Tag: SalesForce

Posted on

Supplier Report: 1/2/2016

sn_snow_Natasha Vasiljeva

Another week of scraps.  The suppliers didn’t make any noise during the last week, which was expected.  As a result, news outlets took to speculation for 2016.

The major news coming out of the week is that EMC is expected to reduce headcount early in 2016 and some sites are predicting that Meg Whitman might step away from HP some time in 2016.

IBM

Hewlett Packard Enterprise | HP Inc

EMC | Dell

  • EMC To Cut Jobs Ahead Of Dell Deal

    The workforce reduction is expected to be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2016 and fully completed by the end of 2016. The total charge resulting from the plan is expected to be approximately $250 million, with total cash payments associated with the plan expected to be $220 million.

    http://www.nasdaq.com/article/emc-to-cut-jobs-ahead-of-dell-deal-20160101-00005

Other

  • Why Salesforce.com Wants SteelBrick

    In the last part of this series, we looked at Salesforce.com’s (CRM) acquisition target—SteelBricks. SteelBrick’s Quote-to-Cash software, which is aimed primarily at SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), is attracting a lot of attention. SteelBrick managed to raise $48 million funds in its Series C round in October 2015, largely due to this software. Apttus, a company that’s built on the Salesforce App Cloud, managed to raise $108 million in September 2015.

    http://marketrealist.com/2015/12/salesforce-com-wants-steelbrick/

  • Tableau in 2015: Year in Review

    The year 2015 was expected to be a tough one for leading business intelligence company Tableau, but the company powered through the fears of increased competition eating into its growth. The year saw major updates in the business intelligence tools offered by software giantsSalesforce.com and Microsoft. At the same time, Tableau’s biggest riva lQlik released Qlik Sense Enterprise, a visualization tool for businesses that competes directly with Tableau. Despite the tightening race in the business intelligence and visualization market, Tableau consistently achieved solid performance throughout the year. We believe that a strong product portfolio and dominant position in the industry will help it continue to perform well in 2016.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/12/30/tableau-in-2015-year-in-review/

Photo: Natasha Vasiljeva

Posted on

Supplier News: 9/5/2015

Death_to_stock_above_5S

IBM is ensuring they are the major player for internet of things by helping create a standardized ecosystem.  HP is looking to sell off a company and move some of their employees to staffing firms.  VMWare continues to be presented as the future of EMC. Meanwhile, Oracle is trying to avoid having their executives sued.

IBM

  • IBM and ARM Collaborate to Accelerate Delivery of Internet of Things

    IBM today announced an expansion of its Internet of Things (IoT) platform called IBM IoT Foundation – through an integration with ARM, providing out of the box connectivity with ARM® mbed”-enabled devices to analytics services. This fusion will allow huge quantities of data from devices such as industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analyzed and acted upon.

    http://seekingalpha.com/pr/14575766-ibm-and-arm-collaborate-to-accelerate-delivery-of-internet-of-things
    More on the partnership:

    There are plenty of clouds that want to store your connected data, but IBM is making the case that it has everything developers need in one reputable cloud. IoT Foundations has the IBM brand, new capabilities announced Thursday to handle data analytics (it uses a variation of the Spark real-time data processing standard) and device management capabilities. The link with ARM should help the engineers at a big name company or startup so they don’t have to worry about the mechanics of connecting their device to the Internet and offloading the data. Instead, they can just make it happen with a few clicks on a cloud dashboard.

    http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/arm-ibm-iot/

  • IBM partners PH firm Ionics Inc to create Internet-of-Things platform

    The Philippine listed firm disclosed that one of its units Ionics EMS Inc, a local electronics manufacturing services provider, is working with IBM as “a key design partner” to launch the IBM IoT Platform. The latter is meant to enable organizations across industries to improve engagement with clients, accelerate technology innovation and enhance business operations.

    http://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/ibm-partners-ph-firm-ionics-inc-to-create-internet-of-things-platform-11562/

  • Half a Century Later Mainframes, Together with Linux, Still Run Much of Today’s Infrastructure

