based storage software and appliances. According to a statement from IBM, the acquisition will strengthen IBM’s leadership positions in storage and hybrid cloud and support clients’ drive to next generation mobile, social and analytics applications.

    http://wraltechwire.com/ibm-adds-two-new-company-acquisitions/15102318/

  • Watson to help kids battling rare diseases

    IBM’s cognitive learning platform will be integrated into Boston Children’s Hospital to help researchers at the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research in their study of steroid-resistant neophrotic syndrome (SRNS), a rare genetic form of kidney disease. Watson will first scour all available literature and related information on SRNS, then be used to process genomic data from patients at Boston Children’s to help researchers identify and develop treatment options for the disease.

    http://www.mhealthnews.com/news/watson-help-kids-battling-rare-diseases

  • More Partners Sign On to IBM Cloud

    Meanwhile, IBM said HCL would use its Bluemix to develop IoT sensors deployed to collect and exchange data from networks of sensors. HCL is developing IoT networks as an adjunct to its flagship IT services and “enterprise digitalization” businesses.

    http://www.enterprisetech.com/2015/11/12/more-partners-sign-on-to-ibm-cloud/

  • IBM, Apple, and Watson: You are about to become obsolete
    I like this post due to the insights of a former employee versus his thoughts about their current state.

    As this first set of sessions ended we had the guy running Watson speak on the fact that—for many professions—the professionals don’t know what they need to know. For instance, even attorneys that specialize don’t know the majority of the laws that define their specialty, let alone all of them. At the core of the IBM Watson effort and its general analytics push is to fix that problem. The time is coming when any professional that doesn’t have access to, and know how to use a tool like Watson will have inadequate skills to gain employment in the developed world.

    http://techspective.net/2015/11/13/ibm-apple-and-watson-you-are-about-to-become-obsolete/

  • Switch to Macs from PCs reportedly saves IBM US$270 per user

    While 40 percent of IBM’s PC users call the helpdesk for troubleshooting, on average only 5 percent of the company’s Mac user do the same, according to Previn. “The longer this program runs, the more compelling the business case becomes,” he says. “I can confidently say that every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money.”

    http://www.mis-asia.com/tech/mobile-and-wireless/switch-to-macs-from-pcs-reportedly-saves-ibm-us270-per-user/

EMC

  • Dell targets simpler cloud experience with EMC

    Kelly points out that many of Dell’s and EMC’s businesses are complementary. For example, EMC storage and Dell servers aid the adoption of converged infrastructure and hybrid cloud; EMC’s RSA controls for identity assurance, fraud detection and data protection; security analytics; and GRC capabilities with Dell’s SecureWorks network security and managed security services; AirWatch mobile device, application and content management with KACE systems and device management; and the Pivotal open cloud platform and agile software development tools with the Boomi platform as a service.

    http://www.networksasia.net/article/dell-targets-simpler-cloud-experience-emc.1447295769

  • Dell’s EMC Acquisition In Danger Over Tax Problems – ($9B Tax Bill)

    The use of this ‘tracking stock’ is intended to offset the amount of debt Dell would have to take on, and also help it avoid avoid a heavy tax bill. But it depends on the American IRS interprets the use of this tracking stock. According to the report, tracking stocks were commonly used during the dot.com boom years in the 1990s, and its use in the deal could invite scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service.

    “Dell’s plan to create tracking shares in a company it does not yet own (that’s VMware) would, if successful, amount to a clever threading of a needle in US tax laws,” said Re/code. “It is intended as neither a distribution of shares nor the spinoff of a subsidiary, both of which are typically taxable events. Instead, EMC shareholders will face taxes in the range of 20 percent to 40 percent for the gains on the cash and the value of the tracking shares.”

    http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/e-enterprise/merger-acquisition/dell-emc-tax-problems-180378
    Read More:
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/10/emc-us-ma-dell-idUSL3N1354VS20151110

Oracle

  • Oracle’s Cloud Prospects Look Positive

    Oracle has embarked on an aggressive strategy to win market share in the cloud market. However, the company is a late entrant and questions have surfaced on whether Oracle could succeed against early entrants such as Microsoft and market leader Amazon who established themselves in the cloud market years earlier than Oracle.

    sn_oracle_wsj_2015_11_13
    Credit: Wall Street Journal
    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3675736-oracles-cloud-prospects-look-positive

  • Oracle Is About to Eat Amazon’s Lunch

    Now, Oracle is acting as much out of envy and perhaps even desperation as anything else. While AMZN stock has doubled in 2015 despite a rough market, ORCL stock is down over 11%. And longer term, Oracle stock is up just 40% or so in the last five years vs. over 290% for Amazon stock and 70% for the broader S&P 500 in the same period.

