Yet buying and selling became central enterprises of business over the course of the last century. Corporations focused on standardization—the Deming ideal—so needs became predictable enough to compare vendors directly, find the greatest price value through the routinized process of request for proposal (RFP), and thereby provide what everyone needed. Buying became the science of squeezing price, sales the art of justifying price, and both functions grew into large organizations. Business is getting too complex and dynamic for centralized buying and selling machines. What’s more, the strategic sourcing initiatives of the past two decades all but erased margins for high-volume suppliers. When the absolute floor is the baseline, there is no need to sell, per se. There is only a need to serve. In fact, there is a heightened need to serve. The only way to differentiate a company is in helping customers profit through the use of products.
You want to build an awesome business right? Then you need to understand how to create an awesome customer experience. Well, you’re a customer too right? Most of what I’ve learned about customer service has been from being a customer. I look at each person or company I buy from as a mentor because they help me create better experiences for my customers by creating a good or bad buying experience for me.
McDonalds vow to end deforestation in its global supply chain
Applying throughout the entire supply chain, the core principles and practices of McDonald’s commitment on deforestation include: No deforestation of primary forests or areas of high conservation value; No development of high carbon stock forest areas and no development on peatlands regardless of depth, and the utilization of best management practices for existing commodity production on peatlands.
83% of supply chain executives report lackluster performance as they struggle to get to grips with effects of globalization
Supply chains are being held back by the effects of globalization, according to a new survey, with 83% of executives from leading enterprises claiming to see only average or poor performance. Over 60% said this is primarily due to the number of partners involved and the risks this creates, which is in turn limiting their flexibility.
The two new services include the Order Management Cloud and the Global Order Promising Cloud. Together, they offer order management, visibility and order fulfillment capabilities, the company said. But to go a step further, Oracle’s new services connect businesses’ current sales and order processes in its Configure, Price and Quote Cloud product and their current packing and shipping services in the Inventory Cloud product, all to Oracle’s billing in the Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud.
The press was focused on big data and the transformation of the classic IT companies from legacy business to the newer cloud/SaaS model. Between IBM’s new tiny chip set, the ever increasing abilities of Watson, and the propagation of SoftLayer, IBM’s business model seems on track. So on track that Seeking Alpha wonders if they should spin off their legacy consulting and software model.
Oracle seems to emulating IBM with their partnership with Xamarin. Meanwhile, EMC finalized their purchase of Virtustream and released an interesting blog on their own thoughts on big data.
IBM
Seeking Alpha: IBM Should Spin Off Its Legacy Business Of Installing Software And Consulting Services
It’s true that licensed software still makes up about a quarter of the total software sales at IBM, roughly the same revenue level for subscription software – with the rest tied to the company’s hardware sales. But continuing to run the on-premise software installation business along with a drastically different, new business endeavor of building cloud infrastructure to deliver software as a service all seems to be counter-intuitive. It may well hinder the company’s efforts to both salvage the declining market for installed software and press ahead with the rising cloud business.
IBM Chasing $20B Linux Server Market With Power Systems
Balog said that the conversation IBM is having with organizations is about finding the data workloads that today are having challenges with ingesting information or business insights with analytics. IBM Power excels in the area of data analytics and enterprise Java applications, Balog said.
Should Intel Corp. Investors Worry About IBM’s Big Announcement?
There’s a significant difference between producing a single test chip and going into mass production. For example, back at Intel’s 2013 investor meeting, the individual responsible for running Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group, Bill Holt, said that Intel had test chips of its 10-nanometer manufacturing technology up and running. And yet, it’s looking like volume production of Intel’s first 10-nanometer processors won’t begin until sometime in 2016 for what’s increasingly looking like a 2017 product rollout. That’s a roughly three-year gap from when Holt said Intel had test chips on 10-nanometer running — and the test chips may have been floating around even earlier — to economically viable high-volume manufacturing.
