Tag: Redhat

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Supplier Report: 4/16/2016

 

sn_fruit_Jeffrey Betts

IBM continues to tout their involvement and goals in the healthcare arena. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty was a keynote speaker for the World Health Care Congress and reinforced their progress and aspirations in medical analysis reiterating that cognitive computing is the future of the field.

Seeking Alpha thinks that Oracle’s outlook is less bright due to their overall attitude towards cloud and what that means for their future against competitors.

EMC’s future is looking lighter with new rumors that they are looking to sell off Documentum.

IBM

  • What to expect from IBM earnings

    IBM had a tough 2015 given the ongoing and heavily time consuming business model transition to cloud. Further, sluggish IT spending particularly on on-premise and data center hardware along with foreign exchange volatility remain added concerns.

    We believe that revenues will continue to be affected in the near term as the company is currently transitioning to higher-growth markets that are not yielding enough to offset declines in traditional segments. Also, intensifying competition in the industry is a major headwind.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-to-expect-from-ibm-earnings-2016-04-14
    More:
    IBM: Revenue Will Be Hurt By Cloud Through 2018, Says Credit Suisse

    Credit Suisse’s Kulbinder Garcha reiterates an Underperform rating, and a $110 price target, projecting results in line with consensus on top and bottom line.

    But Garcha thinks the company will miss its $13.50 earnings goal this year, instead delivering instead $13.30, and “We believe top line won’t stabilize until 2018, with the commentary on Japan tax benefit adding confusion on the EPS guidance.”

    http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2016/04/13/ibm-revenue-will-be-hurt-by-cloud-through-2018-says-credit-suisse/

  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: “Cognitive Computing Is the Future of Healthcare”

    Importantly, Rometty said, “That invisible data will now be visible. And when you combine those together,” she said, transformative capabilities will be possible. To name just two examples, she noted that “Weather influences asthma. Exposure to crime influences your mental and physical health. This is why we’ve created the Watson cloud,” she noted, adding that “We’ve spent $4 billion to acquire Phytel, Explorys, Merge, Truven, plus the Apple Research Kit,” and other entities, to help fuel the acquisition and analytics of data as part of that broader process.

    http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/ibm-ceo-ginni-rometty-cognitive-computing-future-healthcare
    More:
    New IBM partnership will create the ultimate Cancer Advisor

    IBM and the American Cancer Society will launch a new partnership to combine IBM’s Big Blue cognitive computing platform (Watson) with the non-profit organisation’s cancer research and patient support services.

    Every year 1.6 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer, patients that require accurate information as quickly as possible. Kyu Rhee, the chief health officer of IBM, said: “Watson has read of oncology literature, but this phase is now about learning all the cancer advocacy literature and how to support cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers in their journey.”

    http://www.sourcingfocus.com/site/newsitem/9192/
    More:
    Rometty’s Keynote Speech at the World Health Care Congress:
    https://sn.joeylombardi.com/?p=1599

  • IBM Scores Server Chip Coup at Google

    These efforts over the past few years appear to finally be paying off. On April 6, Google announced that it was co-developing an open server architecture based on IBM’s upcoming POWER9 processors with fellow cloud computing company Rackspace. POWER is now completely supported across Google’s toolchain, allowing Google’s data centers to mix and match Intel’s x86 and IBM’s POWER processors.

    POWER9 isn’t due until 2017, but Intel should certainly be concerned.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/12/ibm-scores-server-chip-coup-at-google.aspx

Storage [EMC | Dell | Infinidat ]

Microsoft

  • Microsoft just took a big stand against the government over user privacy

    Apple isn’t the only company that’s fighting with the government over user privacy these days. Via GeekWire, Microsoft has sued the United States Department of Justice and has asked a court to declare the government’s secrecy orders as unconstitutional. Microsoft says it objects to orders issued by the DOJ that say the company cannot inform customers when law enforcement officials are seeking access to customer information and data.

    http://bgr.com/2016/04/14/microsoft-vs-doj-secrecy-orders/

  • Microsoft and Facebook Say They Have No Gender Pay Gap

    “Today, for every $1 earned by men, our female employees in the U.S. earn 99.8 cents at the same job title and level,” wrote Kathleen Hogan, executive vice president of human resources for Microsoft in a post on the company’s site. She also shared information about the differences (or lack thereof) in compensation for minority employees, who actually slightly out-earned their white counterparts by 0.004 cents.

    http://fortune.com/2016/04/11/microsoft-facebook-equal-pay/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc

  • HPE the big dog in booming cloud infrastructure market

    HPE is currently the runaway market leader after selling $4.55bn (£3.2bn) of kit destined for public or private cloud environments last year, up 27 per cent on 2014.

