Tag: SalesForce

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/11/2015

sn_antman_JDHancock

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

 

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/4/2015

sn_philadelphia_4oJ

As the nation celebrates its birthday, most companies are taking a break from major news (although some didn’t).  It is more of the same as we enjoy a long weekend.

IBM’s big data is transcending the hype and people are expecting great things, so great that Watson and his automated cousins could eliminate 47% of US jobs over the coming decades (because that’s not an alarmist factoid to get more readers).

Oracle is still talking about deep cost reductions to compete with Amazon, while HP keeps singing their breakup song (and released a monstrous 316 page exchange commission report). Speaking of reports, there are more stating EMC had a good Q1 in traditional storage (which has been consistent with reports over the last few weeks).

There was an office chat about how SAS is beloved by their employees and I found an article discussing that culture. Xerox apparently has the opposite situation…recently being named the 5th worst company to work for.

IBM

  • Watson’s next feat? Taking on cancer

    Among the most ambitious projects is a partnership with 14 cancer centers to use Watson to help choose therapies based on a tumor’s genetic fingerprints. Doctors have known for years that some treatments work miraculously on some patients but not at all on others due to genetics. But the expense and complexity in identifying genetic mutations and matching them up with potential therapies has made it difficult for more than a handful of patients to benefit from this new approach. The service is scheduled to launch later this year.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/06/27/watsons-next-feat-taking-on-cancer/

  • But it isn’t all wonder and good news, the same article states:

    While there’s much debate about the extent to which technology is destroying jobs, recent research has driven concern. A 2013 paper by economists at the University of Oxford calculated the probability of 702 occupations being automated or “roboticized” out of existence and found that a startling 47 percent of American jobs — from paralegals to taxi drivers — could disappear in coming years. Similar research by MIT business professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee has shown that this trend may be accelerating and that we are at the dawn of a “second machine age.”

  • New Report Shows the Internet of Things’ Economic Impact Could Surpass Its Hype — But There’s Just One Problem

    While a host of devices such as smartphones, wearable technologies, connected industrial equipment, automobiles, and smart agriculture sensors can collect massive amounts of data, the McKinsey report notes that most of the information currently being collected isn’t being put to use: “Most IoT data collected today are not used, and the data that are used are not fully exploited. A critical challenge is to use the flood of big data generated by IoT devices for prediction and optimization.” McKinsey isn’t the only organization to discover this. IBM (NYSE:IBM) says 90% of data collected by smart IoT devices goes completely unused, and that the data starts losing its value just a few seconds after being gathered.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/01/new-report-shows-the-internet-of-things-economic-i.aspx

  • IBM explains its new (mobile) philosophy

    Matt Candy, managing partner, Europe IBM Interactive Experience, global business services, is one of the brand’s major spokespeople on the topic, and he believes that digital media is changing the way in which businesses and consumers interact: ‘The last, best experience that anyone has becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they have everywhere. These experiences transcend industry – this shift is changing the challenge that brands face when interacting with the customer. Traditional boundaries are dead, it’s time for businesses to focus on human-to-human interactions. This makes experience the new competitive battleground in which businesses will have to work. 

    http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/news/b2b/36371/-ibm-explains-its-new-philosophy.aspx#.VZXhfPlVhBc

  • GlobalFoundries Takeover of IBM Chip Unit Is Official

    The two companies announced last October that IBM would pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over its money-losing chip unit, which includes the plant in Essex. But the deal had to clear hurdles first. Because GlobalFoundries is owned by the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, it needed to obtain clearance from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel charged with reviewing major business deals to safeguard national security. The companies announced Monday that the committee had approved the deal.

    http://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2015/07/01/globalfoundries-takeover-of-ibm-chip-unit-official

Oracle

  • Will Oracle Corporation’s New Cloud Push Pay-Off?

    A few days ago, Ellison and a few other Oracle execs announced the introduction of the company’s new, comprehensive “PaaS [Platform-as-a-Service] Launch and Cloud File Sharing and Collaboration” suite of services. Ellison didn’t hold back when asked what the objective of Oracle’s new Cloud Platform hopes to accomplish, saying “Our new archive storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/06/27/will-oracle-corporations-new-cloud-push-pay-off.aspx

Hewlett Packard

EMC

Other

  • Marc Benioff blasts SAP CEO: “He’s scared of Salesforce”

    On Thursday, during an event in SAP’s home country Germany, Benioff said Bill McDermott, the CEO of the $US90 billion German software maker, recently snubbed Benioff’s outreach efforts. “We offered an olive branch to them. I’ve told Bill I’ve wanted to have a deeper relationship with them. Yes we’re competitors, we should also be partners,” Benioff said, according to Bloomberg. “He’s scared of Salesforce.”

