Tag: Red Hat

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Supplier News: 9/12/2015

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Considering summer is unofficially over, it was a slow news week from suppliers.  IBM did make an interesting move by picking up software developer StrongLoop.  This continues their strategy on cloud and mobile.   IBM also announced the opening of Watson Health Center in Boston.

Oracle is quietly cutting their Java experts while HP overtakes Cisco in providing cloud infrastructure.   Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst details how his company makes money on services when the software is free.

IBM

  • IBM Opens Watson Health HQ, Expands Watson Health Cloud
    It reads like a press release, but interesting information…

    IBM opened its new IBM Watson Health global headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., and announced that Deborah DiSanzo is joining the company as the business unit’s general manager. The IBM Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance will help biomedical companies bring medical innovations to market more efficiently. This solution will help the companies fast-track the deployment of a GxP-compliant infrastructure and applications while adhering to stringent requirements for hosting, accessing and sharing regulated data.

    http://www.eweek.com/it-management/ibm-opens-watson-health-hq-expands-watson-health-cloud.html
    More on the office they are opening in Boston:
    http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/09/10/ibm-announces-watson-health-office-space-in-kendall-square/

  • IBM Has Been A Terrible Steward Of Shareholders’ Capital

    One company that hasn’t shown an ability to innovate in the way that it competes in the market – especially in cloud – compared to someone like Microsoft, who is a chief competitor, is IBM. Like Apple, IBM has also been a slave to a dividend and buyback program. Like Apple, IBM has spent over $100 billion on its buyback program. And, like Apple, IBM’s stock price has lagged the overall market in the last three years.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2015/09/11/ibm-has-been-a-terrible-steward-of-shareholders-capital/

  • IBM Acquires Node.js Developer StrongLoop (no word on price yet)

    StrongLoop is as startup based in San Mateo, California. The company focuses on the creation and development of software for enterprises by using the open-source JavaScript programming language Node.js. Software built by StrongLoop allow companies to create cloud and mobile based apps which are equipped with APIs that allows them to handle massive amounts of data through mobile, web and Internet of Things apps.

    http://en.yibada.com/articles/62707/20150911/ibm-acquires-node-js-developer-strongloop.htm

  • Box shows how a single deal with IBM can move the needle for any $2 billion company

    The partnership, announced in June, allows both companies to plug-in to each other’s technologies, while working on joint apps and sales strategies. Box benefits by gaining access to IBM’s wide array of technologies and client network. IBM gets to tap into Box’s advanced cloud storage offerings.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/box-earnings-ibm-partnership-2015-9

EMC

Hewlett Packard

  • More HP Involvement at SurveyMonkey… Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) CEO Joins SurveyMonkey Board

    Whitman, 59, was appointed to run the computer giant in Sep 2011. She will lead the new H-P Enterprise business group post the spilt in Nov 1 this year. Whitman stated that this is the right time for her to join the board of SurveyMonkey. She looks at the offer as an attractive one as it’s her first external board appointment since she joined H-P in 2011.

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/hewlett-packards-hpq-ceo-joins-surveymonkey-board-cm519157

  • HP overtakes Cisco in cloud infrastructure battle – finally

    After nipping at Cisco’s heels for two years, HP finally overtook arch rival Cisco in the cloud infrastructure equipment battle in Q2, albeit by the slimmest of margins. Synergy Research Group says after tying in Q1 with 13%, HP finally wrestled top spot from Cisco which declined by half a percentage point, while HP remained consistent on 13%.

    http://channellife.co.nz/story/hp-overtakes-cisco-cloud-infrastructure-battle-finally/

Other

  • Oracle cuts Java execs

    Cameron Purdy, a senior vice president for development and a noted Java evangelist, left Oracle in August after more than 8 years at the company, according to his LinkedIn bio. In a few tweets, he indicated that this was Oracle’s decision.

    http://fortune.com/2015/09/07/oracle-cuts-java-execs/

  • SAP Finance Chief Says Company Done With Big M&A Deals for Now

    “I see no need in the foreseeable future for big acquisitions,” Chief Financial Officer Luka Mucic said at a meeting with reporters Thursday at the company’s headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. “If you talk about big acquisitions, what is left in the market?”Salesforce.com Inc. is too expensive and Workday Inc. would overlap with SAP’s product line, Mucic said.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-10/sap-finance-chief-says-company-done-with-big-m-a-deals-for-now

  • Red Hat: How One CEO Uses Extreme Openness To Lead 8,000 People

    Adams: I have to ask: How do you make money on free software? Whitehurst: It’s very hard. The source code to all our software is indeed free. We offer services and support. You can download random Linux or open source software. But if you’re running nuclear submarines, major stock exchanges, or big banks, you want to make sure they’re secure and that you have support. We’re a business-to-business company.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2015/09/10/how-one-ceo-uses-extreme-openness-to-lead-8000-people/

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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

 

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Supplier Report: 6/27/2015

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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.

    http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2415121/ibm-suffers-in-infrastructure-market

  • IBM, Box Team Up to Conquer the Cloud

    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.

    http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/82222.html

  • 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.