    Dell and Cisco were a distant second and third place on 10.6 and 9.6 per cent market share respectively, compared with HPE’s 15.7 per cent, with EMC and IBM rounding out the top five.

    http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2454094/hpe-the-big-dog-in-booming-cloud-infrastructure-market
    However:
    Dell-EMC set to snatch HPE’s crown in $29bn cloud market

    After Dell completes its acquisition of EMC, the merged company looks set to outstrip Hewlett Packard Enterprise as the top earner in cloud IT infrastructure.

    Dell’s and EMC’s combined cloud IT infrastructure revenues for 2015 total $5.3bn, ahead of HP Enterprise’s $4.5bn, according to IDC’s latest vendor revenue figures.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-emc-set-to-snatch-hpes-crown-in-29bn-cloud-market/

Oracle

  • Oracle’s Rite Of Passage Has Come

    Microsoft and Amazon’s AWS have both been taking steps to snatch business away from Oracle. Of the “Cloud Fource” or “Cloud 4ce” companies (names I’ve coined for the top four players in the cloud space comprising Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL)), Microsoft and Amazon are taking important steps to wean the world away from Oracle database systems.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3964707-oracles-rite-passage-come
    sn_MSsql_sa

Other

  • Box: It Makes No Sense For Us To Build Data Centers When IBM Can Do It At Scale

    “Some parts of our architecture have been on AWS over the years,” Levie said in response to TechWeekEurope’s question. “There was already a lot of familiarity with the platform. The partnership we announced with IBM last June encompasses a lot of things as well as cloud. “We had a bit of headway because of previous work with AWS, but we have a much more significant partnership with IBM.

    http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/cloud/box-zones-cloud-data-centres-189947

  • Yes, Badlock bug was shamelessly hyped, but the threat is real

    In a nutshell, Badlock refers to a defect in a security component contained in just about every version of the Windows and Linux operating systems. Known as the Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Call (DCE/RPC), it’s used by administrators around the world to access the most valuable asset on any Windows network—the Active Directory, which acts as a network’s digital security guard, allowing, for instance, an organization’s CFO to log in to an accounting server, while locking out the janitor or the groundskeeper. Because Active Directories enforce security policies and contain password data and other crucial credentials, they are almost always the first asset hackers access once they gain a limited foothold into a targeted network.

    http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/04/yes-badlock-bug-was-shamelessly-hyped-but-the-threat-is-real/

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Supplier Report: 11/7/2015

sn_edisonbulb_JoshByers

IBM purchased another company named Gravitant this week.  It helps customers select cloud services from a variety of providers (and is a cloud service itself).  I know I keep saying this, but IBM is consistent with their purchases: Cloud, Analytics (Big Data), and IoT.  Now I want to see all the pieces put together.

And when you have it all together, then you break it apart.  HPE announced the departure of their CIO on the first official business day as Hewlett Packard Enterprises.  The market seems to be down on HPE at the moment, while their sister company HP Inc gained on their opening day despite concerns about the health of the PC and printer markets.

The Dell/EMC acquisition continues to befuddle me.  Rumor has it that Dell is looking to sell off $10B in assets (wise move) to pay down their massive debt.  They are also looking to rush a startup that EMC and VMWare (and GE) created called Pivotal to IPO to help generate additional funds.  So… Dell goes private and loves it, they are buying EMC and taking them private (presumably), but they are KEEPING VMWare public, and starting another company with the EMC asset and doing an IPO… that made my fingers hurt.

IBM

  • IBM’s Shopping Spree Continues As It Buys Cloud Brokerage Firm Gravitant

    With Gravitant, it gets cloud brokerage, which helps companies manage cloud purchases across multiple suppliers. IBM plans to fold the new bauble into its IBM Global Technology Services unit. In addition, IBM Cloud plans to add the capabilities to its growing SaaS catalogue.

    That’s like a two for one sale because Gravitant gets sold as an old fashioned service offering, and also as a SaaS product, which plays well into IBM’s overall strategy.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/ibms-shopping-spree-continues-as-it-buys-cloud-brokerage-firm-gravitant/

  • The Mainframe Is a Vampire

    If you looked at the recent IBM numbers, which were pretty painful but in line with what generally happens when a company is adapting to a major industry change, you saw one bright light: their mainframe business was growing faster than the server segment in general is growing.