“Of the 120,000 workforce we have globally, 31,000 are in India, making it the second largest after our employees’ strength in the US,” Oracle president Thomas Kurian told reporters at an event here.
Oracle Abandons Its Largest Copyright Damages Theory Against Rimini Street
In a recent Court filing, in response to challenges raised by Rimini Street, Oracle abandoned its biggest damages theory of copyright infringement for its PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel-branded software products based on fair market value, measured by hypothetical license or income approach, to “streamline” the issues for trial. Accordingly, Oracle has withdrawn the $210 million damages associated with its fair market value theory. Oracle’s primary remaining copyright damages theory in the case is for lost profits, where Rimini Street asserts Oracle’s theory is without merit due to a complete lack of proof of causation.
ERP Cloud Could Be The Next Big Thing For Oracle Corporation
Ebbeck noted that customers that have already adopted some cloud services from Oracle and would likely come back for ERP cloud. The other area of potential growth is among the existing on-premise install base. Ebbeck stated that ERP cloud simplifies the IT environments and eliminates the usually time-consuming and expensive on-premise software upgrades.
Oracle Teams Up with Xamarin for Expanding Cloud Business
Oracle recently announced its partnership with California based software company, Xamarin in order to build its cloud platform. Xamarin, known for its mobile development platform for enterprises, will offer a software development kit for Oracle’s cloud-based mobile applications under the new deal.
Understanding the Dimensions of Your Big Data Strategy
One of the key differences between big data analytics and classic business intelligence is the way by which big data demands real-time decision making in applications to force a different decision in stride based on predictive modeling. Modern third-platform applications rely on analytics to decide what to do now with machine data, personal information, geospatial information, and other criteria that are statistically significant in making a decision. This requires the technology capability to integrate analytics and applications, but equally importantly, it requires business support to change business decisions in real-time based on analytics recommendations called by mission critical applications. As such, business adoption relies on business analysis to identify key business moments that can be driven by analytics.
EMC announced it has completed the acquisition of Virtustream. Virtustream represents a transformational element of EMC’s strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments. The all-cash transaction is expected to have no material impact to EMC financial results in 2015 and is expected to be additive to revenues and accretive to EPS in 2016. Operational details of the new EMC Federation business formed by Virtustream will be announced later this quarter.
IBM has created a microprocessor that has components the same size as a strand of DNA. While IBM makes smaller chips, EMC has become a smaller company by selling off Syncplicity (a file sharing company).
Reports are coming out that Oracle is bullying customers with usage breach notices due to their missed performance goals last quarter. Speaking of performance goals, looks like cloud costs are going up (Microsoft and IBM are raising prices in certain areas) – is the race to the bottom over?
IBM
IBM Just Created the World’s Smallest, Most Powerful Chip; Here’s Why You Should Care
At the most basic level, IBM’s processor, which it worked on with GlobalFoundries, Samsung, and the State University of New York (SUNY), has far smaller transistors than any other processor on the planet. That means that when the chip eventually appears in future smartphones, computers, and other pieces of technology, those gadgets will be faster and more energy-efficient.
IBM prepares software to better read an ‘intelligent grid’
Enter Opus, which is meant to merge IBM’s long history of expertise in analytics with utility know-how into a single picture meant to project supply and demand — all with the goal of wasting less energy and helping to realize a more distributed reality that does not impair reliability or undermine industry profits.
IBM Rolls Out Docker-Based Container Services This is a follow-up to a post from a few weeks back:
Containers give developers the flexibility to build once and move applications without the need to rewrite or redeploy their code. IBM Containers, based on Docker and built on Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, are intended to provide a more efficient environment that enables faster integration and access to analytics, big data and security services. Enterprises will now be able to use the combination of IBM, Docker, Cloud Foundry, and OpenStack to create a new generation of portable distributed applications.