    But with some $56 billion in cash and investments and a will to roll out an ambitious suite of cloud products, AMZN investors should be looking over their shoulder at Oracle as it ramps up in the next six months.

    http://investorplace.com/2015/11/amzn-stock-amazon-web-services-oracle/

Other

  • Why Meg Whitman’s ‘Hmm …’ emails make HP managers scramble

    So she told the whole company they were to follow a new rule. If they saw an issue they were to “escalate in 24 hours and resolve it in 48 hours. If that problem is not solved in 48, everyone has the right to send me an email. I’m an expert forwarder. When I forward an email on, things get done,” she said.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/employees-fear-meg-whitman-hmm-email-2015-11

  • Red Hat enhances containers across open hybrid cloud

    “The datacenter is heterogeneous, and the cloud is hybrid”, said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has been there for close to two years, and many enterprise customers are finding the benefits of deploying workloads on Linux in the public cloud. These offerings help developers to build and integrate faster and adaptable applications with familiar, supported open source tools with significantly less “ramp-up” time and a unified experience across hybrid architectures.

    http://observerleader.com/2015/11/red-hat-enhances-containers-across-open-hybrid-cloud/

  • A Closer Look At Microsoft And Red Hat Partnership

    Meanwhile, Red Hat has gone through interesting times. Canonical Ubuntu gave it a tough competition as the most preferred Linux distribution in the public cloud. Minimalistic, container-optimized operating systems such as CoreOS and RancherOS started to gain popularity. Red Hat’s ambitious plan to repeat the magic with OpenStack, the open source cloud management platform, didn’t translate due to the lack of enterprise adoption. OpenShift, Red Hat’s PaaS was going through a major revamp to embrace containers and Kubernetes. The virtualization market has been shrinking, and there was enough pressure from VMware in this market. Given that Red Hat doesn’t have its own public cloud, its success comes from making RHEL a ubiquitous OS for enterprise workloads across multiple clouds. These factors forced Red Hat to consider partnering with Microsoft.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2015/11/11/a-closer-look-at-microsoft-and-red-hat-partnership/

  • Teradata Cuts Ties With The Marketing Stack

    Some speculate private equity investors will step in and divest key marketing assets, similar to the path eBay Enterprise took. Others suggest any number of enterprise companies could serve as potential acquirers.

    “Aprimo [a campaign manager Teradata bought for $525 million in 2010] was a good acquisition for them and they’ve done a lot with the marketing piece,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research. “If you’re a company that wants to build out marketing apps on top of a database and analytics, it would make sense for that.”

    http://adexchanger.com/digital-marketing-2/teradata-cuts-ties-with-the-marketing-stack/

Photo: The Pic Pac

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/7/2015

sn_edisonbulb_JoshByers

IBM purchased another company named Gravitant this week.  It helps customers select cloud services from a variety of providers (and is a cloud service itself).  I know I keep saying this, but IBM is consistent with their purchases: Cloud, Analytics (Big Data), and IoT.  Now I want to see all the pieces put together.

And when you have it all together, then you break it apart.  HPE announced the departure of their CIO on the first official business day as Hewlett Packard Enterprises.  The market seems to be down on HPE at the moment, while their sister company HP Inc gained on their opening day despite concerns about the health of the PC and printer markets.

The Dell/EMC acquisition continues to befuddle me.  Rumor has it that Dell is looking to sell off $10B in assets (wise move) to pay down their massive debt.  They are also looking to rush a startup that EMC and VMWare (and GE) created called Pivotal to IPO to help generate additional funds.  So… Dell goes private and loves it, they are buying EMC and taking them private (presumably), but they are KEEPING VMWare public, and starting another company with the EMC asset and doing an IPO… that made my fingers hurt.