    These platform innovations have enabled mainframes to incorporate major advances in technology and keep evolving over the years. This was the case with the transition to microprocessors and the parallel sysplex architecture, without which IBM would not have survived its near-death experience in the early 1990s. A few years later, mainframes embraced TCP/IP and just about all Internet standards, integrating seamlessly with the Internet and World Wide Web, and enabling its customers to leverage their existing transaction and data base applications in all kinds of new e-business solutions. Then came zLinux, which made it possible to easily port just about any Linux application to mainframes.

    http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/09/04/half-a-century-later-mainframes-together-with-linux-still-run-much-of-todays-infrastructure/

  • IBM Watson Health Commercial
  • Ogilvy and Watson Have Big Things Planned for IBM

    Sources close to the matter tell us that Ogilvy’s creative team has been hard at work on a larger effort set to debut later this fall. Specifics are scarce at the moment, but we hear that the new campaign will be more “corporate” than the work in this post and that its ultimate goal is a complete refresh/rebranding of the IBM name.

    http://www.adweek.com/agencyspy/ogilvy-and-watson-have-big-things-planned-for-ibm/92748

  • Did IBM Just Get Hacked at DEF CON?

    In the presentation–which Kulach says is aimed at helping users to secure an IBM i system from the perspective of an external and internal intruder–purports to show a series of techniques for compromising the system, including “privilege escalation by nested user switching, getting full system access via JDBC, bypassing the ‘green screen’ (5250) limitations,” and how to get direct access to password hashes through an undocumented API.

    http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh090215-story01.html
    There is a big “but” (the presentation is being called a red herring:

    But to pull off Kulach’s approach to hacking an IBM i server would require such a poorly configured IBM i server that it just strains the credulity of the premise.

  • ANZ signs $450m IT deal with IBM
    Time to be on the lookout for these “baseball” contracts that IBM likes to announce in the 4th Q…
    http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/583529/anz-signs-450m-it-deal-ibm/

Oracle

Hewlett Packard

EMC

Other

  • Wipro hires Ankur Prakash, another TCS executive

    TCS veteran Ankur Prakash, who was previously the COO of the company’s Latin America business, has now been mandated to lead Wipro’s emerging markets business, a role in which he will report directly to Neemuchwala, according to two people directly familiar with the development. Both of them requested anonymity.

    http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/wipro-hires-ankur-prakash-another-tcs-executive/articleshow/48737538.cms

  • Windows 10 Is Great, but Microsoft Can’t Save the PC

    But for device makers, the situation could be quite different. Later this year, Hewlett-Packard will cleave itself in two, creating two separate companies focused on different businesses. One of those firms — HP — will derive around half of its revenue from sales of traditional PCs. If PC shipments continue to decline, that company could be devastated. Earlier this month, when Hewlett-Packard turned in third quarter earnings, its PC-related revenue contracted more than 13%.

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/08/31/windows-10-is-great-but-microsoft-cant-save-the-pc.aspx

  • Businesses are buying analytics software even if investors aren’t

    There are some wrinkles to iron out as the world adjusts to a trend toward open source and freemium business models, and to business software that individuals can buy. But there’s a huge opportunity for companies to cash in on business demand for better data analysis, and the young companies that live and breathe data seem the best positioned to cash in.

    http://fortune.com/2015/09/04/tableau-splunk-hortonworks-revenue-investors/

  • Salesforce jumps into health care with a tailored cloud platform

    Aiming to help healthcare organizations manage their relationships with patients, the company’s new Salesforce Health Cloud promises providers a complete view of each patient as well as the ability to engage them better across caregiver networks. Overall, the goal is to help providers make smarter patient-care decisions, the company said.

    http://www.cio.com/article/2979584/salesforce-jumps-into-healthcare-with-a-tailored-cloud-platform.html

Photo: Death to Stock Photos

Posted on

Supplier News: 8/22/2015

sn_dinobot_PeteSlater

There is chatter about big purchases: the never-ending tale about EMC and HP, IBM is looking to buy CyberArk (maybe), Oracle bought Maxymiser, and CA completed their Xceedium deal.