    In fact, with the massive growth of web services, it has been hard for the server segment to get out of the low single digits. But once you adjusted for currency fluctuations, mainframes (IBM’s System Z) were up a whopping 20 percent. That’d be impressive server growth in a good year, for what has been a really soft year for servers, 20 percent growth is outstanding.

    http://www.datamation.com/commentary/the-mainframe-is-a-vampire.html

  • Why the IBM – Weather Company purchase is a big deal (shameless plug: I cover this topic on the SourceCast podcast episode #3, which will go live tomorrow… so visit again!)

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-11-05/ibm-to-buy-weather-company-why-that-s-a-big-deal
  • IBM Watson is going to change how you think about the weather (Here is a non-video article that says similar (internet of) things)

    The focus at IBM is not so much in getting Watson involved in making better weather forecasts, but in putting the world’s most famous supercomputer to work in mining epic amounts of data in order to help businesses come up with actionable insights about the weather on both a real-time and long-term basis.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/11/05/ibm-watson-is-going-to-change-how-you-think-about-the-weather/

EMC/Dell

  • Pivotal IPO Could Make Dell-EMC Deal Even More Complicated

    As a reminder, EMC owns 80 percent of VMware, which is operated and traded as an independent company. When Dell agreed to buy EMC for $67 billion last month the deal included VMware, which Dell has said it wants to continue operating in the same fashion.

    Pivotal is itself a joint venture of EMC and VMware along with GE (which owns around 10 percent). The plan could call for EMC to sell about 20 percent of its ownership stake as an IPO, which is similar to what it did when it took VMware public in 2007, according to the re/code article.

    If this is true, it’s just another case of this deal getting ever more muddled with multiple layers of ownership, all pointing back to Dell, which if this closes is the ultimate decider here. Let’s not forget, however that EMC has a clause in its agreement that if it gets a better offer than the $67 billion that Dell offered it, it could take that deal.

    http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/pivotal-ipo-could-make-dell-emc-deal-even-more-complicated/

  • Dell planning to sell off $10 billion in assets (rumor)
    It is too early to say I called it, but keep watching for news like this…

    Reuters reports the PC vendor is planning this to reduce the heavy debt load it will be taking on to buy data storage company EMC for around £44 billion. In 2007, EMC sold 19 percent of VMware shares in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. A successful Pivotal IPO could potentially raise billions in new capital

    http://financialspots.com/2015/11/04/dell-planning-to-sell-off-10-billion-in-assets-rumour/

    Here is more information on the sell off providing possible asset targets:

    Unnamed sources told Reuters that Dell will take on about $49.5 billion after it completes the $67 billion acquisition of EMC and its federated companies sometime next year. Selling such assets as its Quest software business (for systems management), SonicWall (network security) and AppAssure (data backup) will help the company reduce the debt load, according to the sources.

    http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/dell-reportedly-to-sell-software-assets-to-ease-debt-from-emc-deal.html

Hewlett Packard (HPE & HPI)
Note: I suspect my coverage of HP Inc will dwindle with time, but for now, I will cover both companies.  

  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise Loses CIO As It Charts New Course

    Ralph Loura, who had served as chief information officer of the enterprise business of HP for the past 15 months, has left the company. “I had an impact while there [and] I helped design the new op model for IT, and designed myself out of it because it was what the new company needed (move from a federated model with group CIOs, to a unified/centralized model with a single CIO),” he wrote to CRN.

    http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/300078699/hewlett-packard-enterprises-loses-cio-as-it-splits-from-the-former-hp.htm

  • Why JPMorgan Is Cautious On HP Inc (HPQ)

    The skeptical view taken by the firm comes on the back of PC data, which is hardly reassuring. Seagate and Western Digital both guided for a decline in HDD TAM for the fourth quarter. Intel reported a 19% YoY decline in its PC shipments for 3QFY15 worse than the 10% decline witnessed in 2QFY15. Desktops and Notebooks posted even worse numbers and there is scarcely anything notable that stirs confidence. While HDD companies see signs of stabilization, analysts at JPMorgan are far from convinced and expect more macro instability.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/25953-why-jpmorgan-is-cautious-on-hp-inc-hpq/

    However, On Monday, the stock market reacted like this (per USA Today):

    HPQ, which sells PCs and printers, soared 13%, to $13.83; HPE, responsible for commercial computer systems, software and services,  fell 1.6% $14.49. Both stocks are trading on the S&P 500.

