Supplier Report: 6/6/2015

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For the 3rd straight week, OpenStack is a major news item.  Both IBM and Cisco announced acquisitions of OpenStack firms.  Acquisitions were the major news driver in general as CA also acquired Grid Tools while HP is making news for what they didn’t (and might) buy.

IBM

  • IBM Acquires Managed Private OpenStack Cloud Startup Blue Box

    The Seattle-based cloud provider simplifies private cloud for enterprises by offering it as a managed service. Its turnkey private clouds are hosted in customers’ data centers but managed by Blue Box, similar to Cisco’s Metacloud. Blue Box gives IBM capabilities to deliver public cloud-like experience within a data center of the client’s choice.

    http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/06/04/ibm-acquires-managed-private-openstack-cloud-startup-blue-box/

  • When Watson meets procurement

    Another example that Michael provided might best be described as the category/supplier “briefing book” on steroids. The idea behind “the complete procurement overview” is to aggregate information on a real-time basis when anyone within procurement (or outside of it) needs a briefing document or related auto-generated deliverable.

    https://spendmatters.com/2015/06/05/when-watson-meets-procurement-ibm-uses-big-data-to-tackle-big-supply-challenges/

  • IBM Extends Watson Platform Capabilities

    IBM revealed the existence of a Tradeoff Analytics API that developers can invoke via the IBM Watson Cloud running on the IBM Bluemix cloud service. This particular API, said Vince Padua, director of the IBM Watson platform, makes it easier for developers to create applications that filter large amounts of content. Similar in concept to the filtering tools commonly used in e-commerce applications on the Web, Padua said the goal is to enable end users to weight different types of content in way that enable Watson to deliver better answers based on the personal preferences of the end user based on multiple criteria.

    http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/06042015/ibm-extends-watson-platform-capabilities

  • IBM has been awarded an average of 21 patents per day so far in 2015

    Although the media (Quartz included) tend to focus on what wacky inventions companies like Google and Apple are patenting, IBM is still far and away the leader in patents in the US. The US Patent and Trademark Office releases its new patent awards on Tuesdays. After yesterday’s awards, IBM has been awarded an average of 152 patents a week—or 21 patents a day—in 2015, whereas Apple has only received about 42 a week, and Google about 64.

    http://qz.com/418068/ibm-has-been-awarded-an-average-of-21-patents-per-day-so-far-in-2015/

  • IBM is shutting Many Eyes data visualization service

    Launched 8 years ago by IBM Research, the project gave people a way to crowd-source their data analysis cheaply and easily. Users could upload data sets to Many Eyes, which would then present visualizations for other people in different specialties to assess.

    http://fortune.com/2015/06/02/ibm-shuts-many-eyes/

  • IBM Targets Specific Industries with Prebuilt Analytics

    The specially tailored solutions provide modeling patterns for predictive analytics — basing business decisions on Big Data gathered from different sources — and customized interfaces and dashboards so users can focus on industry-specific use cases. Data preparation capabilities are also specialized to handle unique industry-related data, collecting the information and massaging it for analytic investigations.

    https://adtmag.com/articles/2015/06/01/ibm-industy-data.aspx

 

HP

EMC

  • Enterprise storage share of EMC, NetApp, Dell and IBM drop, HP gains
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    http://www.infotechlead.com/it-statistics/enterprise-storage-share-of-emc-netapp-dell-and-ibm-drop-hp-gains-30789
  • Hewlett-Packard: They’ll End up Buying EMC

    HP to buy EMC? We think so. We have also held the belief that HP will ultimately buy EMC (including VMware) to strengthen its position in several key areas, including cloud (VMware and Virtustream), converged infrastructure (EMC), analytics (Pivotal), and mobility (VMware AirWatch). While management’s messaging around the size of M&A in HP Enterprise continues to refer to Aruba as a benchmark (~$3 billion), CEO Meg Whitman explained that from an academic perspective, technology hardware is an industry that should consolidate due to declining revenues and slowing growth rates. This sounds like EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s answer. Have they been talking? We think so. Pro forma financial leverage is manageable at a $32-33 takeout price (less than 3x net debt/EBITDA). There are so many reasons this makes sense. HP management has not commented specifically on acquiring EMC.

    http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/06/04/hewlett-packard-theyll-end-up-buying-emc-says-raymond-james-brean-sees-more-savings/

  • EMC’s Management Presents at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Tech Conference
    (Full Transcript)
    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3231396-emcs-emc-management-presents-at-bank-of-america-merrill-lynch-global-tech-conference-transcript
  • Is EMC cloud strategy a victory for customer choice or just confusing?