As people are talking about purchases, SalesForce CEO Mark Benioff continues to talk smack about IBM and Oracle.  Meanwhile, IBM expands their  systems that can emulate organic thought process.

IBM

  • IBM launches Linux-only mainframe system LinuxONE

    IBM’s continued expanding support of Linux and Open Source projects makes sense given that these platforms and tools provide much of today’s connected infrastructure. And, the move away from in-house servers to cloud-based ones is a direct threat to IBM’s mainframe business. The company’s claim that it can provide a fast, reliable, and secure alternative at half the cost of cloud-based solutions is bound to get the attention of those with large-scale projects who want to control costs.

    http://www.extremetech.com/computing/212410-can-ibms-linuxone-mainframe-compete-with-cloud-computing

  • IBM Creates ‘Neuromorphic Chip’ That Is As Powerful As A Rodent’s Brain

    The network that IBM unveiled today uses around 48 million connections, which is the same computing power as a rat’s brain. The system is designed to be able to run “deep-learning” algorithms, similar to the facial recognition system being used by Facebook or the instant translate mode in Skype. However, IBM’s deep-learning algorithms are much cheaper to run, draw less electricity and are not the size of an entire data center. TrueNorth essentially contains 5.4 billion transistors and uses a tiny 70 mw of power. As a comparison, an Intel processor with 1.4 billion transistors draws between 35 and 140 watts.

    http://www.techtimes.com/articles/77610/20150818/ibm-creates-neuromorphic-chip-powerful-rodents-brain.htm

  • Buffett Loves IBM. That’s Bad for Innovation, and Investors

    IBM still develops many things, but not on the scale or with the profundity it did in decades past. It has been nurturing select investments for years, and pruning the losers. The company has shed multiple underperforming businesses in the past two decades, a tradition continued by current chief Virginia “Ginni” Rometty. First was the personal computer, a business it got out of in 2005, then last year’s sale of server computers based on Intel’s x86 chip, followed by this year’s divestiture of its chip-making operations.

    http://www.barrons.com/articles/buffett-loves-ibm-thats-bad-for-tech-innovation-and-ibm-1439617268

  • IBM and FireEye Possible Candidates to Acquire CyberArk, Centrify
    http://www.thestreet.com/story/13260085/1/ibm-and-fireeye-possible-candidates-to-acquire-cyberark-centrify.html

EMC

  • Why EMC’s ‘federation’ could unify (Yes, we are still talking about this)

    EMC’s decision to control VMware but at arm’s length was brilliant. It allowed the faster-growing acquired company to trade at a much higher relative valuation than its parent. Now both companies are slowing, and at least one prominent Wall Street analyst believes EMC will bring all the companies into the fold. “A stand-alone EMC, a stand-alone VMware, and a stand-alone Pivotal would, in our opinion find it difficult to compete,” writes Maynard Um of Wells Fargo Securities . Whereas VMware thrived by selling to EMC competitors like HP and Cisco, those companies increasingly are competing with both companies now, removing one of the benefits of separation.

    http://fortune.com/2015/08/19/emc-vmware-pivotal-federation/

  • EMC management trio jump ship to competitors

    Isabelle Guis, a product marketing VP and head of cloud strategy at EMC, joins Egnyte in September to become its chief strategy officer. Egnyte is a file sync ‘n sharer for enterprises, now saying it’s involved in adaptive enterprise file services. As such it competed with EMC’s Syncplicity business. This was sold to Skyview Capital in July. Syncplicity’s CEO in EMC days was Jeetu Patel. He moved to Box earlier this month to become an SVP and its chief strategy officer. These two moves, when added to that of EMC’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Martin, who went to a similar CMO spot at fierce EMC competitor Pure Storage in July, add up to… what exactly?