    http://news.rpi.edu/content/2015/06/26/internet-things-technology-worlds-smartest-lake
    Protecting fresh water is important because:

  • 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.

    http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/ibm-and-the-long-game-cooperation-not-dominance.html

  • IBM Storage Named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances
    http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-storage-named-a-leader-in-gartners-magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-backup-software-and-integrated-appliances-300105295.html
  • 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/

Oracle

  • Oracle leads integrated infrastructure and platforms market revenue in 1Q15
    sn_integratedinfra
    http://www.firstpost.com/business/oracle-leads-integrated-infrastructure-platforms-market-revenue-1q15-2313970.html
  • Oracle Vs. Google Is Coming Up…Again

    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.”

    http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/179747/oracle-ups-cloud-investment-plans-data-center-in-sao-paulo

  • 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.”

    http://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/15/06/5621218/oracle-has-plethora-of-new-iaas-paas-and-cantor-analyst-

  • Oracle SaaS earnings rattle SalesForce

    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.

    http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/oracle-saas-earnings-rattle-salesforce/

EMC

Other

Posted on

Supplier Report: 6/20/2015

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It was relatively quiet this week in supplier news.  No acquisitions, no mergers.  The major news coming out of the suppliers was stock performance.

Oracle had a weak Q4 due to a strong US dollar.   Red Hat moved up based on good performance news while Teradata is downgraded.

IBM continues clear messaging around data management, cloud, and mobile.  They expand their support of open source platforms while growing their cloud offerings internationally.

IBM

  • TCS and IBM lead race for Volvo’s $500 million IT contract

    “The deal should be finalised within a month—at the moment Volvo is facing a lot of heat to cut costs and any business which is non-core and not making money for the company is under the pump right now,” one of the persons quoted earlier said. “Volvo IT is more of a cost centre for the company, and for them it makes sense to hand it out to professional outsourcing firms.”

    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/tcs-and-ibm-lead-race-for-volvos-500-million-it-contract/articleshow/47698785.cms

  • IBM inks Bluemix cloud deal with Capgemini’s Sogeti

    By connecting sensors that use different protocols and data formats on Bluemix, Sogeti can provide clients with insights on the performance of their heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, lighting and other energy-producing processes. Sogeti will use the same combination of its smartEngine and IBM’s Internet of Things service on Bluemix to provide insights on data for clients in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, utilities management and more.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/ibm-inks-bluemix-cloud-deal-capgeminis-sogeti-2303166.html

  • It sounds like IBM layoffs are still going on (Australia)

    While it doesn’t sound like IBM is targeting a massive number of employees right now, its layoffs tend to occur in dribbles and drabs, laid-off employees report. IBM won’t disclose the number of people it cuts and doesn’t have to report that figure under the WARN act unless it conducts a layoff that cuts 500 people or more at once.

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/ibm-watchdog-more-layoffs-this-month-2015-6

  • IBM commits to open source Spark

    As data and analytics are embedded into the fabric of business and society –from popular apps to the Internet of Things (IoT) –Spark brings essential advances to large-scale data processing. First, it dramatically improves the performance of data dependent apps. Second, it radically simplifies the process of developing intelligent apps, which are fuelled by data.

    http://it-online.co.za/2015/06/18/ibm-commits-to-open-source-spark/
    Andrew Brust says Spark won’t replace Hadoop:

    Spark is best known as a sort of in-memory analytics replacement for iterative computation frameworks like MapReduce; both employ massively parallel compute and then shuffle interim results, with the difference being that Spark caches in memory while MapReduce writes to disk. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Spark offers a simpler programming model, better fault tolerance, and it’s far more extensible than MapReduce. Spark is any form of iterative computation, and it was designed to support specific extensions; among the most popular are machine learning, microbatch stream processing, graph computing, and even SQL.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/hadoop-and-spark-a-tale-of-two-cities/

  • IBM Debuts New Cloud Data Center in Italy

    The new data center helps businesses in Italy fast track their cloud migration plan without having to host their data outside of their own country. Businesses in Italy will now be able to use IBM’s award winning cloud infrastructure while simultaneously being compliant with local data sovereignty regulations.

    http://www.cloudwedge.com/ibms-debuts-new-cloud-data-center-in-italy-1985/

Oracle

 

Hewlett Packard

Other

  • Red Hat Profit Rises 28%

    “Our solid start to fiscal year 2016 was evidenced by strong constant currency revenue growth of over 20%,” said Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. “This strong growth reflects in part the demand for our open, hybrid cloud technologies across four footprints: bare metal, virtualization, private cloud and public cloud deployments.”

    http://www.rttnews.com/2513835/red-hat-profit-rises-28.aspx

  • Teradata Downgraded by JMP Securities (TDC)

    Teradata (NYSE:TDC) last released its earnings data on Thursday, May 7th. The company reported $0.30 earnings per share for the quarter, missing the analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.42 by $0.12. The company had revenue of $605.80 million for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $605.80 million. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $0.54 earnings per share. Teradata’s revenue was down 7.3% compared to the same quarter last year. On average, analysts predict that Teradata will post $2.44 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

    http://www.wkrb13.com/markets/638731/teradata-downgraded-by-jmp-securities-tdc/