    Howard Elias: The long and short of it, is that customers really do need different cloud varieties depending on the task at hand, he said. “They may want on- or off-premises; managed or unattended; production or test-and-development; mission-critical or otherwise clouds,”  Elias acknowledged that vCloud Air could run the same workloads, but “you won’t get the self-provisioning, and there’s an SLA for the underlying infrastructure capability, but not in terms of resiliency, performance etc.” That is, vCloud Air is positioned to work very well with an existing VMware workload running in-house but “you won’t get the curation and attendedness” that Virtustream provides, he added.

    https://fortune.com/2015/06/01/is-emc-cloud-confusing/

Other

  • Cisco and IBM acquisitions highlight efforts to make OpenStack easier to use

     Cisco’s target, Piston, has developed CloudOS, which manages clusters of commodity servers as a single pool of resources. The software offers features for quickly deploying OpenStack, and by using automation functionality it promises to free up IT staff from time-consuming management tasks. On average, when using more than 50 nodes, running a private cloud environment using CloudOS with OpenStack costs less than one third the amount required to do the same thing on Amazon Web Services, according to an FAQ on Piston’s website.

    http://www.computerworld.com/article/2931558/cloud-computing/cisco-and-ibm-acquisitions-highlight-efforts-to-make-openstack-easier-to-use.html

  • Red Hat’s CEO is dead wrong about the cloud

    Maybe AWS chief Andy Jassy started it all, deriding the private cloud as “archaic” and not really cloud at all. Then Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told me that public clouds like AWS become “obscenely expensive at scale” — which, of course, sent public cloud advocates into a frothing rage.

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2931412/cloud-computing/red-hats-ceo-is-dead-wrong-about-the-cloud.html

  • CA Buys Grid Tools

    Information technology management software maker CA, Inc.said Thursday it has bought privately-held Grid Tools Ltd., a provider of enterprise test data management, automated test design and optimization software solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/ca-buys-grid-tools-20150604-00733

Supplier Report: 5/2/2015

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The big news this week is SalesForce potentially being up for sale.  There were hundreds of articles discussing potential buyers with IBM, Oracle, HP, and Microsoft being the only viable contenders.

Speaking of Oracle and HP, outside of the Saleforce news, there wasn’t much new information posted (same recycled stories).  Sometimes you are looking for the sizzle and the steak, so focus was shifted to other suppliers this week like EMC and Red Hat.

IBM

  • Apple and IBM are looking to get iPads in the hands of the elderly:

    The collaboration calls for Apple to provide iPads and IBM to deliver apps and analytics software to connect millions of Japanese seniors with services, healthcare, community and their families under the national Post Office Watch service. IBM will write software that alerts Post Office Watch customers to take their medicine, provide them with exercise and diet information and assist with tasks such as grocery shopping.

    http://thevarguy.com/business-technology-solution-sales/050115/apple-ibm-japan-post-supply-tablets-elderly-japanese

  • IBM introduces new quantum computing chip:

    IBM’s new chip is the first to integrate the basic devices needed to build a quantum computer, known as qubits, into a 2-D grid. Researchers think one of the best routes to making a practical quantum computer would involve creating grids of hundreds or thousands of qubits working together. The circuits of IBM’s chip are made from metals that become superconducting when cooled to extremely low temperatures. The chip operates at only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

    http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537041/ibm-shows-off-a-quantum-computing-chip/

  • IBM boosts divident by 18%

    The increase will cost the company an extra $197.7 million a quarter and brings the dividend yield to about 3%.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-boosts-quarterly-dividend-18-1430232709

  • Cloud is not a high margin business:

    AWS, which many thought was running at break-even or possibly at a loss, turns out to be for Amazon a $5 billion business generating a third of the company’s total profits. That’s good, right? Not if it establishes a benchmark for typical-to-good cloud service provider performance. In fact it suggests that some companies — IBM especially — are going to have a very difficult time finding success in the cloud.

    http://betanews.com/2015/04/28/aws-shows-cloud-is-not-a-high-margin-business/

  • Interesting “what if” post of IBM buying TCS…

    It’s simple – make a move on the largest, most aggressive and dynamic of the Indian-heritage providers:  TCS.   Together, they would crush the market across all aspects of delivery, all verticals, all technologies because their individual forays in the As-a-Service world could play off each other and get scale even quicker.  They would have skill at massive scale and could undercut the competition on key deals – almost at will – if they needed to.

    http://www.horsesforsources.com/ibm-tcs_042515

EMC

Other