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/18/emc_execs_exit/

Oracle

  • Oracle snags Maxymiser to goose its marketing push

    Maxymiser specializes in what is called A/B testing, in which marketing professionals offer a couple of options to prospects to see which gets the best response. In theory, great A/B testing means that customers or would-be customers get pitches that actually interest them, rather than irritate them.

    http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/oracle-buys-maxymiser/

  • The epic 30-year bromance of billionaire CEOs Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff

    But their relationship took a quick turn in 2000 when Benioff found out that Oracle had secretly started its own CRM service that directly competed with Salesforce. Benioff wanted Ellison to leave Salesforce’s board immediately, but Ellison refused to quit. Ellison told Benioff, “It would be much cooler if you fired me.” (because that way Ellison would get to keep his Salesforce shares).

    http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-marc-benioff-relationship-2015-8

  • Adobe, IBM on top for enterprise digital marketing platforms; Oracle, Salesforce increasingly threaten

    A new report by global analyst firm Ovum has found Adobe to be the overall market leader for digital marketing platforms, followed closely by IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce. SAS and Teradata are the market challengers and new market entrant Marketo is a follower. These vendors share three-quarters of the annual US$5bn global market spend on digital marketing platforms.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/adobe-ibm-top-enterprise-digital-marketing-platforms-oracle-salesforce-increasingly-threaten-2392362.html

Hewlett Packard

  • Why big data will be a big deal for the new HP

    HP’s big data offerings fall under the umbrella of its Haven product, which includes the company’s Hadoop distribution (which it works with partners like Hortonworks to deliver), along with Vertica (a SQL analytics platform), IDOL (for analyzing unstructured data) and HP’s Distributed R (for large-scale predictive analytics).

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/2973046/cloud-computing/why-big-data-will-be-a-big-deal-for-the-new-hp.html
    Comment: This is a fine thing to say, but HP seems to be late to the party (really late).  Do they have the ability to catch up and entice customers away from the other platforms?

  • HP CEO Whitman On The Odds Of A Blockbuster Acquisition And How HP Enterprise Stacks Up Against EMC, IBM

    You never say never. But I think probably not. We are really pleased with our portfolio. We think we are incredibly well positioned. We have got some nice growth in our businesses. I would rather look to the future and what we are going to do on a go-forward basis. But you never say never. Who knows what is going to happen. We have been very disciplined, and we have been smart about it, and I think we have been on the right side of right so far. EMC looks a little bit more like HP, but they don’t have our big technology services arm and they don’t have our Enterprise Services arm. Listen, they have some great technology, but we are doing very well in storage. Our all-flash storage array was up 400 percent year-over-year. We are really cranking on all-flash storage array.

    http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/data-center/300077859/crn-exclusive-hp-ceo-whitman-on-the-odds-of-a-blockbuster-acquisition-and-how-hp-enterprise-stacks-up-against-emc-ibm.htm

Other

  • How the cloud will devour open source

    Take MySQL, for example. The database has changed hands a few times, with Sun acquiring MySQL AB in 2008, then Oracle picking up the asset through its acquisition of Sun the following year. But MySQL, Sun, and Oracle have collectively made a heck of a lot less — orders of magnitude less — by selling MySQL-related services than Amazon Web Services has made by selling MySQL ­as­ a­ service (that is, Relational Database Service).

    http://www.infoworld.com/article/2970866/open-source-tools/how-the-cloud-will-devour-open-source.html

  • Don’t be IBM! Benioff goads the ‘dinosaurs’ as Salesforce beats Wall St expectations

    The way to understand the future is to look at the past, and you can look at IBM with the mainframe business. I think we all know IBM still sells a lot of mainframes. That doesn’t mean that IBM is innovating, that doesn’t mean that IBM is creating value for customers or helping them to transform customers’ businesses or align them with modern trends. It just means they’re selling them old technology and upgrading it. That’s what you see with companies like Oracle and SAP. These are old technology bases that are kind of meandering along like mainframes. And I think that is reflected in their license revenue growth, which has been poor, and then their movement to the cloud has been stunted because they don’t want to shift those customers into new models.

    http://diginomica.com/2015/08/21/dont-be-ibm-benioff-goads-the-dinosaurs-as-salesforce-beats-wall-street-expectations/

  • CA Technologies Completes Acquisition of Xceedium, Inc.