Other

  • Why Billionaire Trader Stan Druckenmiller Believes In Amazon And Not IBM

    “We are in a bubble in what I would call short term behavior,” Druckenmiller said. To reinforce the point Druckenmiller gave a negative assessment of IBM, which he said has missed earnings only three times over the past nine years and is in the process of buying back billions in stock, and a bullish view on Amazon.com… the difference? While IBM is cutting R&D spending against a shrinking base of sales, Amazon has doubled that spending as a percentage of sales even as they’ve grown at double digit rates. “I love Amazon. They are investing on the future,” Druckenmiller said, before quipping, “Bezos is a serial monopolist.”

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/11/03/billionaire-trader-stan-druckenmiller-says-hes-long-growth-stocks-short-value-stocks/

  • Will NoSQL be the undoing of Oracle’s database reign?

    What’s most interesting in all this is how database popularity, broadly measured, compares with Gartner’s newly released Operational Database Magic Quadrant. TechRepublic contributor Janakiram MSV has captured five big takeaways from Gartner’s report, but here’s a sixth:The database vendors that embrace NoSQL are destined to be the long-term winners.

    Photo: DB-Engines
    Photo: DB-Engines

    http://www.techrepublic.com/article/will-nosql-be-the-undoing-of-oracles-database-reign/

  • Why Did Microsoft Corporation Paint Its Cloud Red?

    As part of the deal, Microsoft will feature Red Hat’s Linux as a “preferred” option for enterprise computing jobs on Azure. The deal comes in as a surprise for many as the companies have historically had differing stances on software patents and usage. Red Hat has always encouraged open-source softwares that can be distributed widely and can be modified. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been against it. Interesting to note is the fact that a separate technical team will be built from employees of both companies to solve the customer issues more efficiently.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/25978-why-did-microsoft-corporation-paint-its-cloud-red/

  • Teradata Plans to Sell Its $200 Million Marketing Application Business. Any Takers?

    According to financial statements within the Teradata announcement, Marketing Applications revenue was down about 9% this year, which is surprising in a generally strong martech market but in line with the rest of Teradata’s business. Teradata told me separately that their marketing cloud business grew 22% year-on-year this quarter, suggesting that the decline came in the older, on-premise products and/or related services. As you may know, Teradata’s marketing applications business was a mashup of the original Teradata marketing products, developed over the past 20 years and largely on-premise, and the Aprimo cloud-based systems acquired for $525 million in 2010. The Aprimo group was dominant in the years immediately following the acquisition but control shifted back to the older Teradata team more recently. One bit of evidence: the Aprimo brand was dropped in 2013.

    http://customerthink.com/teradata-plans-to-sell-its-200-million-marketing-application-business-any-takers/

Photo: Josh Byers

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Supplier Report: 10/24/2015

sn_storm_Pavel Badrtdinov

It was a rough week for the companies usually covered on this report.  IBM missed earnings expectations AGAIN.  The press has been brutal predicting the end of days for big blue.  Rometty says she will stay the course and focus on cloud and analytics.

HP has not reacted well to the EMC news and has been trolling the acquisition in the press and with their channel customers.   While they throw attention to other companies, they officially announced their decision to put the Helion cloud platform out of its misery.

Speaking of cloud, EMC announced they are creating a joint venture with VMware based on their Virtustream technology.

IBM

  • IBM in Hot Water as Earnings Continue Downward Spiral

    IBM has continued its down ward spiral, with revenues falling by 14 percent in the third quarter, year on year. The company’s revenues has come down to $19.28 billion in the third quarter, much lower than the $22.4 billion it earned in the third quarter last year. This is the 14th continuous quarter loss for IBM, once the doyen of computer hardware makers everywhere. The earnings have even disappointed analysts forecasts, who were expecting the company to earn $19.6 million. As expected, the markets reacted strongly and punished the company by scrapping 5.5 percent of its share price, at the end of the day.

    http://www.financialbuzz.com/ibm-in-hot-water-as-earnings-continue-downward-spiral-350193

  • 42 percent of IBM’s SoftLayer outbound emails found to be spam

    “We believe that SoftLayer, perhaps in an attempt to extend their business in the rapidly growing Brazilian market, deliberately relaxed their customer vetting procedures,” Spamhaus suggested.

    http://www.scmagazineuk.com/42-percent-of-ibms-softlayer-outbound-emails-found-to-be-spam/article/449004/

    Hmmm… I didn’t know that Brazil was a spam hub… but it is (#4):
    http://www.bloomberg.com/ss/09/02/0211_spam_countries/18.htm

  • IBM bags Wipro

    Wipro, on its part, said it will train 15,000 of its developers to use Bluemix via an online open course across 58 countries. Wipro is to use over 100 services in IBM’s public Bluemix catalogue but will also use Bluemix Dedicated. That’s a private cloud version for developers to build apps that access sensitive data.

    http://www.techeye.net/business/ibm-bags-wipro

  • IBM CEO Pledges to Stay the Course

    Ms. Rometty said she didn’t take the decision to reduce IBM’s outlook lightly. The reason was a slowdown in what the company calls “transactional” businesses, which is shorthand for deals that require customers to make sizable upfront commitments—like big contracts for hardware, software or services contracts.