IBM Named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays
This inclusion comes a month after IBM was identified as the number one worldwide solid-state array vendor in unit shipments and petabytes of data delivered for 2014 in Gartner’s Market Share Analysis: SSDs and Solid-State Arrays Worldwide Report for 2014, by Joseph Unsworth and John Monroe, published May 1, 2015.2 In 2014 IBM sold more than 2,100 FlashSystems, totaling more than 62 petabytes (PB) of storage capacity, according to IBM.
If Oracle thinks the customer is really abusing the terms, it whips out the “breach notice,” which warns a customer that they are in violation and must stop using all Oracle software in 30 days. That’s risky, because it allows the customer to walk away from its Oracle contracts.
Oracle Pursuing ‘Generational’ Change In IT, Cantor Says
Oracle conceives this “push of IT resources into the cloud as a ‘generational change’ that only comes along once every 20–25 years,” the analysts at Cantor explain. This is why management is working hard in expanding the cloud business. However, the experts believe this change will be particularly complicated for Oracle, given that it “continues to offer on-premise solutions,” and holds a broad portfolio of solutions across a wide array of product categories. Therefore, the company “does not want to provide a particular timeframe for when the headwind from the transition is over,” the analysts explain, but management is “unrelenting in its view that the shift to the cloud is positive for the long-term economics of Oracle’s business model.”
PC Shipment Declines 9.5% in Q2: Worst Decline in 2 Years
According to the preliminary data released by Gartner, PC shipments in the second quarter fell 9.5% year over year to 68.4 million units, marking the worst slump since third-quarter 2013. The research firm highlighted three main reasons — strong dollar, phase out of Windows XP refresh or upgrade cycle, and launch of Windows 10 — behind the decline.
HP Split Partner Update: No Orders To Ship Aug. 1-6
Hewlett-Packard is warning solution providers that no orders will be shipped for six days, Aug. 1 to 6, as a result of a system cutover precipitated by an operational split into two companies effective Aug. 1.
EMC has sold off its file-sharing arm Syncplicity just three years after it snapped the business up, claiming the technology is no longer core to its portfolio. Private investment firm Skyview Capital has bought the business from EMC, although the latter will retain “a financial interest” in the company, although it did not disclose exactly what that would be.
However, one change could cost some customers big time. In the past, a customer using an entry-level Virtual Server Instance in SoftLayer paid $35 per 5TB of outbound bandwidth. That rate is now $35 per 250GB. The charge for 5TB of outbound bandwidth now $615. That’s a hefty raise, which a source close to IBM confirmed, adding that most SoftLayer customers will likely see their costs decline. SoftLayer, unlike its rivals, does not charge for data transfer within its own private network even between zones.
Long-term, these German ambitions look like an effort to properly diversify. Roughly 68% of Salesforce revenue is sourced in the United States versus 18.3% from all of Europe. By contrast, no territory accounts for more than a third of SAP revenue. Oracle is not quite as diversified, but it still gets less than half of its revenue from the U.S. market.
Alec Gardner said, “Organisations that consider appointing a data scientist or a team of data analysts may find that they can derive much deeper and more varied insights from their data. This will let them recommend improvements in areas of the business such as supply chain and logistics, product or service development, or customer acquisition.
OpenStack was introduced in 2010 as a project of NASA, who dropped out in 2013, and Rackspace. In 2011 Ubuntu adopted OpenStack and became the first “vendor” to integrate with the platform. In 2012 Red Hat began a project to integrate with OpenStack and introduced commercial support by July 2013. Over time many other organisations have joined the foundation as sponsors and contributors. Recently released OpenStack Kilo (version 11) has approximately 400 new features and was the product of almost 1500 contributors. However, there is a downside to the open source model: lots of developers with lots of ideas about what should be included breeds complexity.
Like everyone, Splunk has watched the growing number of breaches over the last year, and its customers have been asking for better security detection tools to help battle these threats, many of which use with compromised credentials. This kind of attack is difficult to detect with conventional security techniques looking for signatures or rules. If someone comes in through the front door using valid credentials, there are no rules or patterns. They look like a valid user, Song explained.