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-sap-ceo-bill-mcdermott-2015-7

  • Xerox is the 5th worst company to work for

    Under Burns’ leadership, the company’s earnings have declined from more than $1.3 billion in 2011 to $992 million in 2014, a 25% drop. These figures support recurring employee complaints about leadership — only 32% of surveyed employees approved of Burns. Many employees also complained about a culture of favoritism in the company, saying that personal relationships are more important than work ethic when it comes to promotions and raises. Another recurring complaint was related to compensation. Employees cited low pay and years without cost of living raises as reasons for the company’s high turnover. Less than a third of Xerox employees would recommend a job at the company to a friend.

    http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/06/29/the-worst-companies-to-work-for/3/

  • Xerox Is Not the Problem, the Whole IT Services Industry Is

    If we look at it from a labor perspective (Xerox should be pretty bad considering it is the fifth worst company to work for), we do see that the company does have low expenses per employee. Annualizing results from last quarter, Xerox pays about $7,100 per employee per quarter, and squeezes out about $5 in revenue for every dollar spent on labor (including general expenses). Accenture, surprisingly, spends even less per employee per quarter at about $4,100, earning about $5.56 per dollar spent on labor.

    http://247wallst.com/services/2015/07/02/xerox-is-not-the-problem-the-whole-it-services-industry-is/

  • What’s Wrong With Software Licensing Models?

    http://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/video/300077310/whats-wrong-with-software-licensing-models.htm
  • This is an old article that Bobby C mentioned this week, but considering how customers are down on SAS, I thought I would find it:

    HOW SAS BECAME THE WORLD’S BEST PLACE TO WORK

    At 70 years old, Goodnight holds the conviction that “what makes his organization work are the new ideas that come out of his employee’s brains.” He therefore holds his employees in the highest esteem. So while he fully anticipated that the recession would constrain the firm’s short-term revenues, he instinctively knew that his team would produce breakthrough products while his competitors were cutting costs.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/3004953/how-sas-became-worlds-best-place-work

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/30/2015

 

sn_vikingfuneral

This is a week of unexpected actions.  HP Enterprise purchases ConteXtream to enable cloud SaaS telecom, EMC purchases Virtustream to act as the centerpiece of their cloud offerings.  Now there are rumors (again) that EMC might buy HP Enterprises post split.

CA bought Rally Software and SalesForce purchased Tempo.

Meanwhile, IBM gets both good and bad news about their cloud offerings and deepen their overall relationship with Apple.

IBM

  • IBM to distribute 50,000 Apple machines to employees

    With this announcement, IBM has not only become one of the biggest purchasers of the Macs, it has also become one of the strongest supporters of Apple. The company has currently distributed around 15,000 Macs in the organization, however, now it plans to provide 50,000 machines to its employees by the end of 2015.

    http://www.businessfinancenews.com/22545-ibm-plans-to-distribute-50000-apple-inc-machines-to-its-employees/

  • Microsoft and Google rise while IBM sinks in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud providers

    IBM achieved some scale in the IaaS business by buying SoftLayer. However, Gartner says SoftLayer “typically sold to Mode 2 customers (specifically start-ups and gaming companies with a strong interest in bare-metal dedicated hosting). Since the acquisition, IBM has increasingly focused on acquiring Mode 1 customers, but SoftLayer better meets the needs of Mode 2 customers.” Gartner also notes that “IBM’s aPaaS (BlueMix) is hosted in SoftLayer data centers but the offerings are not integrated.”

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-and-google-rise-while-ibm-sinks-in-gartners-latest-magic-quadrant-for-cloud-providers/

  • IBM cloud computing services earns $7.7 billion over the past year

    IBM’s most recent quarterly earnings report indicates that the company is seeing rapid growth in its cloud business revenues, which increased 75 percent year-over-year, resulting in total cloud revenues of $7.7 billion in the twelve months leading up to the end of 2015’s first quarter. Even given the recent success of the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, these most recent financial figures show that IBM’s cloud computing services are outperforming Amazon’s by more than $2.5 billion over the last year.

    http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/05/29/ibm-cloud-computing-services/id=58034/

