Category: News

Vodafone flogs its fixed-line operations in the Netherlands

Posted on November 4, 2016 by - News

Vodafone’s Dutch subsidiary has flogged off its fixed-line operations to Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile Nederland.

More than 150,000 customers will be finding themselves with German overlords as part of the deal. It is not clear how much money changed hands in the sell off.

The whole thing is a sop to European Union watchdogs who otherwise would not be so keen on letting the much larger merger of Vodafone’s Dutch operations with Liberty Global’s Dutch subsidiary Ziggo go through.

Vodafone is the second-largest mobile provider in the Netherlands, while Ziggo is the biggest cable company so owning fixed lines would be a monopoly too far as far as the EU is concerned. Particularly as the pair will form a strong competitor to KPN, the former Dutch state telecommunications company.

The telecommunications industry is undergoing a period of consolidation in Europe making for a rapid shake-up of the sort of services suppliers can offer. Dubbed “market repair” by analysts there are moves to consolidate in countries such as France, Italy and the UK. The big idea is that it will be the best way for big companies to generate the billions of euros required to invest in next-generation networks.

On the other side stand antitrust regulators such as Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. They are firm proponents of the view that national telecoms markets in Europe benefit from having four operators. In their critics’ eyes, I suppose this makes them champions of market disrepair.

Broadcom buys Brocade

Posted on November 3, 2016 by - News

broadcom_logoChipmaker Broadcom is writing a $5.9 billion cheque for networking systems supplier Brocade.

Broadcom said that it will be an all-cash transaction for a total of $5.5 billion, plus $400 million of net debt. Brocade’s board of directors has approved the deal and Broadcom expects to complete the acquisition in the second half of its fiscal 2017.

Broadcom said it would retain Brocade’s fibre channel SAN switching business and divest Brocade’s IP networking business – including the recently acquired Ruckus Wireless.

Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom said the deal enhances Broadcom’s position as one of the leading providers of enterprise storage connectivity solutions to OEM customers.

“With deep expertise in mission-critical storage networking, Brocade increases our ability to address the evolving needs of our OEM customers. In addition, we are confident that we will find a great home for Brocade’s valuable IP networking business that will best position that business for its next phase of growth.”

Broadcom said the deal does not depend on Brocade’s off-loading its IP networking business.

Lloyd Carney, Chief Executive Officer of Brocade, in a statement that the transaction represents significant value for our shareholders and creates new opportunities for our customers and partners.

“Our FC SAN solutions will help Broadcom create one of the industry’s broadest portfolios for enterprise storage. We will work with Broadcom as it seeks to find a buyer for our IP networking business, which includes a full portfolio of open, hardware and software-based solutions spanning the core of the data center to the network edge.”

Brocade, just completed its $1.2 billion acquisition of wireless vendor Ruckus Wireless in May. Brocade reported $2.26 billion in revenue in fiscal 2015. It just closed its fiscal 2016 on Monday and has not yet reported results for its fourth quarter and full fiscal 2016.

Broadcom said Brocade’s fibre channel SAN business would contribute approximately $900 million of pro forma non-GAAP EBITDA earnings in its fiscal 2018.

HPE and Mirantis lay off OpenStack developers

Posted on November 2, 2016 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudThe former maker of expensive printer ink HPE and Mirantis have laid off roughly 200 OpenStack developers in what is a swift kick in the open saucy project’s development.

For those that came in late, OpenStack is the open source project for cloud computing infrastructure which was supposed to be the next big thing for suppliers trying to create customer projects.

HPE is busy gutting itself so that it focuses on supply chain productivity, discretionary spending and efforts to reshape the workforce. OpenStack was not really that useful for that cunning plan.

The mid-October layoff included at least 65 people from HPE’s Stackato group, which is in the process of being sold to Micro Focus International’s SUSE. In total, given the changes at the Yehud center and across the whole organization at least 100 HPE OpenStack engineers have cleaned out their desks.

That would be suitably grim but Mirantis appears to have done something similar. Mirantis co-founder and chief marketing officer Boris Renski said that his outfit restructured following the acquisition of TCP Cloud.

This meant that Mirantis wound down a number of engineering investments that it didn’t feel were aligned with its new focus of delivering an operations-centric OpenStack distribution through a build-operate-transfer model, Reknski said.

