Tag: Splunk

Posted on

Supplier Report: 9/26/2015

sn_leaf_Ales Krivec

It was another big week for IBM and Watson with the announcement of Watson offices moving to Silicon Valley.  IBM wants to be close to the disruptions and maybe cause a few.  But as businesses expand into the unfamiliar world of AI, cloud, and SaaS, are they locking themselves into environment they can’t get out of easily?

As datacenters and server budgets shrink, is there an exit strategy to the externally hosted ecosystem?

IBM

  • IBM Watson sharpens its cognitive skills: New APIs help make it more ‘human’

    As part of this announcement, IBM also said it will expand the company’s presence in Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area with a new Watson Hub, South of Market in San Francisco. IBM believes it will put them closer to, and increase collaboration with, the local start ups, developers, venture capital groups, established businesses and academic experts the company is currently working with to take cognitive computing into new markets. The location will also serve as the new global headquarters for IBM Commerce, a high-growth industry opportunity for IBM and Watson. The facility is scheduled to open in early 2016.

    http://www.firstpost.com/business/ibm-watson-sharpens-its-cognitive-skills-new-apis-help-make-it-more-human-2445566.html

  • Watson to become a huge sales engine…

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-24/ibm-s-watson-said-to-become-huge-engine-for-sales
  • Massachusetts gives IBM a $2.5M tax break for absolutely no reason whatsoever

    IBM has promised to create 500 new jobs in exchange for its tax break. If they don’t, there will be hell to pay … or at least they’ll have to give back some of the $2.5 million.

    http://www.networkworld.com/article/2986116/big-data-business-intelligence/massachusetts-gives-ibm-a-2-5m-tax-break-for-absolutely-no-reason-whatsoever.html

  • IBM boosts security of bring your own cloud apps

    The technology helps a company discover the cloud-based apps its employees are using on their computers and mobile devices and then helps roll out a safer way of using them, without impacting productivity. Hosted on IBM Cloud, the solution scans a company’s network to find the apps being used, which are then analysed using deep threat analytics from IBM X-Force.

    http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/it-infrastructure/security/5376/ibm-boosts-security-of-bring-your-own-cloud-apps

EMC

  • Cloud takes a bite out of backup boss EMC’s top line in Q2

    The storage titan saw its quarterly sales drop 16.9 per cent annually to $414.4m, and its share of the market came in more than six points lower than in the corresponding period last year. Second-placed Symantec – whose $104.5m revenue accounted for 14.4 per cent of the worldwide total – endured a decline of a comparatively modest 3.7 per cent

    They added:

    “Focus continues to shift away from hardware-centric, on-premise PBBA systems to hybrid/gateway systems,” she said. “The results [of this] are greater emphasis on backup and deduplication software, the ability to tier or push data to the cloud, and the increasing commoditisation of hardware, all of which require market participants to adjust product portfolios accordingly.”

    http://www.channelnomics.eu/channelnomics-eu/news/2426707/cloud-takes-a-bite-out-of-backup-boss-emcs-top-line-in-q2

Hewlett Packard

Other

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

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: 6/13/2015

sn_dustyrhodes

Rumors dominated the news again this week with talk that Oracle could buy Splunk and (once again) that HP could be purchasing EMC.  IBM actually went out and bought ANOTHER company called Blue Box to add to their OpenStack offerings (this is a major trend developing).

IBM also scored new long term business while HP finally settles on past mistakes.

IBM

  • IBM buys another company: IBM acquired Blue Box to retain its dominance in the hybrid cloud space

    IBM said that the inclusion of Blue Box to its services portfolio will strengthen its OpenStack lineup with a remotely managed OpenStack offering. Clients can now integrate cloud-based applications and on-premise systems into OpenStack-managed clouds, thus simplifying the deployment of workloads across hybrid cloud environments.

    http://marketrealist.com/2015/06/ibm-continues-acquisition-spree-blue-box/?source=google

  • IBM’s Expanding Margins: Overly Aggressive Cost Cutting Or Change In Business Mix
    sn_ibm_margins_2014
    http://seekingalpha.com/article/3253235-ibms-expanding-margins-overly-aggressive-cost-cutting-or-change-in-business-mix
  • We Need Only Three Hadoops, And Maybe Three Systems