IBM

  • IBM’s Shopping Spree Continues As It Buys Cloud Brokerage Firm Gravitant

    With Gravitant, it gets cloud brokerage, which helps companies manage cloud purchases across multiple suppliers. IBM plans to fold the new bauble into its IBM Global Technology Services unit. In addition, IBM Cloud plans to add the capabilities to its growing SaaS catalogue.

    That’s like a two for one sale because Gravitant gets sold as an old fashioned service offering, and also as a SaaS product, which plays well into IBM’s overall strategy.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/ibms-shopping-spree-continues-as-it-buys-cloud-brokerage-firm-gravitant/

  • The Mainframe Is a Vampire

    If you looked at the recent IBM numbers, which were pretty painful but in line with what generally happens when a company is adapting to a major industry change, you saw one bright light: their mainframe business was growing faster than the server segment in general is growing.

    In fact, with the massive growth of web services, it has been hard for the server segment to get out of the low single digits. But once you adjusted for currency fluctuations, mainframes (IBM’s System Z) were up a whopping 20 percent. That’d be impressive server growth in a good year, for what has been a really soft year for servers, 20 percent growth is outstanding.

    http://www.datamation.com/commentary/the-mainframe-is-a-vampire.html

  • Why the IBM – Weather Company purchase is a big deal (shameless plug: I cover this topic on the SourceCast podcast episode #3, which will go live tomorrow… so visit again!)

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-11-05/ibm-to-buy-weather-company-why-that-s-a-big-deal
  • IBM Watson is going to change how you think about the weather (Here is a non-video article that says similar (internet of) things)

    The focus at IBM is not so much in getting Watson involved in making better weather forecasts, but in putting the world’s most famous supercomputer to work in mining epic amounts of data in order to help businesses come up with actionable insights about the weather on both a real-time and long-term basis.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/11/05/ibm-watson-is-going-to-change-how-you-think-about-the-weather/

EMC/Dell

  • Pivotal IPO Could Make Dell-EMC Deal Even More Complicated

    As a reminder, EMC owns 80 percent of VMware, which is operated and traded as an independent company. When Dell agreed to buy EMC for $67 billion last month the deal included VMware, which Dell has said it wants to continue operating in the same fashion.

    Pivotal is itself a joint venture of EMC and VMware along with GE (which owns around 10 percent). The plan could call for EMC to sell about 20 percent of its ownership stake as an IPO, which is similar to what it did when it took VMware public in 2007, according to the re/code article.

    If this is true, it’s just another case of this deal getting ever more muddled with multiple layers of ownership, all pointing back to Dell, which if this closes is the ultimate decider here. Let’s not forget, however that EMC has a clause in its agreement that if it gets a better offer than the $67 billion that Dell offered it, it could take that deal.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/pivotal-ipo-could-make-dell-emc-deal-even-more-complicated/

  • Dell planning to sell off $10 billion in assets (rumor)
    It is too early to say I called it, but keep watching for news like this…

    Reuters reports the PC vendor is planning this to reduce the heavy debt load it will be taking on to buy data storage company EMC for around £44 billion. In 2007, EMC sold 19 percent of VMware shares in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. A successful Pivotal IPO could potentially raise billions in new capital

    http://financialspots.com/2015/11/04/dell-planning-to-sell-off-10-billion-in-assets-rumour/

    Here is more information on the sell off providing possible asset targets:

    Unnamed sources told Reuters that Dell will take on about $49.5 billion after it completes the $67 billion acquisition of EMC and its federated companies sometime next year. Selling such assets as its Quest software business (for systems management), SonicWall (network security) and AppAssure (data backup) will help the company reduce the debt load, according to the sources.

    http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/dell-reportedly-to-sell-software-assets-to-ease-debt-from-emc-deal.html

Hewlett Packard (HPE & HPI)
Note: I suspect my coverage of HP Inc will dwindle with time, but for now, I will cover both companies.  