  • IBM is Most Popular Hosted Private Cloud Provider: Survey

    Forrester noted that survey respondents were concerned about vendor lock-in. However, the report said “standards like OASIS’s TOSCA and open source projects like OpenStack provide enterprises the future hope of less lock-in and greater adherence to standards.” IBM is a major supporter of open cloud computing and a key contributor of code to the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry projects.

    http://www.eweek.com/cloud/ibm-is-most-popular-hosted-private-cloud-provider-survey.html

  • IBM ships new predictive analytics suite

    IBM today announced 20 new industry-specific solutions with pre-built predictive analytics capabilities that will make it easier and faster for organizations across industries like retail, banking, telecommunications, insurance and others, to uncover and act on critical business insights.

    http://www.finextra.com/news/announcement.aspx?pressreleaseid=59924

  • Xamarin, IBM Expand MobileFirst Partnership, Add Security

    Xamarin said interoperability with IBM MobileFirst Protect enables enterprises to more securely deploy, manage and monitor business applications. IBM MobileFirst Protect, formerly IBM MaaS360, is a secure enterprise mobility management platform that provides mobility management and security of mobile devices, applications, documents, emails, plus access to the Web from a single portal.

    http://www.eweek.com/developer/xamarin-ibm-expand-mobilefirst-partnership-add-security.html

Oracle

HP

  • Mphasis Hung Out to Dry by Parent Company Hewlett-Packard

    The Indian Economic Times has reported that, despite owning just over 60 per cent of Mphasis, HP has no plans to offer further financial support to the software services company. However, Mphasis chief executive Ganesh Ayyar insists that his organisation will not be stepping back from the BPO arena.

    http://www.sourcingfocus.com/site/newsitem/8743/

  • HP acquires Israel’s ConteXtream to liberate telcos from hardware (HP has been snapping up quite a few networking companies lately)

    “In the networking world there are countless functions — firewalls, caching, all kinds of activities — and we have all kinds of monolithic hardware boxes to do these things. NFV is about saying, ‘Why can’t we put these various functions in the cloud? Why does each function need to be on specialized and dedicated hardware?’”

    http://www.geektime.com/2015/05/27/hp-acquires-israels-contextream-to-liberate-telcos-from-hardware/

  • HP enterprise services told to cut $2bn over three years (Cathie Lesjak on some of their accounting plans)

    In particular, the infrastructure technology outsourcing (ITO) business was severely dented by competition from cloud providers. Government austerity programs in the United States and Europe have forced a business model transformation, HP said in its results.

    http://www.itnews.com.au/News/404384,hp-enterprise-services-told-to-cut-2bn-over-three-years.aspx

  • With the reduction comes…EMC Deal Makes Post-Split HP More Vulnerable

    Making all that happen will require an enterprise salesforce, and a lot of engineers with experience building actual clouds. Those are two things HP has. With the personal computer pieces of the company jettisoned, HP Enterprise becomes affordable to EMC, which starts to trade today with a market cap of $52 billion.

    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3214566-emc-deal-makes-post-split-hp-more-vulnerable

EMC

  • EMC buying Virtustream for $1.2B

    When the deal closes (expected in Q3), Virtustream will form EMC‘s new managed cloud services business. “The acquisition represents a transformational element of EMC’s strategy to help customers move all applications to cloud-based IT environments,” says the company

    http://seekingalpha.com/news/2543006-emc-buying-virtustream-for-1_2b

  • Why EMC’s Acquisition of Virtustream Is Good News

    With increasingly more businesses migrating applications to the cloud, Virtustream gives EMC the needed expertise and offerings to help its customers manage this transition. “It’s a game changer,” said EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci.

    http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/052915/why-emcs-acquisition-virtustream-good-news-emc.aspx

  • EMC and Canonical expand OpenStack Partnership

    For the last two years, EMC has been a part of Canonical’s Cloud Partner Program and OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL). During this time EMC created a new Juju Charm for EMC VNX technology. This enables deployment by Canonical’s Juju modeling   software. This past week, we specifically announced the availability of a new OpenStack solution with Ubuntu OpenStack and Canonical as part of the Reference Architecture Program announced last November in Paris. The solution is built in close collaboration with Canonical in EMC labs then tested, optimized, and certified.

    http://www.cloudscaling.com/blog/openstack/emc-and-canonical-expand-openstack-partnership/

Other

  • CA is buying Rally software for $480M

    CA, which is looking to cut its dependence on a slow-growing system management software market (pressured by cloud competition), states Rally’s Agile Development tools will “complement and expand CA’s strengths in the areas of DevOps and Management Cloud.” Rally’s clients include over 35 Fortune 100 firms.