Renski said about 100 OpenStack Developers were laid off and another hundred or so were moved about.

Staff which seemed to have been packing their bags were those involved in a deployment and management tool for OpenStack, and the Workloads team who were trying to build a PaaS product.

Renski pointed out that his outfit was not abandoning OpenStack or exiting OpenStack distribution business.

However, Stackalytics, a website that tracks OpenStack community contributions, shows that OpenStack interest seems to be declining. HPE and  Mirantis were important players to the project.

Cheap tablets killing the sector

Posted on November 1, 2016 by - News

 

cheap-tabletsBeancounters at IDC claim that a flood of cheap tablets are killing off an already dying technology branch.

In a new report, IDC said that 43 million tablets shipped in Q3 2016 but that figure was actually the bad news.  The overall market declined 14.3 percent year-on-year, because of poor sales at the top end of the market. Basically consumers switching to cheap tablets with lower margins.

While there is a .8 percent quarter-on-quarter increase in shipments as vendors get ready for the holiday quarter. the market’s pants.

Amazon with its Fire tablets were the only tablets to see significant growth.  These were up 320 percent year-on-year but still only taking 7.3 percent of the market. Huawei sales increased 28.4 percent to 5.6 percent of the market.

Apple’s shipments fell 6.2 percent and Lenovo was down 10.8 percent. Samsung fell 19.3 percent.

Vendor 3Q16 Unit Shipments 3Q16 Market Share 3Q15 Unit Shipments 3Q15 Market Share Year-Over-Year Growth
Apple 9.3 21.50% 9.9 19.60% -6.20%
Samsung 6.5 15.10% 8.1 16.00% -19.30%
Amazon 3.1 7.30% 0.8 1.50% 319.90%
Lenovo 2.7 6.30% 3.1 6.00% -10.80%
Huawei 2.4 5.60% 1.9 3.70% 28.40%
Others 19 44.20% 26.9 53.20% -29.20%
Total 43 100.00% 50.5 100.00% -14.70%

IDC senior research analyst Jitesh Ubrani said that they -$200 tablets were spoiling the market for everyone.

He said that the “The race to the bottom is something we have already experienced with slates and it may prove detrimental to the market in the long run as detachables could easily be seen as disposable devices rather than potential PC replacements”

Department for Work and Pensions purging monster projects

Posted on October 31, 2016 by - News

dont-ignore-workplace-pensions-large_transkp2xaqpd1krf0u2yohg6we4d6c4a3w2q2xczuap8nk0The Department for Work and Pensions is “reviewing” shedloads of digital and technology projects, but denies the reason is a budget overspend.

According to Computer Weekly, hundreds of IT projects have been put on hold at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and 300 contractors been told to clean out their desks.

Up to 500 projects are under review, on hold or set to be scrapped.

Word on the street is that an audit of DWP’s accounts at the halfway point in the financial year revealed a significant overspend in DWP Digital, the department’s IT team. Numbers like £250 million have been bandied about but a DWP spokesperson has denied it:

“We routinely review our work to ensure that we focus our resources on the most viable options and deliver the best value for the taxpayer. This year we are on track to deliver record digital transformation on a scale larger than most FTSE 100 companies.”

Projects affected include a move to migrate applications away from existing HPE datacentres to the Crown Hosting Service set up by the Cabinet Office, and getting rid of ancient Fujitsu VME mainframes. Several IT suppliers to DWP have been hit.   Several thousand Microsoft Surface Pro laptops are “sitting in cupboards” waiting to be deployed as part of a major desktop overhaul.

There appear to be no lay-offs among permanent DWP staff who appear to be being used to take up the slack.

 

 

Avnet and Ingram see sales fall

Posted on October 28, 2016 by - News

avnettsJust as Ingram is about to be bought, HNA and Avnet gears up to sell TS unit to Tech Data, both outfits are seeing their sales slide.

It is no big news, both Avnet and Ingram Micro have seen several quarters of sales doom as they start their M&A activity.

Ingram’s Q3, which ended 1 October, net profits jumped 21 per cent annually to $78.5m (£64.4m) on sales which were down three per cent over the same period to $10.2 billion.  Ingram is becoming part of the Chinese giant HNA. It did not hold a Q3 earnings call or provide a financial outlook for that reason.

Tts CEO Alain Monié did say the third quarter had been seen “robust improvement in gross and operating margins.”

