Tag: Red Hat

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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

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Supplier Report: 10/31/2015

sn_spark_JosephYoung

Oracle World happened and as expected, Hurd and Ellison made plenty of amusing remarks about their competitors.  As Ellison remarked that IBM is not a competitor, big blue went out and bought the Weather Company… for $2B.

Hewlett Packard is officially and finally splitting this weekend.  The two companies are facing unique market conditions in light of the Dell-EMC deal.

IBM

  • IBM Will Acquire The Weather Company’s Digital Business

    IBM announced this morning it’s acquiring The Weather Company, the parent company to the The Weather Channel, as well as the company’s B2B, mobile and web properties. The deal is being valued at more than $2 billion, according to a report from The Wall St. Journal. The companies are not disclosing the financial terms, however. The deal will see The Weather Company licensing weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract. The Weather Channel is not included in the acquisition.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/28/ibm-will-acquire-the-weather-companys-digital-business/

  • Why does this keep happening to IBM?

    For the second time in a little over two years, Big Blue faces an investigation into how it records revenue. The company disclosed on Tuesday that the SEC is looking into the “accounting treatment of certain transactions in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland.”

    The stock dropped 4 percent to $137.86 after the revelation and was down 14 percent for the year at Tuesday’s close before bouncing back a bit Wednesday morning.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/why-does-this-keep-happening-to-ibm.html

  • IBM: The Line In The Sand

    One of the items that is hindering IBM from making a large acquisition is the fact that the company has $32 billion in long-term debt. This is the exact time IBM needs all of its resources to try to generate revenue growth, however they will be hindered by debt maturities in 2016. The following chart fromMorningstar shows that IBM has a large number of debt maturities coming in the next five years. Specifically next year, IBM has $5 billion in debt due and while they can easily pay off the debt, it is a drain on potential cash and cash flows that could be used to invest in the business or make an acquisition.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3609866-ibm-the-line-in-the-sand

  • IBM Cloud Opens To Apache Spark

    IBM will provide Apache Spark as a service onBluemix, IBM’s cloud platform. IBM will also be pushing Spark into BigInsights on Bluemix, as well as IBM’s Data Science Workbench and its SPSS Analytics Server and Modeler.

    http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/ibm-cloud-opens-to-apache-spark/d/d-id/1322827

  • Intel, Oracle Working Together To Take On IBM

    A few months ago, the head of engineering and products at Oracle, Thomas Kurian, and Doug Fisher from Intel’s Software and Services Group decided to set up a joint team of engineers codenamed Project Apollo near Intel’s facilities in Oregon, the report said.

    The team has been assigned the task of figuring out how massive cloud computing data centers could be set up that make use of Oracle’s hardware and Intel’s chips to take on IBM in the cloud computing hardware market. Project Apollo has successfully completed its mission, and the team members are now sharing “how to” documents to convince enterprise customers to use their technology in building data centers, the report said.

    http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/10/intel-oracle-together-take-on-ibm/

Oracle

Hewlett Packard (the split happens this weekend)

  • Meg Whitman bets that a smaller HP will be able to beat Dell

    But in the server space, Dell is waiting. With EMC, it gets the No. 1 provider of storage gear, making it a one-stop shop for corporate customers. If Dell’s strategy works, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will just continue the former HP’s fate, where sales have declined for 15 of the past 16 quarters. PC shipments, where HP is No. 2, fell 7.7 percent in the third quarter, according to Gartner. For servers, where Hewlett-Packard is the market leader, second-quarter shipments slowed to 8 percent from 13 percent in the prior period.

    http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article41966259.html

  • Why Hewlett-Packard Company’s Troubles May Not End With Breakup

    Post breakup, there is a fair chance that the resulting HP companies will acquire to compensate for their various shortcomings. While acquisitions might add some important assets (technology and talents), any kind of acquisition comes with a certain level of risk. Integration is one of the challenges that companies meet after they acquire a new asset. History shows that many of Hewlett-Packard’s past acquisitions never happened smoothly, a problem that may carry into the resulting entities.

    The other risk is that acquisitions predicated on desperation to catch up with the competition could fail to live up to expectations, be costly or unnecessarily disruptive. The two resulting HP businesses may not stay clear of these acquisition risks.

    http://investcorrectly.com/20151030/hewlett-packard-company-nysehpqs-troubles-may-not-end-breakup/

EMC

  • Dell acquisition of EMC could jostle Microsoft’s plans

    Dell, clearly, cannot risk this in the long term. It needs an operating system of its own. VMware’s Photon Stack is a great start, but it is only a start. It would not shock me at all to see Dell buy Red Hat in the next two years. It would be the final piece of the puzzle for a fully vertically integrated play.