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-pledges-to-stay-the-course-1445360608

  • IBM Raises Eyebrows, Opens Source Code Access To China: Here’s Why

    The demos are reportedly done inside a secure room without an Internet connection, where China’s IT experts view the source code on an IBM security application to prevent other people from poaching the company’s IP. Moreover, the demos are done only for a few hours, keeping anyone from thoroughly going through the code to find back doors that may have been implanted to allow the U.S. government to secretly infiltrate the system, suggesting that the demos are highly symbolic more than anything else.

    http://www.techtimes.com/articles/96776/20151018/ibm-raises-eyebrows-opens-source-code-access-to-china-here-s-why.htm

EMC

  • EMC and VMware Creating a Jointly Owned Hybrid Cloud Company

    EMC and VMware are creating a new jointly owned hybrid cloud company that will be based on the Virtustream business that EMC acquired earlier this year. EMC and VMware officials announced the new company—which will carry the Virtustream brand—Oct. 20 during the releases of their respective quarterly earnings. The new business will be added to the list of companies that make up EMC’s federation. EMC and VMware each will own a 50 percent share of Virtustream.

    http://www.eweek.com/video/emc-and-vmware-creating-a-jointly-owned-hybrid-cloud-company.html

  • EMC to retain some autonomy after acquisition (this is just VMware, which everybody already knew)

    EMC’s virtualization software subsidiary VMware will “remain an independent public company,” Dell said. Many of VMware’s current clients provide servers and related services, putting them in direct competition with Dell’s key operations. Fears that clients could drop VMware after it is transferred to Dell sank the former’s share price around 30% in the wake of the announcement of the acquisition.

    http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/EMC-to-retain-some-autonomy-after-acquisition

HP

  • HP Split Could Mean ‘Deal or Die’ for H-P Enterprise

    The tax-free split of HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise includes an agreement that restricts deals that could undo the financial engineering and require a bill to the Internal Revenue Service. Burgess suggested the provision is effectively a poison pill that could thwart a takeover. An outright buyout of the company or a deal involving more than 50% of the stock in Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, for example, could create problems.

    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13334251/1/hp-split-could-mean-deal-or-die-for-h-p-enterprise.html

  • Hewlett-Packard spreading FUD over Dell-EMC merger (sharing this because I am glad someone called HP out for their lack of subtlety.  If you have to FUD, do it with nuance)

    Hewlett-Packard hopes to draw away enterprise data storage customers from Dell and EMC using the classic approach of spreading FUD, business shorthand for “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” about its rivals. Last week, HP CEO Meg Whitman criticized Dell’s planned $67 billion acquisition of EMC. HP later launched an opportunistic marketing campaign warning customers about potential upheaval in the storage business of the combined Dell-EMC.

    http://news.investors.com/technology-click/102315-777303-hp-spreads-fear-uncertainty-doubt-over-dell-emc-merger.htm

  • HP is giving up on competing with Amazon’s cloud (HPQ)

    That’s something HP has found out the hard way, with HP Helion constantly coming under fire for being too small and too unfocused on the market to seriously make a dent. And so, HP is going to shut down HP Helion to stick with what its good at: Helping customers run their own data centers with hardware, software, and services to run at cloud levels of efficiency. The industry term for that concept is “private cloud,” and it plays into HP’s experience in servers and software.

    http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/ZZ/20151021/BUSINESS/310219918/-1/business

Other

  • IBM: Can A Red Knight Save Big Blue?

    Two things excite me about Jim. First, the performance of Red Hat under his leadership. Since he became CEO of the company in January, 2008, the shares are up 275%, a market cap of $14.75 billion for a company that doesn’t really sell anything. Red Hat offers support for open source software, stuff you can download for free, yet revenues are growing at nearly 20% per year, and software engineers consider it a great place to work.

    The second thing that excites me about Jim is that he has a philosophy, a way of managing his business, one that is proven to work, and one that can scale to a company of IBM’s size. I have read his book, The Open Organization and you should too. It’s a manual for 21st century software management, and software is where IBM needs to be.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3589406-ibm-can-a-red-knight-save-big-blue

Photo: Pavel Badrtdinov