As the nation celebrates its birthday, most companies are taking a break from major news (although some didn’t). It is more of the same as we enjoy a long weekend.
IBM’s big data is transcending the hype and people are expecting great things, so great that Watson and his automated cousins could eliminate 47% of US jobs over the coming decades (because that’s not an alarmist factoid to get more readers).
Oracle is still talking about deep cost reductions to compete with Amazon, while HP keeps singing their breakup song (and released a monstrous 316 page exchange commission report). Speaking of reports, there are more stating EMC had a good Q1 in traditional storage (which has been consistent with reports over the last few weeks).
There was an office chat about how SAS is beloved by their employees and I found an article discussing that culture. Xerox apparently has the opposite situation…recently being named the 5th worst company to work for.
IBM
Watson’s next feat? Taking on cancer
Among the most ambitious projects is a partnership with 14 cancer centers to use Watson to help choose therapies based on a tumor’s genetic fingerprints. Doctors have known for years that some treatments work miraculously on some patients but not at all on others due to genetics. But the expense and complexity in identifying genetic mutations and matching them up with potential therapies has made it difficult for more than a handful of patients to benefit from this new approach. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.
But it isn’t all wonder and good news, the same article states:
While there’s much debate about the extent to which technology is destroying jobs, recent research has driven concern. A 2013 paper by economists at the University of Oxford calculated the probability of 702 occupations being automated or “roboticized” out of existence and found that a startling 47 percent of American jobs — from paralegals to taxi drivers — could disappear in coming years. Similar research by MIT business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee has shown that this trend may be accelerating and that we are at the dawn of a “second machine age.”
New Report Shows the Internet of Things’ Economic Impact Could Surpass Its Hype — But There’s Just One Problem
While a host of devices such as smartphones, wearable technologies, connected industrial equipment, automobiles, and smart agriculture sensors can collect massive amounts of data, the McKinsey report notes that most of the information currently being collected isn’t being put to use: “Most IoT data collected today are not used, and the data that are used are not fully exploited. A critical challenge is to use the flood of big data generated by IoT devices for prediction and optimization.” McKinsey isn’t the only organization to discover this. IBM (NYSE:IBM) says 90% of data collected by smart IoT devices goes completely unused, and that the data starts losing its value just a few seconds after being gathered.
Matt Candy, managing partner, Europe IBM Interactive Experience, global business services, is one of the brand’s major spokespeople on the topic, and he believes that digital media is changing the way in which businesses and consumers interact: ‘The last, best experience that anyone has becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they have everywhere. These experiences transcend industry – this shift is changing the challenge that brands face when interacting with the customer. Traditional boundaries are dead, it’s time for businesses to focus on human-to-human interactions. This makes experience the new competitive battleground in which businesses will have to work.
GlobalFoundries Takeover of IBM Chip Unit Is Official
The two companies announced last October that IBM would pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over its money-losing chip unit, which includes the plant in Essex. But the deal had to clear hurdles first. Because GlobalFoundries is owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, it needed to obtain clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel charged with reviewing major business deals to safeguard national security. The companies announced Monday that the committee had approved the deal.
A few days ago, Ellison and a few other Oracle execs announced the introduction of the company’s new, comprehensive “PaaS [Platform-as-a-Service] Launch and Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration” suite of services. Ellison didn’t hold back when asked what the objective of Oracle’s new Cloud Platform hopes to accomplish, saying “Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”
HP says channel crucial post-split, outlines potential risks
In the document, HP said the successful execution of its indirect strategy is integral to the financial performance of both companies. HP said in both its fiscal 2013 and 2014, its top-ten global disties and resellers collectively accounted for 12 percent and eight percent of HP’s sales. “Our financial results could be materially adversely affected due to distribution channel conflicts or if the financial conditions of our channel partners were to weaken,” the document states. “Our results of operations may be adversely affected by any conflicts that might arise between our various distribution channels or the loss or deterioration of any alliance or distribution arrangement.