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise Loses CIO As It Charts New Course

    Ralph Loura, who had served as chief information officer of the enterprise business of HP for the past 15 months, has left the company. “I had an impact while there [and] I helped design the new op model for IT, and designed myself out of it because it was what the new company needed (move from a federated model with group CIOs, to a unified/centralized model with a single CIO),” he wrote to CRN.

    http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/300078699/hewlett-packard-enterprises-loses-cio-as-it-splits-from-the-former-hp.htm

  • Why JPMorgan Is Cautious On HP Inc (HPQ)

    The skeptical view taken by the firm comes on the back of PC data, which is hardly reassuring. Seagate and Western Digital both guided for a decline in HDD TAM for the fourth quarter. Intel reported a 19% YoY decline in its PC shipments for 3QFY15 worse than the 10% decline witnessed in 2QFY15. Desktops and Notebooks posted even worse numbers and there is scarcely anything notable that stirs confidence. While HDD companies see signs of stabilization, analysts at JPMorgan are far from convinced and expect more macro instability.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/25953-why-jpmorgan-is-cautious-on-hp-inc-hpq/

    However, On Monday, the stock market reacted like this (per USA Today):

    HPQ, which sells PCs and printers, soared 13%, to $13.83; HPE, responsible for commercial computer systems, software and services,  fell 1.6% $14.49. Both stocks are trading on the S&P 500.

Other

  • Why Billionaire Trader Stan Druckenmiller Believes In Amazon And Not IBM

    “We are in a bubble in what I would call short term behavior,” Druckenmiller said. To reinforce the point Druckenmiller gave a negative assessment of IBM, which he said has missed earnings only three times over the past nine years and is in the process of buying back billions in stock, and a bullish view on Amazon.com… the difference? While IBM is cutting R&D spending against a shrinking base of sales, Amazon has doubled that spending as a percentage of sales even as they’ve grown at double digit rates. “I love Amazon. They are investing on the future,” Druckenmiller said, before quipping, “Bezos is a serial monopolist.”

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/11/03/billionaire-trader-stan-druckenmiller-says-hes-long-growth-stocks-short-value-stocks/

  • Will NoSQL be the undoing of Oracle’s database reign?

    What’s most interesting in all this is how database popularity, broadly measured, compares with Gartner’s newly released Operational Database Magic Quadrant. TechRepublic contributor Janakiram MSV has captured five big takeaways from Gartner’s report, but here’s a sixth:The database vendors that embrace NoSQL are destined to be the long-term winners.

    Photo: DB-Engines
    Photo: DB-Engines

    http://www.techrepublic.com/article/will-nosql-be-the-undoing-of-oracles-database-reign/

  • Why Did Microsoft Corporation Paint Its Cloud Red?

    As part of the deal, Microsoft will feature Red Hat’s Linux as a “preferred” option for enterprise computing jobs on Azure. The deal comes in as a surprise for many as the companies have historically had differing stances on software patents and usage. Red Hat has always encouraged open-source softwares that can be distributed widely and can be modified. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been against it. Interesting to note is the fact that a separate technical team will be built from employees of both companies to solve the customer issues more efficiently.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/25978-why-did-microsoft-corporation-paint-its-cloud-red/

  • Teradata Plans to Sell Its $200 Million Marketing Application Business. Any Takers?

    According to financial statements within the Teradata announcement, Marketing Applications revenue was down about 9% this year, which is surprising in a generally strong martech market but in line with the rest of Teradata’s business. Teradata told me separately that their marketing cloud business grew 22% year-on-year this quarter, suggesting that the decline came in the older, on-premise products and/or related services. As you may know, Teradata’s marketing applications business was a mashup of the original Teradata marketing products, developed over the past 20 years and largely on-premise, and the Aprimo cloud-based systems acquired for $525 million in 2010. The Aprimo group was dominant in the years immediately following the acquisition but control shifted back to the older Teradata team more recently. One bit of evidence: the Aprimo brand was dropped in 2013.

    http://customerthink.com/teradata-plans-to-sell-its-200-million-marketing-application-business-any-takers/

Photo: Josh Byers