    http://seekingalpha.com/news/2547046-ca-buying-rally-software-for-480m-raly-plus-42_5-percent

  • In the middle of these buyout rumors, Salesforce buys Tempo

    Tempo launched in 2013 as part of an emerging trend of “smart assistant” mobile apps for email, calendars, and such. Tempo connects to a user’s calendar, contacts, and other apps to provide helpful information and suggestions like sending an email if they’re running late for a meeting, or flight and weather details ahead of a trip. It competed with similar apps like Cue, Sunrise, Donna, and others.

    https://fortune.com/2015/05/29/salesforces-acquires-tempo/

  • Splunk Stock Too Expensive Despite Exceptional Cloud Growth

    At around $68 a share, Splunk’s price-to-earnings ratio is 766 factoring in Splunk’s 9 cent-a-share earnings in its last fiscal year. That P/E is 36 times the average earnings multiple of companies in the S&P 500 (SPX) index. And even when compared with the more expensive iShares North American Tech-Software ETF (IGV), which has an average P/E of 30, Splunk stock still trades 25 times higher.

    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13164029/1/splunk-stock-too-expensive-despite-exceptional-cloud-growth.html

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/23/2015

sn_sparklers

Several companies are moving into the OpenStack cloud platform. In last week’s report, I covered Oracle’s openstack plans, this week both IBM and EMC released offerings as well.

HP’s recent performance earnings indicate that the company is in a slump.   Down 21% from this time last year, the company seems to be in a daze before its historical split.

The rumors of Salesforce being purchased reached a peak with reports that Microsoft making a $55B offer for the company, which was rejected due to SalesForce wanting something closer to $70B.

IBM

  • Unusual IBM Breach Could Make Coverage Ruling An Outlier

    In a closely watched case, the Connecticut high court unanimously found Monday that Federal Insurance Co. and Scottsdale Insurance Co. don’t have to cover losses stemming from a data breach that occurred when a cart holding computer tapes with IBM employees’ sensitive information fell out of the back of a transportation contractor’s van near a highway exit ramp. About 130 of the tapes, which contained the Social Security numbers, birth dates and contact information of 500,000 past and present IBM workers, were taken from the roadside by an unknown person.

    http://www.law360.com/articles/657168/unusual-ibm-breach-could-make-coverage-case-an-outlier

  • IBM is bringing OpenStack to SoftLayer (Oracle last week and IBM this week)

    Rather than using a single cloud provider, enterprises want to hedge their bets and spread workloads across multiple providers, or between a cloud provider and an in-house deployment. This year, 82 percent of organizations will adopt a multi-cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014, according to a survey from cloud management services provider RightScale.

    http://www.cio.com.au/article/575370/ibm-brings-openstack-its-softlayer-cloud/

  • Around 90 Inverclyde jobs axed as IBM moves roles to Bulgaria

    Most of the affected workers are employed by agency Manpower on behalf of IBM, which refused to comment on the employees facing the cuts.

    http://news.stv.tv/west-central/1321243-around-90-inverclyde-jobs-axed-as-ibm-moves-roles-to-bulgaria/

  • Dubuque officials say national IBM article was a ‘hatchet job’

    Both articles cited the decline in workers from a peak of 1,300 to 625, as well as the state and local incentives offered prior to the company’s arrival. The articles also referenced a recent letter from U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that questioned company leaders’ request to hire workers on temporary foreign visas while laying off other employees.

    http://www.thonline.com/news/dubuque/article_433b7c36-0015-11e5-8fae-0b042e6f27ae.html

  • And so it begins: The first IBM/Apple iWatch app:

    Hospital RN is an app that allows nurses to do their jobs more efficiently by providing them with on-the-go data and alerts.

    http://www.techradar.com/us/news/wearables/apple-and-ibm-mobilefirst-apps-hit-the-apple-watch-1294759

EMC

  • EMC also offers two OpenStack solutions

    EMC’s rapid acceleration into the OpenStack community and open source communities in general is in part due to its OpenStack Cloud reference architectures, its new software defined storage controller CoprHD, EMC {Code}, its newly launched EMC CloudFoundry Dojo, and EMC’s recent OPNFV Sponsorship. EMC also recently releases two new driers for the Kilo release, Cinder and Manila.

    http://www.storagereview.com/emc_announces_two_new_openstack_solutions

HP

Other

Posted on

Supplier Report: 5/9/2015

sn_nileriver

IBM made headlines this week with the news that they are selling off Rivermine to Tangoe, allowing the company to focus on big data and strengthening Tangoe’s market-share in the TEM space. Big data and analysis continues to be the major theme with IBM at the moment with news of a partnership with Facebook to improve targeted ads to users. More importantly, it was announced that cancer centers will be using Watson to scan genetic reports for cancer trends.