    We are also starting to think that IBM, which is trying to revitalize and open up its Power chip architecture, might be better served if it would anoint one of the larger Hadoop distros as its preferred stack and to get it all tuned up to run on Power-based servers. Such an approach is probably necessary to take on Intel in the datacenter, which was the really the point of IBM selling off its System x server division to Lenovo Group last fall.

    http://www.theplatform.net/2015/06/11/we-need-only-three-hadoops-and-maybe-three-systems/

  • IBM signs 5-year IT services deal with Citizens Bank

    IBM will be using a hybrid IT approach to optimize the bank’s existing IT infrastructure. IBM will be integrating automation and predictive analytics technologies to standardize and streamline many of its internal IT systems and processes.

    http://www.infotechlead.com/bpo/ibm-signs-5-year-it-services-deal-with-citizens-bank-31037

  • Doctor Evidence to Supply IBM Watson Health with Cancer Research Data

    Doctor Evidence will contribute 2 million additional data points from highly structured, peer-reviewed content, including thousands of clinical papers, conference proceedings, abstracts on remissions, patient survival cases, epidemiology, and drug label data from the U.S. and Europe. This medical information will be added to Watson’s existing corpus of health data that includes content from partners such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Cancer.gov, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others.

    http://hitconsultant.net/2015/06/11/doctor-evidence-ibm-watson-health-cancer-data/

    sn_doctorevidence_ibm

  • IBM introduces SuperVessel open access cloud service

    IBM has introduced SuperVessel, an open access cloud service created by Beijing’s IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs. The system is available to all developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem. The cloud acts as a virtual R&D engine for the creation, testing and pilot of emerging applications including deep analytics, machine learning and the Internet of Things.

    http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ibm-introduces-supervessel-open-access-cloud-service–1086689

Oracle

Hewlett Packard Enterprises

  • HP Abandons Medellin Global Center and Has No One to Blame But Itself

    With triumphant platitudes and self-congratulatory praise, Hewlett-Packard made history by opening a US$14 million global services captive in Medellin, Colombia back in 2012. Plans called for employing over 1,000 professionals, with the center positioned to become the backbone for HP’s regional back-office, HR and call center operations.Three years later and the entire project is being dissolved to the utter dismay of staunch supporters in Medellin and Bogota who bent over backwards to “seduce” (the word local media used at the time) HP into selecting Medellin during a highly competitive, global selection process where several other geographies were considered.

    http://www.nearshoreamericas.com/hp-kills-medellin-global-services-center-blame/

  • HP pays big bucks to settle class-action lawsuit over botched deal

    HP said June 9 that its insurance would pay the $100 million settlement fund to resolve the lawsuit from a Dutch pension fund PGGM Vermogensbeheer B.V. The lawsuit stems from an impairment charge after HP purchased the software company Autonomy.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/news/2015/06/11/hp-pays-big-bucks-to-settle-class-action-lawsuit.html

EMC

  • HP will stomp EMC’s disks into the dust, babble storage mystics

    Networked storage array revenues are shrinking while server-SAN and hyper-scale storage revenues grow strongly, IDC said in its latest worldwide disk storage tracker. Total worldwide disk storage revenues in the first 2015 quarter were almost $8.8bn, up 6.8 per cent year-over-year, with 28.3EB shipped, which was 41.1 per cent higher year-on-year.

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

  • We think HP will buy EMC, says analyst

    “While management’s messaging around the size of M&A in HP Enterprise continues to refer to Aruba as a benchmark (~$3bn), CEO Meg Whitman explained that from an academic perspective, technology hardware is an industry that should consolidate due to declining revenues and slowing growth rates. This sounds like EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s answer. Have they been talking? We think so. Pro forma financial leverage is manageable at a $32-$33 takeout price (less than 3x net debt/EBITDA). There are so many reasons this makes sense.”

    http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2411970/we-think-hp-will-buy-emc-says-analyst

Other

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