Now, it seems that even more changes are ahead for the company, and they may directly affect the new HP Enterprise unit. Reports on Tuesday (June 30) revealed that the company’s current head of its Enterprise Group, Bill Veghte, has stepped down from his post to “pursue a new opportunity,” according to a statement from the company.
Marc Benioff blasts SAP CEO: “He’s scared of Salesforce”
On Thursday, during an event in SAP’s home country Germany, Benioff said Bill McDermott, the CEO of the $US90 billion German software maker, recently snubbed Benioff’s outreach efforts. “We offered an olive branch to them. I’ve told Bill I’ve wanted to have a deeper relationship with them. Yes we’re competitors, we should also be partners,” Benioff said, according to Bloomberg. “He’s scared of Salesforce.”
Under Burns’ leadership, the company’s earnings have declined from more than $1.3 billion in 2011 to $992 million in 2014, a 25% drop. These figures support recurring employee complaints about leadership — only 32% of surveyed employees approved of Burns. Many employees also complained about a culture of favoritism in the company, saying that personal relationships are more important than work ethic when it comes to promotions and raises. Another recurring complaint was related to compensation. Employees cited low pay and years without cost of living raises as reasons for the company’s high turnover. Less than a third of Xerox employees would recommend a job at the company to a friend.
Xerox Is Not the Problem, the Whole IT Services Industry Is
If we look at it from a labor perspective (Xerox should be pretty bad considering it is the fifth worst company to work for), we do see that the company does have low expenses per employee. Annualizing results from last quarter, Xerox pays about $7,100 per employee per quarter, and squeezes out about $5 in revenue for every dollar spent on labor (including general expenses). Accenture, surprisingly, spends even less per employee per quarter at about $4,100, earning about $5.56 per dollar spent on labor.
This is an old article that Bobby C mentioned this week, but considering how customers are down on SAS, I thought I would find it:
HOW SAS BECAME THE WORLD’S BEST PLACE TO WORK
At 70 years old, Goodnight holds the conviction that “what makes his organization work are the new ideas that come out of his employee’s brains.” He therefore holds his employees in the highest esteem. So while he fully anticipated that the recession would constrain the firm’s short-term revenues, he instinctively knew that his team would produce breakthrough products while his competitors were cutting costs.
Playing well together seems to be the common theme of the week. Several companies are investing in a company called Docker that is developing a SaaS “container” system. The container is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications. It gives programmers, development teams and operations engineers the common toolbox they need to take advantage of the distributed and networked nature of modern applications. IBM, RedHat, and EMC are all working with the company.
In addition to the Docker investment, IBM made friends with storage company Box to offer IBM’s bluemix on Box storage platforms. Speaking of platforms, Oracle released good growth news in their cloud space while it ramps up for another fight with Google.
IBM
IBM suffers in integrated platforms market
IBM retained its spot in second place in the market, but a 44.2 per cent sales slump to $42.35m saw its share shrink from 9.8 per cent last year to 5.6 per cent. HP fared much better in the quarter, with its sales jumping by more than half (53.7 per cent) annually to $23.79m, taking its share from two per cent to 3.1 per cent.
The two will offer customers IBM analytics and social solutions, IBM security technologies, the IBM cloud, and Box’s cloud content collaboration platform. They will develop joint content management solutions and incorporate Box technology into select IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps, which is the result of IBM’s teaming up with Apple.
Another interesting Watson application: Internet of Things Turning New York’s Lake George Into “World’s Smartest Lake”
The potential impact of these new developments extends well beyond the shores of Lake George. By capturing and pooling data from all sorts of sensors and swiftly analyzing it, scientists, policy makers, and environmental groups around the globe could soon accurately predict how weather, contaminants, invasive species, and other threats might affect a lake’s natural environment. Armed with these new insights and a growing body of best practices, corrective actions could be taken in advance to protect fresh water sources anywhere in the world.
