Supplier News: 8/22/2015

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There is chatter about big purchases: the never-ending tale about EMC and HP, IBM is looking to buy CyberArk (maybe), Oracle bought Maxymiser, and CA completed their Xceedium deal.

As people are talking about purchases, SalesForce CEO Mark Benioff continues to talk smack about IBM and Oracle.  Meanwhile, IBM expands their  systems that can emulate organic thought process.

IBM

  • IBM launches Linux-only mainframe system LinuxONE

    IBM’s continued expanding support of Linux and Open Source projects makes sense given that these platforms and tools provide much of today’s connected infrastructure. And, the move away from in-house servers to cloud-based ones is a direct threat to IBM’s mainframe business. The company’s claim that it can provide a fast, reliable, and secure alternative at half the cost of cloud-based solutions is bound to get the attention of those with large-scale projects who want to control costs.

    http://www.extremetech.com/computing/212410-can-ibms-linuxone-mainframe-compete-with-cloud-computing

  • IBM Creates ‘Neuromorphic Chip’ That Is As Powerful As A Rodent’s Brain

    The network that IBM unveiled today uses around 48 million connections, which is the same computing power as a rat’s brain. The system is designed to be able to run “deep-learning” algorithms, similar to the facial recognition system being used by Facebook or the instant translate mode in Skype. However, IBM’s deep-learning algorithms are much cheaper to run, draw less electricity and are not the size of an entire data center. TrueNorth essentially contains 5.4 billion transistors and uses a tiny 70 mw of power. As a comparison, an Intel processor with 1.4 billion transistors draws between 35 and 140 watts.

    http://www.techtimes.com/articles/77610/20150818/ibm-creates-neuromorphic-chip-powerful-rodents-brain.htm

  • Buffett Loves IBM. That’s Bad for Innovation, and Investors

    IBM still develops many things, but not on the scale or with the profundity it did in decades past. It has been nurturing select investments for years, and pruning the losers. The company has shed multiple underperforming businesses in the past two decades, a tradition continued by current chief Virginia “Ginni” Rometty. First was the personal computer, a business it got out of in 2005, then last year’s sale of server computers based on Intel’s x86 chip, followed by this year’s divestiture of its chip-making operations.

    http://www.barrons.com/articles/buffett-loves-ibm-thats-bad-for-tech-innovation-and-ibm-1439617268

  • IBM and FireEye Possible Candidates to Acquire CyberArk, Centrify
    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13260085/1/ibm-and-fireeye-possible-candidates-to-acquire-cyberark-centrify.html

EMC

  • Why EMC’s ‘federation’ could unify (Yes, we are still talking about this)

    EMC’s decision to control VMware but at arm’s length was brilliant. It allowed the faster-growing acquired company to trade at a much higher relative valuation than its parent. Now both companies are slowing, and at least one prominent Wall Street analyst believes EMC will bring all the companies into the fold. “A stand-alone EMC, a stand-alone VMware, and a stand-alone Pivotal would, in our opinion find it difficult to compete,” writes Maynard Um of Wells Fargo Securities . Whereas VMware thrived by selling to EMC competitors like HP and Cisco, those companies increasingly are competing with both companies now, removing one of the benefits of separation.

    http://fortune.com/2015/08/19/emc-vmware-pivotal-federation/

  • EMC management trio jump ship to competitors

    Isabelle Guis, a product marketing VP and head of cloud strategy at EMC, joins Egnyte in September to become its chief strategy officer. Egnyte is a file sync ‘n sharer for enterprises, now saying it’s involved in adaptive enterprise file services. As such it competed with EMC’s Syncplicity business. This was sold to Skyview Capital in July. Syncplicity’s CEO in EMC days was Jeetu Patel. He moved to Box earlier this month to become an SVP and its chief strategy officer. These two moves, when added to that of EMC’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Martin, who went to a similar CMO spot at fierce EMC competitor Pure Storage in July, add up to… what exactly?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/18/emc_execs_exit/

Oracle

  • Oracle snags Maxymiser to goose its marketing push

    Maxymiser specializes in what is called A/B testing, in which marketing professionals offer a couple of options to prospects to see which gets the best response. In theory, great A/B testing means that customers or would-be customers get pitches that actually interest them, rather than irritate them.

    http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/oracle-buys-maxymiser/

  • The epic 30-year bromance of billionaire CEOs Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff

