Procurement & Career Guidance
Companies are trying to turn everything into a monthly software subscription.
You can’t be fooled by the hype, step back and understand what the product is, and what you are actually purchasing.
Just because a supplier calls their product SaaS or PaaS doesn’t mean it is. If a company is performing a service for you and spitting out a document or a product, that isn’t software.
IBM
Still, the company’s transformation will take some time. “We believe that data analytics is critical to IBM’s long-term growth story, and a big piece of that is Watson,” Bill Kreher, a technology analyst at Edward Jones Investments, says. “IBM is committing more money and resources toward solutions like the genome project than anyone else. I think patient investors will be rewarded as IBM continues to progress down the cognitive computing front.”
The software of Alchemy API is extensively used by 40,000 developers for analyzing and classifying text and images. The more the technology works, the smarter it gets. The point of using this technology is that it helps in analyzing information and provides important details about the users. Watson would perform in a similar manner. This technology is basically very helpful in identifying the types and habits of the target audience, thus benefiting the advertising companies.
http://www.gurufocus.com/news/321531/ibm-eyeing-foray-into-artificial-intelligence
However, as noted here previously, when it comes to cloud computing, IBM appear to be pursuing the Amazon model of radical opaqueness. They refuse to publish any data about the energy or emissions associated with their cloud computing platform. This is a retrograde step, and one they may come to regret.
https://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/85363/ibms-interconnect-2015-good-not-good/
“The result is that technology providers have to pull on more and more levers – like adding GPU acceleration or enabling GPU virtualisation, or enabling FPGA attachment – to get cost-to-performance to come down; that is driving much of the heterogeneity in the cloud – different types of heterogeneity, not just at the CPU level,” he ( Brad McCredie) said. “It’s one of the big drivers behind OpenPower.”
Lee Conrad, national organizer for the workers’ group, Alliance@IBM, said he has learned there were 75,622 regular IBMers on Tuesday, down by 1,686 from mid-February. IBM has not confirmed nor commented on that number. But the company has said that a “workforce rebalancing” this year would amount to several thousand jobs.
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/money/2015/03/04/ibm-headcount-drops-globally/24393745/
According to the complaint, IBM inflated its stock price before selling the semiconductor unit by carrying the unit’s property, plant and equipment assets on its books at US$2.4 billion, when it should have known the assets were worthless.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/401162,ibm-sued-by-shareholder-over-alleged-securities-fraud.aspx
Oracle
Oracle enjoys a dominant position in the enterprise software and database management system (DBMS) software market. According to market research firm Gartner, global spending on IT infrastructure is estimated to grow 2.4% to $3.8 trillion in 2015. Among infrastructure, Big Data and digitalization initiatives are likely to contribute the majority of DBMS market growth. We believe that Oracle’s leading position in the DBMS software market will make it the primary beneficiary of this increased spending.
http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/166844/oracle-grows-on-cloud-business-big-data-among-key-drivers
HP
Make no mistake about it. Hewlett-Packard definitely needs to do this because its consumer business lines are slowing down. While its corporate lines show a lot of promise, they still need a lot of growth. This move to buy Aruba Networks makes a lot of sense within this broader context.
According to Buffett, bankers’ appetites for deals mean that they can do almost anything to push for the sale or purchase of a company. He cited how investment bankers usually urge buyers to pay premiums of up to 50% for the target company. Investment bankers usually tell buyers wonderful things that will happen once the deal closes, such as “control value” of the acquisition. The interest of the bankers is to push a deal through and get paid for their action.
However, Buffett said the same bankers would turn up a few years later and urge for the spinoff of the business they had pushed so hard to be acquired. Instead of control value, bankers change the story and urge for spinoff of the acquisition on the basis of unlocking shareholder value.
http://investcorrectly.com/20150304/warren-buffet-raises-red-flags-banks/
Other
Salesforce.com spent a lot of time on its investor call talking about the large enterprise deals it is winning because that’s what the Street likes to hear, but the company has to keep its eyes on the midmarket, where Microsoft Dynamics is right behind them. The midmarket is an engine of growth and a great counterbalance to the inherent spikes of big deals. And Microsoft is getting good at winning here. Not only is its Cloud version competitively priced for the midmarket, it also has a strong reseller channel that can sell cost-effectively into this market.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/06/why-salesforce-com-should-be-watching-its-back-for-microsoft/
The best development platforms we’ve seen are Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android for mobile, or the Xbox One. All of these development platforms have hardware, an operating system, and a software layer. Salesforce’s development platform only leverages software and provides less utility to 3rd party app developers, hence only ~300 apps created in the past 15 months. The most comparable example would be Facebook’s single sign-on capabilities. By integrating with Facebook, an app developer can let a new user create a user profile by “Logging in with Facebook.” This is the best use case we’ve seen of development platforms that only leverage software. But I don’t see it translating too well with a CRM tool instead of social network.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-moazed/the-end-of-saas_b_6762108.html