    With the transaction complete, CA offers customers a comprehensive, flexible solution for controlling and protecting IT administrator or other privileged user accounts from external attacks or insider mistakes and malicious misuse. The combined solution provides privileged identity controls at the server and the gateway to control access and action based on identity. The proxy-based, gateway approach from Xceedium also provides privileged identity control over cloud, on-premise, virtualised and hybrid IT environments, helping to protect the systems driving the application economy.

    http://www.cso.com.au/mediareleases/25440/ca-technologies-completes-acquisition-of-xceedium/

Photo: Pete Slater, Flickr

Posted on

Supplier Report: 8/8/2015

sn_dr_evil

IBM is making headlines with their one billion dollar purchase of healthcare imaging company Merge.  Merge will help Watson learn to look at medical images.   That picture ability could very well be developed at on a Mac as IBM agreed to purchase 200,000 Apple computers to replace more than half of their current workforce’s systems.

EMC might get bought by VMware (you heard that right) in some attempt to reorganize post-Tucci.  Informatica is going private again taking investment funds from SalesForce and Microsoft.

IBM

EMC

  • VMware to acquire EMC?

    Inverting the company to make VMware the pinnacle would send a message that says storage hardware is not the future and virtualisation/cloud (whatever that means) is where the world is headed.  How would the partner relationship be affected?  I suspect potentially less than in the case of an EMC acquisition as VMware would be selling storage and co-operating with partners, so called co-optition.

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vmware-acquire-emc-chris-m-evans

  • EMC II, VMware and the future: Unpicking the house that Joe built

    There’s a case to be made that part of the reason for the Federation structure was that Tucci could not pick a single successor who would obtain the respect of the others and keep the EMC house that Joe had built in one piece. Only Joe could hold the whole caboodle together, and so the Federation came into being, with David, Pat, and Paul all getting CEO rank – and real, or near-as-dammit CEO responsibility – under Joe’s control.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/06/emc_federation_future_musings/

Other

  • A first: Microsoft inches past IBM in annual revenue
    Microsoft revenues now stand at $93.58 billion annually, compared to $92.79 billion for IBM.
    http://fortune.com/2015/08/05/microsoft-inches-past-ibm-in-revenue/
  • Gartner Seeing Steady Increase in Inquiries About Cancelling Maintenance Agreements with ERP Vendors

    “Enterprise software licensees are struggling with the low value and poor service received from increasingly expensive vendor annual maintenance fees and this report verifies that many licensees are actively considering independent support options,” said Seth Ravin, CEO, Rimini Street. “Rimini Street offers Oracle and SAP licensees a more robust service offering, a more responsive service model, exceptional client value and the ability to free up funds to drive innovations the business needs today. We are proud to have already helped nearly 1,100 clients, including more than 100 Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 organizations, achieve maximum value from their IT investments.”

    http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150805006713/en/Gartner-Steady-Increase-Inquiries-Cancelling-Maintenance-Agreements

  • Microsoft and Salesforce take a piece of Informatica

    Informatica has been taken back into private hands at a price of $5.3 billion (around £3.42 billion, or AU$7.18 billion) that was part funded by Microsoft and Salesforce. It isn’t a surprise that Microsoft and Salesforce are on the purchase bandwagon given that both already do a fair bit of work with Informatica on data integration technology and Informatica’s cloud tools are built on Amazon Web Services.

    http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/microsoft-and-salesforce-take-a-piece-of-informatica-1301320

  • We should drop the term ‘big data’, experts suggest

    Teradata Corp chief technology officer Stephen Brobst said that one of the biggest mistakes companies make is that they tend to put too much focus on the technology. “It’s not just about the technology; it’s more about value creation. Big data initiatives should not be technology-led; they should be led by value creation,” he said at a roundtable discussion in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

    http://www.themalaymailonline.com/tech-gadgets/article/we-should-drop-the-term-big-data-experts-suggest

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/25/2015

sn_STHug_KristinaAlexanderson

Mergers and acquisitions was a major news theme (again) this week.  IBM announced they were acquiring DB startup company Compose.  The HP/EMC rumors started up again, while Mr. Tucci expressed his desire to keep his company whole (not splitting off VMWare).   Speaking of HP –  they sold off a part of their troubled Autonomy business.