    But their relationship took a quick turn in 2000 when Benioff found out that Oracle had secretly started its own CRM service that directly competed with Salesforce. Benioff wanted Ellison to leave Salesforce’s board immediately, but Ellison refused to quit. Ellison told Benioff, “It would be much cooler if you fired me.” (because that way Ellison would get to keep his Salesforce shares).

    http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-marc-benioff-relationship-2015-8

  • Adobe, IBM on top for enterprise digital marketing platforms; Oracle, Salesforce increasingly threaten

    A new report by global analyst firm Ovum has found Adobe to be the overall market leader for digital marketing platforms, followed closely by IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce. SAS and Teradata are the market challengers and new market entrant Marketo is a follower. These vendors share three-quarters of the annual US$5bn global market spend on digital marketing platforms.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/adobe-ibm-top-enterprise-digital-marketing-platforms-oracle-salesforce-increasingly-threaten-2392362.html

Hewlett Packard

  • Why big data will be a big deal for the new HP

    HP’s big data offerings fall under the umbrella of its Haven product, which includes the company’s Hadoop distribution (which it works with partners like Hortonworks to deliver), along with Vertica (a SQL analytics platform), IDOL (for analyzing unstructured data) and HP’s Distributed R (for large-scale predictive analytics).

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/2973046/cloud-computing/why-big-data-will-be-a-big-deal-for-the-new-hp.html
    Comment: This is a fine thing to say, but HP seems to be late to the party (really late).  Do they have the ability to catch up and entice customers away from the other platforms?

  • HP CEO Whitman On The Odds Of A Blockbuster Acquisition And How HP Enterprise Stacks Up Against EMC, IBM

    You never say never. But I think probably not. We are really pleased with our portfolio. We think we are incredibly well positioned. We have got some nice growth in our businesses. I would rather look to the future and what we are going to do on a go-forward basis. But you never say never. Who knows what is going to happen. We have been very disciplined, and we have been smart about it, and I think we have been on the right side of right so far. EMC looks a little bit more like HP, but they don’t have our big technology services arm and they don’t have our Enterprise Services arm. Listen, they have some great technology, but we are doing very well in storage. Our all-flash storage array was up 400 percent year-over-year. We are really cranking on all-flash storage array.

    http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/data-center/300077859/crn-exclusive-hp-ceo-whitman-on-the-odds-of-a-blockbuster-acquisition-and-how-hp-enterprise-stacks-up-against-emc-ibm.htm

Other

  • How the cloud will devour open source

    Take MySQL, for example. The database has changed hands a few times, with Sun acquiring MySQL AB in 2008, then Oracle picking up the asset through its acquisition of Sun the following year. But MySQL, Sun, and Oracle have collectively made a heck of a lot less — orders of magnitude less — by selling MySQL-related services than Amazon Web Services has made by selling MySQL ­as­ a­ service (that is, Relational Database Service).

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2970866/open-source-tools/how-the-cloud-will-devour-open-source.html

  • Don’t be IBM! Benioff goads the ‘dinosaurs’ as Salesforce beats Wall St expectations

    The way to understand the future is to look at the past, and you can look at IBM with the mainframe business. I think we all know IBM still sells a lot of mainframes. That doesn’t mean that IBM is innovating, that doesn’t mean that IBM is creating value for customers or helping them to transform customers’ businesses or align them with modern trends. It just means they’re selling them old technology and upgrading it. That’s what you see with companies like Oracle and SAP. These are old technology bases that are kind of meandering along like mainframes. And I think that is reflected in their license revenue growth, which has been poor, and then their movement to the cloud has been stunted because they don’t want to shift those customers into new models.

    http://diginomica.com/2015/08/21/dont-be-ibm-benioff-goads-the-dinosaurs-as-salesforce-beats-wall-street-expectations/

  • CA Technologies Completes Acquisition of Xceedium, Inc.

    With the transaction complete, CA offers customers a comprehensive, flexible solution for controlling and protecting IT administrator or other privileged user accounts from external attacks or insider mistakes and malicious misuse. The combined solution provides privileged identity controls at the server and the gateway to control access and action based on identity. The proxy-based, gateway approach from Xceedium also provides privileged identity control over cloud, on-premise, virtualised and hybrid IT environments, helping to protect the systems driving the application economy.

    http://www.cso.com.au/mediareleases/25440/ca-technologies-completes-acquisition-of-xceedium/

Photo: Pete Slater, Flickr

Supplier Report: 8/8/2015

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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

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.”

    http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150805006713/en/Gartner-Steady-Increase-Inquiries-Cancelling-Maintenance-Agreements

