Tag: Red Hat

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Supplier Report: 6/27/2015

sn_empire

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

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Supplier Report: 6/20/2015

sn_GordonGekko

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/

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Supplier Report: 6/6/2015

sn_jeffreyjones

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
    sn_storage_value
    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

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Supplier Report: 5/2/2015

sn_steak

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