    Microsoft doesn’t want to see that happen. And after seeing the tab for the Dell acquisition of EMC, I am sure Dell doesn’t want to spend the money either. Ample time and effort is going to be spent trying to find amicable solutions that allow both companies to coexist.

    http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/opinion/Dell-acquisition-of-EMC-could-jostle-Microsofts-plans

Other

  • Workday Inc Becoming A Cause Of Concern To Oracle Corporation’s Cloud Business

    However, Workday Inc (NYSE:WDAY) built its business on the cloud from the ground upward, giving it an edge in competition with Oracle in HR and Finance applications delivered through the cloud. Because of its nature and the steps it has already made, Workday could cause more grief for Oracle and other legacy software vendors as enterprises shift from on-premise installations to the cloud.

    http://investcorrectly.com/20151028/workday-inc-nysewday-becoming-cause-concern-oracle-corporation-nyseorcls-cloud-business/

  • Red Hat is boring — and more open source companies should emulate it

    But whether such companies like it or not, the minute they base their success on an open source project, their revenue potential is hampered compared to a proprietary competitor. Sure, companies like Cloudera, MongoDB, and DataStax sell proprietary value around an open source project, but most are still somewhat constrained by their need to compete with the free project they sponsor. None of which is to suggest these companies will hurt for revenue. Rather, it’s a reminder that the best way for an open source company to grow is like Red Hat: steady, consistent, boring.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2998810/open-source-tools/red-hat-is-boring-and-more-open-source-companies-should-emulate-it.html

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Supplier Report: 10/17/2015

sn_watch_FrankPark

Everybody is talking about EMC. Meg is. Ginny is. The news (clearly) is.  Nobody knows what the end picture will look like, but wow… that sure is a chunk of debt (interest payments alone are $2.5B annually).

While attention is focused on EMC, IBM is about to release their Q3 results.  Could this be the bottom for their losses?

Microsoft is making grounds in the cloud space against Amazon while Red Hat announces a new acquisition in Ansible.

IBM

EMC

  • Dell-EMC: What Storage Customers Should Do

    This shouldn’t panic users, but users — especially big ones and those whose software or infrastructure stacks are dependent on particular Dell or EMC products —  should take the year or so that it will take before Dell-EMC is fully baked to reevaluate their infrastructure vendor list and product choices. One of my close friends, who runs storage at a company that spends several million dollars a year with EMC told me he got an email from senior management asking how the deal might affect their company; their plan is to add another storage vendor to hedge their bets.

    http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/dell-emc-what-storage-customers-should-do/a/d-id/1322681

  • Why Did VMware (VMW) Plunge 8.1% on EMC-Dell Deal?

    An important thing to note here is that Dell will not be offering the regular trading stocks for VMware. Instead, the company will be issuing tracking stock that would reflect the performance of the trading stock. This will entitle EMC shareholders to have only economic interest in the trading stock but not own them (that is no voting rights or dividends). The absence of rights also makes some analysts speculate that the tracking stock might likely trade at a discount to the trading stock.

    http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/193486/why-did-vmware-vmw-plunge-81-on-emcdell-deal

  • EMC acquisition: Is it a good deal for Dell?

    Both vendors have acquired higher value software, although VMware eclipses all the software deals of Dell such as SecureWorks and Quest. Yet for the deal to work, its needs to benefit from economies of scale and this will probably mean a reduction in headcount and product portfolio where there is duplication. Mid-level marketing, sales and administrative tasks are also ripe for some cost cutting. But nobody should expect a repeat of the bloodbath happening at HP which says it expects to cut 58,000 jobs by end of fiscal year 2015. Dell is already pretty lean as is EMC. The federation model of EMC also means that that headline staffing numbers are relatively svelte as it stands.

    http://www.channelpro.co.uk/opinion/9496/emc-acquisition-is-it-a-good-deal-for-dell

HP Enterprises

Other

Photo: Frank Park

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/26/2015

sn_leaf_Ales Krivec

It was another big week for IBM and Watson with the announcement of Watson offices moving to Silicon Valley.  IBM wants to be close to the disruptions and maybe cause a few.  But as businesses expand into the unfamiliar world of AI, cloud, and SaaS, are they locking themselves into environment they can’t get out of easily?

As datacenters and server budgets shrink, is there an exit strategy to the externally hosted ecosystem?