IBM

EMC

  • Why EMC has no plans to split itself up

    “Splitting this federation or spinning off VMware is not a good idea,” said EMC Joe Tucci during an earnings call with analysts Wednesday. “I firmly believe that we are better together. A lot better together.”

    http://fortune.com/2015/07/22/emc-earnings-split-up/

  • EMC’s turbulent trifecta temporarily ties Tucci to top table
    The person who wrote this headline must be so proud of themselves (oh… British publication, of course)

    “The companies that will be successful are the ones that are able to truly transform themselves. The board and management, we’re focussed on assuring and we are deeply engaged in making sure we have a very successful transformation. We have a number of options, really good options, and we have important next-generation winning technologies, great assets, and we have great people,” he continued. [The post also mentions the fabled HP/EMC merger]

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/23/tuccis_turbulent_trifecta/

  • EMC to cut jobs in Q4 2015 to reduce costs by $850M

    EMC will cut $50 million through tighter spending and job cuts in the fourth quarter of this year. The company will increase the size of cost savings in each quarter until it reaches an annual rate of $850 million starting in 2017 by reducing other expenses, as well, in part by canceling underperforming products and closing facilities.

    http://www.infotechlead.com/networking/emc-to-cut-jobs-in-q4-2015-to-reduce-costs-by-850-mn-32532

  • Big Changes in Store for Storage

    According to a recent outlook from Wikibon, we are on the cusp of a digital extinction event as today’s complex network storage architectures give way to more nimble server-side solutions. The firm predicts that within 10 years, 90 percent of storage revenues will flow toward server SAN or hyperscale server SAN solutions, marking a 150 percent annual growth rate from today’s current market estimate of about $1 billion. At best, traditional SAN and NAS may eke out meager existences within long-term data retention infrastructure in which the frequency of data access is low but metadata retrieval is fairly steady.

    http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/big-changes-in-store-for-storage.html

  • EMC Corp Sticking To Its Guns

    Right or wrong, EMC is committed to its path of evolving into a leading provider of “IT-as-a-service”. Likewise, the company remains committed to an operating structure that is going to continue to frustrate some investors, as it believes (correctly, in my view) that VMware (NYSE:VMW), Pivotal, and other components are vital to its future strategy.

    http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/emc-corporation-emc-sticking-to-its-guns-363253/

Hewlett Packard

Other

  • Dell is closely studying the EMC playbook

    “I think what [EMC CEO Joe] Tucci has done with VMWare is a good example of that, where you can take something that people don’t fully understand, buried in the portfolio, and unlock it while still having a partnership with the mothership,” said Durban, who sits on the Dell board of directors.

    http://fortune.com/2015/07/17/dell-is-closely-studying-the-emc-playbook/

  • Salesforce Positioned as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

    Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, today announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned Salesforce as a Leader in its July 2015 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (SFA). This is the ninth consecutive year that Salesforce has appeared in the Leaders quadrant.

    http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/salesforce-positioned-as-a-leader-in-the-2015-magic-quadrant-for-sales-force-automation-300117584.html

  • Splunk Named a Leader in 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM

    “Splunk is the only security provider to improve on completeness of vision in the Gartner 2015 SIEM Magic Quadrant which we believe serves as the latest evidence that Splunk remains at the forefront of solving advanced and emerging SIEM use cases,” said Haiyan Song, senior vice president of security markets, Splunk. “Splunk is growing well beyond the SIEM market rate, as an increasing number of companies recognize the value of taking an analytics-driven approach to security with Splunk as the nerve center. And with our recent acquisition of Caspida, Splunk is adding machine learning-based user behavioral analytics and extending our analytics-enabled SIEM to better detect advanced and insider threats.”

    https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/splunk-named-leader-2015-gartner-120000738.html

Photo: Kristina Alexanderson, Flickr