EMC is starting to think about a post physical storage world while HP can’t move past their Autonomy purchase.

IBM

  • More on the IBM selling Rivermine to Tangoe:

    From an IBM perspective, it will be curious to see if the divestiture allows a refocusing of developing on the other Emptoris assets, including what Spend Matters believes would be a helpful re-platforming of the Emptoris product line to more effectively compete with where other competitive upstream suite solutions (e.g., BravoSolution, Iasta/Selectica, SciQuest, Ivalua, GEP) have headed or are going. For generic sourcing suites, single stack – and ideally a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model – is the future; spanning sourcing, supplier management, contract management, analytics and more.

    http://spendmatters.com/2015/05/08/ibmemptoris-divests-rivermine-tangoe-picks-up-10m-tem-business-vendor-and-market-analysis/

    PS: There is another important point in the post:

    Now, it appears that a single provider will have the upper hand in terms of market share if not breadth of solution (it will also likely create less pricing pressure on TEM solutions generally, although IBM was never in the business of lowering prices).

  • IBM and Facebook just partnered up:

    Marketers and brand managers will be able to leverage Facebook’s customer insights from its rich user base and Custom Audience (an ad targeting feature) along with IBM’s marketing cloud and analytics capabilities to offer more personalized and targeted advertisements for users. Furthermore, the combined capabilities of Facebook and IBM will allow brands to strategically select users that are more likely to respond to advertisements thereby allowing them to communicate more effectively.

    http://www.investing.com/analysis/facebook—ibm-join-forces-to-develop-marketing-solutions-251078

  • 14 Centers to Use IBM Watson for Cancer Genetics

    Oncologists will upload the DNA fingerprint of a patient’s tumor, which indicates which genes are mutated and possibly driving the malignancy. Watson will then look for actionable targets, matching them to approved and experimental cancer drugs and even non-cancer drugs (if Watson decides the latter interface with a biological pathway driving a malignancy). The centers will pay a subscription fee for Watson, which IBM did not disclose.

    http://hitconsultant.net/2015/05/08/14-centers-use-ibm-watson-cancer-genetics/

    Also in Watson news, IBM is planning more cloud capabilities for the system:

    Watson Hybrid Cloud will use Watson Explorer—a cognitive computing exploration capability for the enterprise—as the on-premises platform for the application development, combining enterprise data sources into the application through a scalable environment that keeps utilized data local, private and secure, IBM said.

    http://www.eweek.com/cloud/ibm-gives-watson-new-hybrid-cloud-capabilities.html

  • SAP, IBM to integrate their HR solutions

    With availability planned for mid-2015, the first offering from this alliance includes a planned integration between the SuccessFactors Employee Central solution and IBM Kenexa’s cloud-based HR software Talent Acquisition Suite. This integration is expected to enable IBM customers to move their HR information systems (HRIS) to the cloud with the leading core HR solution from SuccessFactors, an SAP company, while helping to protect their recruiting investments, and provide customers of SuccessFactors Employee Central with a broader set of options for recruiting, assessment and onboarding of candidates.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/sap-ibm-integrate-hr-solutions-2234852.html

  • How IBM is monetizing Watson:

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/102643778

EMC

HP

Here is a funny footnote about HP the last few weeks: I build this report on saved Google alerts dumped to RSS feeds.  For HP, Carly Fiorina’s presidential hopes have dominated the news cycle (thousands of articles), completely choking out actual business news. 

  • Thought this story was going away?  Wrong.  HP sues Autonomy founder for $5bn

    What’s striking about all of this is that when news of HP’s Autonomy quest surfaced—the plan leaked before the announcement—the near-universal reaction was that HP, which was struggling with a low-margin PC business and trying to bulk up its software and systems portfolios, was overpaying for interesting but perhaps not world-beating technology. Autonomy’s multi-media search technology worked across audio, and video, not just text, for example. It also had an augmented reality business.

    http://fortune.com/2015/05/05/hp-autonomy-legal-war/?xid=timehp-popular

Other