IBM

  • IBM Watson sharpens its cognitive skills: New APIs help make it more ‘human’

    As part of this announcement, IBM also said it will expand the company’s presence in Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area with a new Watson Hub, South of Market in San Francisco. IBM believes it will put them closer to, and increase collaboration with, the local start ups, developers, venture capital groups, established businesses and academic experts the company is currently working with to take cognitive computing into new markets. The location will also serve as the new global headquarters for IBM Commerce, a high-growth industry opportunity for IBM and Watson. The facility is scheduled to open in early 2016.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/ibm-watson-sharpens-its-cognitive-skills-new-apis-help-make-it-more-human-2445566.html

  • Watson to become a huge sales engine…

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-24/ibm-s-watson-said-to-become-huge-engine-for-sales
  • Massachusetts gives IBM a $2.5M tax break for absolutely no reason whatsoever

    IBM has promised to create 500 new jobs in exchange for its tax break. If they don’t, there will be hell to pay … or at least they’ll have to give back some of the $2.5 million.

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/2986116/big-data-business-intelligence/massachusetts-gives-ibm-a-2-5m-tax-break-for-absolutely-no-reason-whatsoever.html

  • IBM boosts security of bring your own cloud apps

    The technology helps a company discover the cloud-based apps its employees are using on their computers and mobile devices and then helps roll out a safer way of using them, without impacting productivity. Hosted on IBM Cloud, the solution scans a company’s network to find the apps being used, which are then analysed using deep threat analytics from IBM X-Force.

    http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/it-infrastructure/security/5376/ibm-boosts-security-of-bring-your-own-cloud-apps

EMC

  • Cloud takes a bite out of backup boss EMC’s top line in Q2

    The storage titan saw its quarterly sales drop 16.9 per cent annually to $414.4m, and its share of the market came in more than six points lower than in the corresponding period last year. Second-placed Symantec – whose $104.5m revenue accounted for 14.4 per cent of the worldwide total – endured a decline of a comparatively modest 3.7 per cent

    They added:

    “Focus continues to shift away from hardware-centric, on-premise PBBA systems to hybrid/gateway systems,” she said. “The results [of this] are greater emphasis on backup and deduplication software, the ability to tier or push data to the cloud, and the increasing commoditisation of hardware, all of which require market participants to adjust product portfolios accordingly.”

    http://www.channelnomics.eu/channelnomics-eu/news/2426707/cloud-takes-a-bite-out-of-backup-boss-emcs-top-line-in-q2

Hewlett Packard

Other

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/19/2015

sn_oldtv_Pablo GarciaSaldaña

The news this week seem to be reacting to HP’s announcement that they are cutting 33,000 jobs over 3 years.  Journalists are looking at HP, IBM, and EMC and re-stating the now-familiar critique of “these companies are bloated and not nimble”.

Are the critics right?  Time will tell.  Today, three companies are trying to transform and become more responsive to the market.  IBM is focused on the emerging internet of things and supporting that entire eco-system of devices.  HP is trying to slim down and become more reactive (with an offshore consulting team).  EMC has been struggling with their own potential reorganization.

Can companies that have enough employees to fill a mid-sized American city find a way to compete with companies that can support 900 million users with 60 employees? And are the sales models that those large companies rely upon still relevant in the age of open source software and ad-driven profits?

IBM

  • IBM working on blockchain technology

    Krishna told the publication house that “they are modifying the original bitcoin ideas to build a blockchain that operates without currency, ensures that contract details remain private and makes it easier for companies to embed business rules into their smart contracts”.

    http://www.econotimes.com/IBM-working-on-blockchain-technology-91011
    What is blockchain?

    The blockchain is seen as the main technological innovation of Bitcoin, since it stands as proof of all the transactions on the network. A block is the ‘current’ part of a blockchain which records some or all of the recent transactions, and once completed goes into the blockchain as permanent database.

  • HCL, IBM team up to jointly develop IoT solutions

    As part of the partnership, HCL and IBM will combine their technical knowhow and manpower to enable seamless integration of device, connectivity, data platform and analytics for organisations to address some of the most complex enterprise and industrial IoT challenges.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/hcl-ibm-team-up-to-jointly-develop-iot-solutions-2438274.html
    Additionally, IBM opens IoT & Big Data units, appoints Harriet Green as GM

    Harriet Green, now VP and GM at IBM said: “The Internet of Things will help enterprises and governments at every level unlock entirely new areas of opportunity and growth, and no company is better positioned than IBM to be the partner of choice as these organizations embrace its potential.

    http://www.cbronline.com/news/verticals/the-boardroom/ibm-opens-iot-big-data-units-appoints-harriet-green-as-gm-4670303

  • Leadership Depends on Clarity and Agility: IBM’s CIO

    “As [organizations] get bigger, we tend to isolate roles so people’s skills get too segmented,” Smith said. “We’re working to give people broader roles where people are expected to do role rotations and gain skills that enable them to get better and hone their craft. We have a concept that we’re going to take large teams and keep breaking them down so we know the purpose of each team.”

    http://daily.financialexecutives.org/leadership-depends-on-clarity-and-agility-ibms-cio/