  • 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.

    http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/microsoft-and-salesforce-take-a-piece-of-informatica-1301320

  • 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.

    http://www.themalaymailonline.com/tech-gadgets/article/we-should-drop-the-term-big-data-experts-suggest

News you can use: 7/22/2015

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Photo: Nico Time, Flickr

  • The End of Buying and Selling

    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.

    http://www.sdcexec.com/article/12091986/the-end-of-buying-and-selling

  • 7 Mentors You Didn’t Even Know You Had

    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.

    http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247900?ctp=BizDev&src=Syndication&msc=Feedly

  • 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.

    http://www.supplychaindigital.com/supplychainmanagement/4052/McDonalds-vow-to-end-deforestation-in-its-global-supply-chain

  • 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.

    http://mhwmagazine.co.uk/LatestNews/83%25_of_supply_chain_executives_report_lacklustre_performance_as_they_struggle_to_get_to_grips_with_e-19059.html

  • ORACLE CLOSES ITS CLOUD PROCUREMENT GAPS

    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.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2015/oracle-closes-its-cloud-procurement-gaps/

Supplier Report: 7/18/2015

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Photo: Andrea Vallejos, Flickr

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.

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Oracle

  • Oracle’s second largest workforce is in India

    “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.

    http://www.infotechlead.com/hr/oracles-second-largest-workforce-is-in-india-32271

  • 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.

    http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150716006624/en/Oracle-Abandons-Largest-Copyright-Damages-Theory-Rimini

  • 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.

    http://investcorrectly.com/20150715/erp-cloud-next-big-thing-oracle-corporation-nyseorcl/

  • 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.

    http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/181296/oracle-teams-up-with-xamarin-for-expanding-cloud-business

EMC

  • 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.

    https://infocus.emc.com/joe_dossantos/dont-pull-the-trunk-of-your-big-data-elephant/?cmp=soc-cor-glbl-us-sprinklr-TWITTER-Data%20Lakes-Big%20Data-EMCcorp-208668228

  • EMC Finalizes $1.2 Billion Virtustream Buy

    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.

    http://www.channelpartnersonline.com/news/2015/07/emc-finalizes-1-2-billion-virtustream-buy.aspx

 

Supplier Report: 7/11/2015

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Photo: JD Hancock, Flickr

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.

    https://www.yahoo.com/tech/ibm-just-created-the-worlds-smallest-most-123665085589.html

  • There are ALOT of articles about this chip.  For instance:
    The Best Thing About IBM’s Super-Chip? It’s Not From Intel
    http://www.wired.com/2015/07/ibm-seven-nanometer-chip/
  • 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.

    http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060021311

  • 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.

    http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/News-Flashes/IBM-Rolls-Out-Docker-Based-Container-Services-105040.aspx

  • 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.

    http://www.finchannel.com/index.php/technology/item/46327-ibm-named-a-leader-in-gartner-s-magic-quadrant-for-solid-state-arrays

Oracle

  • Oracle ‘breach notice’ bullies enterprise clients into cloud service, consultant claims

    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.

    http://thestack.com/oracle-breach-notice-cloud-services-100715
    More on the subject:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-cloud-sales-2015-7?r=UK

  • 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.”

    http://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/15/07/5661493/oracle-pursuing-generational-change-in-it-cantor-says

Hewlett Packard

EMC

  • EMC offloads file-sharing business

    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.

    http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2417109/emc-offloads-file-sharing-business

Other

  • Surprise! The cost of cloud is about to rise

    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.

    http://fortune.com/2015/07/06/cost-of-cloud-rising/

  • Why Salesforce.com Keeps Picking on SAP

    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.

    http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070815/why-salesforcecom-keeps-picking-sap-crm-orcl-sap.aspx

  • The worst CRM in the word is… not salesforce.
    IT IS EXCEL.  People need to stop using excel for contact management lists.
    http://www.business2community.com/sales-management/%E2%80%8Band-the-worst-crm-in-the-world-ishint-it-is-not-salesforce-01268557
  • Drought of data scientists hurting business

    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.

    http://idm.net.au/article/0010529-drought-data-scientists-hurting-business

  • Jim Whitehurst – Red Hat Summit 2015 – Keynote:
  • Is OpenStack ready for primetime?

    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.

    http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/jul/07/openstack-ready-prime-time/

  • Splunk Buys Security Startup Caspida For $190M

    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.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/09/splunk-buys-security-startup-caspida-for-190m/?ncid=rss