As I was thinking of the theme of this week’s post, I saw this – IBM’s cooperate not dominate strategy:
This comes despite IBM’s efforts to develop its own backup and storage platforms. The Spectrum Project is aimed at optimizing backup for physical, storage and cloud environments as a way to support unified, hybrid infrastructure in the enterprise. And by, again, tapping third-party cloud providers like CenterGrid, the system can be tailored to a broad range of industry verticals that are utilizing Big Data and mobile apps for services like parking-spot location in increasingly crowded urban areas.
IBM Bluemix and word press don’t mix IBM is encouraging developers to host a WordPress blog on BlueMix but it doesn’t natively support the plugins. The article calls out that IBM missed an opportunity for developers and hobbyists (like me) learn their platform. http://diginomica.com/2015/06/23/wordpress-on-ibm-bluemix-doesnt-quite-compute/
According to a research note from Patrick Walravens at JMP Securities, a decision in favor of Oracle would mean that Oracle can “demand a royalty from Google for each mobile device sold using the Android platform.” Additionally, it could “potentially” complicate the “API economy with a new set of legal concerns.”
Oracle Has ‘Plethora’ Of New Iaas, Paas…And Cantor Analyst Loves It
In the report Cantor Fitzgerald noted, “Oracle focused on its ability to offer services across all three layers of the cloud relative to a more IaaS-focused approach at AWS, while provisioning faster (e.g., 4x) compared to AWS, requiring less time managing (e.g., zero command-line interfaces with Oracle vs. 155 for AWS) and offering a lower cost archive cloud storage service (e.g., 10x lower cost than Amazon Glacier for a 20PB archive).” White believes that Oracle continues to be “unique in the IT world” since it is the only leading IT vendor “with a broad offering across all three layers of the cloud.”
Last Wednesday (June 17), Oracle released its quarterly earnings report, closely watched by the market waiting to see if Oracle could live up to its own hype. Indeed, Oracle did. “We dramatically overachieved in the cloud,” said the firm’s CEO Safra Catz during the earnings call. According to the figures, during the last quarter of the fiscal year ended May 31, Oracle’s SaaS and Platform-as-a-Service units saw a 29 percent increase in revenue compared with the same period one year prior. According to reports, SaaS revenue hit $416 million – more than $125 million more than Oracle had forecasted for itself at the beginning of the quarter.
EMC Embraces Docker (as well) for Private Cloud Storage
Like many IT vendors, EMC is taking advantage of Docker containers to essentially make support for any given server platform a non-issue. As a container, Docker provides a lighter-weight approach to virtualization that enables applications running on top of Docker to be deployed on top of any virtual or physical server.
Why are tech giants like Google, Intel and IBM backing a startup from San Francisco?
Docker, a startup from San Francisco, is the one to popularize container tech in the last year has cited companies like Yelp, eBay and BBC News as users of its service. But there isn’t a universal standard which will allow containers to be used across different environments, for example, data centers of separate cloud computing providers. But with this new standard, containers will be available for all.
While Samsung will “optimize” the applications to work with its own Android devices, businesses will be able to use Red Hat’s BaaS platform to enable the apps to run native and hybrid/HTML5 across other Android devices, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry, a Red Hat spokesman said.
Via a new alliances with Vantrix, a provider of storage systems optimized for video content, and an expansion of its relationship with Super Micro Computer, Red Hat is now making greater use of OEM partnerships to bring open source storage technologies such as Ceph and Gluster to market.
Every CEO, needs to make a buy-versus-build decision when it comes to gaining new technology assets. Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has never been afraid of making a strategic acquisition to bolster his company, and he hasn’t hesitated to build either. So when it comes to Docker container technology, the big question many have been asking is—will Red Hat acquire Docker Inc.?