Hewlett Packard

  • HP’s Job Cuts Reflect EDS Legacy
    HP announced 33,000 job cuts over three years this week…

    Most from the technology services group it had built from Electronic Data Systems Corp., a $13.9 billion acquisition. The job cuts are H-P’s way of creating a more nimble business that can better match customer needs for help with cloud-based computing, or off-loading computing and software to the Internet. It is also a recognition of how badly H-P miscalculated developments in the information technology services market.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/h-ps-job-cuts-reflect-eds-legacy-1442447023

  • Hewlett-Packard Company Plans offshoring 60% of Enterprise Service

    In fact, Enterprise Services division is not an organic segment of the larger HP group. In 2008 HP acquired the H. Ross Perot founded Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion. At that time, HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd was intent on pushing HP towards enterprise IT services. IBM had by then a sizeable market share in this segment due to some strategic acquisitions such as PriceWaterhouseCooper’s for $3.5 billion in 2002. Hurd in 2008 wanted HPQ to acquire a big-revenue earner in enterprise-level IT services segment. The result was the expensive purchase of EDS.

    http://www.wallstreetscope.com/hewlett-packard-company-nysehpq-plans-offshoring-60-of-enterprise-service/25429003/

  • HP Plans To Keep The Struggling Enterprise Services Unit Contrary To Common Belief

    According to Whitman, Enterprise Services is essential to the success of the greater HPE as it starts a life of its own, separate from the parent. For example, she envisions a situation where companies will be hiring HPE’s consultants to help with their cloud implementations, digitization of paper processes and so on. Such consulting works perfectly fit in the domain of Enterprise Service, and that explains why Whitman believes the unit is essential to the overall success of HPE.

    http://investcorrectly.com/20150917/hewlett-packard-company-nysehpq-plans-keep-struggling-enterprise-services-unit-contrary-common-belief/

  • HP Has Enough Workers to Fill a City—And It Needs Them All

    The HPs and IBMs of the world have responded to these shifts by offering cloud services and ready-made business applications of their own. That’s a big part of why HP and IBM are shedding jobs right now. “In general software companies are better for owners than services businesses are,” Burris explains. “In a software business, a programmer can write a piece of code that can be used by millions of different customers and users. That intellectual property, that information about a problem, is now made available to a whole pile of people at the same time.”

    http://www.wired.com/2015/09/hp-enough-workers-fill-cityand-needs/

Other

  • Age-old question: Can commercial software succeed in an open-source world?

    Now, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff’s dream of taking on not just Oracle but SAP in other enterprise software categories puts it at risk, according to the story. That may be why Salesforce is building up its skills in PostgreSQL, an open-source database favored by many companies that are increasingly wary of relying on pricey databases from Oracle, SAP, and even Microsoft.

    http://fortune.com/2015/09/18/open-source-software-threat/
    Additionally:

    As one data point, note that Red Hat, which sells support and service for Linux, is arguably the most successful company built on open-source. It became the first $1 billion open source company three years ago and closed its last fiscal year in February at almost $1.8 billion in revenue. That is not chump change, but it’s a far cry from the run rates proprietary software companies tout. Here’s guessing that the new normal for software companies in the open-source era will look a lot more like Red Hat and a lot less like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft. And that has to be a sobering thought.

  • Can GE buy IBM or EMC?

    GE could easily sell those parts of IBM it didn’t want, or spin them off into a new company, and get back most of the cash needed to do this deal. By installing new management and focusing on the Internet of Things, GE would give IBM a new story to tell and, in the process, dramatically increase its value to investors. Buying IBM would also cement Immelt’s own industrial strategy into place, making it nearly impossible for a successor to do to his company what he did to Jack Welch’s outfit.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3510876-ge-could-buy-ibm

  • Key Takeaways from the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference: Johnson and Johnson

    “Five years ago, our pharmaceutical division at that time was about $24 billion in annual sales, and we lost $8.5 billion to patent expiry, literally over about a 18 month to 24 month period, and you know the margins in that business, you know the challenges that something like that presents. And we made a real decision not to go out and do a major acquisition, which I think would be a challenge to demonstrate value creation for many, if not most of those…We continue to invest in R&D. We’ve got much more focus in our therapeutic categories. And today, literally, five, six years later, we launch 14 compounds, seven of which have been $1 billion brand and things are really making a difference and things like prostate cancer, thrombosis, Type 2 diabetes, range of conditions, and there’s no way we could have done that, if it was an only a pharma business, because it wouldn’t have survived. We had a strong MD&E and strong consumer business. So financially, we think it’s important.”

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3508116-johnson-and-johnson-3-key-takeaways-from-the-wells-fargo-healthcare-conference

Photo: Pablo GarciaSaldaña