“We see further stabilisation in market demand across most of the globe and our teams continue to leverage our investments in productivity and services to deliver improved bottom-line results and growth in a number of areas as we benefit from the broadest solutions portfolio and widest geographic reach in the industry,” he added.

Avnet is trying to sell its Technology Solutions arm to Tech Data. For the combined business, including TS, net profit fell 47.1 per cent annually to $68.8m, on sales which slumped 13 per cent over the same period to $6bn.

This means that TS performed “below expectations”, with sales falling 21.2 per cent annually to $1.87bn.

CEO William Ameilo said Avnet’s future without TS looks bright.

“In summary, the sale of TS allows us to focus on electronic components business, to which we just added unique capability with the acquisition of Premier Farnell while providing significant capital to strengthen our balance sheet and fund future growth,” he said.

Britain’s not got security talent

Posted on October 27, 2016 by - News

5710dc371600002b0031bc8aMore than half of UK organisations do not believe they have the in-house talent required to combat existing cyber-security threats, according to new research.

Beancounters from Databarracks have added up some numbers and divided by their shoe size and reached the conclusion that two thirds of the 350 IT decision makers questioned had been affected by a cyber-threat in the past year. But 53 per cent of those questioned felt that they had the sufficient cyber-security skills in their team needed to handle the current sophistication of attacks.

According to Databarrack’s 2016 Data Health Check cyber attacks were increasing and only a third of the respondents in our study remained unscathed by an attack in the last 12 months.

Oscar Arean, technical operations manager at Databarracks said: “Reassuringly though, the number of people looking to improve their security policies is increasing year on year, with a third of respondents in 2016 admitting they had reviewed policies and made changes following an attack, as opposed to 29 per cent in 2014.”

According to the report, over half of respondents have invested in safeguards to protect against cyber threats in the past year. Ongoing training, cyber threat monitoring solutions, and improvement of policies were the most common investments.

“This is a definite step in the right direction, but it seems that current resilience planning is mostly inward-looking at this point, as only 5 per cent of respondents had invested in a certification to a cyber security framework. Considering confidence in in-house skills is so low, it’s likely we’ll see an increase in adoption of security frameworks in the coming years,” Arean said.

FAST rewarding whistleblowers

Posted on October 26, 2016 by - News

r-1417839-1397651202-4169-jpegThe Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) is planning to start a scheme where it will financially reward whistleblowers.

The incentive payment agreement works on the basis that if a report from a whistleblower leads to the successful identification of illegal software then there will be a payment of 55 percent of the historic use payment. In some companies that could be a lot of dosh.

FAST hopes that it will encourage more people to come forward and grass up their companies.

FAST CEO Alex Hilton said piracy figures are declining in the UK, but there remains a hard core of users who are intentionally using unlicensed software. It has announced a new damages programme to punish companies and now it wants to reward individuals who know that the organisations they are working for are intentionally misusing software.

In most cases the vast majority of cases where FAST comes across under-licensing in business, it is the result of oversight. In those cases FAST will help ensure that their software is compliant.

However company bosses who are deliberately ignoring their software licensing responsibilities should be warned that FAST is coming at them with a big financial stick,” he added.

Whistleblowers can report illegal software use via the FAST hotline or through the web. A report, which clearly details the use of unlicensed products, then needs to be submitted for the group to act on.

FAST has found that in the past job preservation was preventing more whistleblowers from coming forward. The reward system might encourage greater willingness to speak out against illegal activity.

Cloudy Netsuite delivers final results  

Posted on October 25, 2016 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudSome Netsuite shareholders might be relieved that the outfit could be bought by Oracle – the outfit’s last financial results were not that great.

The Cloud-based ERP outfit announced its last quarter results before it joins Ellison’s team and while it has continued to grow it is also showing increased operating overheads and losses. In other-words if it had not been bought out it could be in for some serious restructuring if it is going to continue.

NetSuite reported a third quarter loss of $34.1 million compared to $37.7 million a year earlier, on revenue of $243.9, up 26 percent. Costs increased to $50.2 million compared to $44.3 million.

The $9.3 million buyout needs to be approved by shareholders on 4 November. Surprisingly, shareholders don’t like it and the meeting could be contentious.  The feeling is that Ellison and the Netsuite board have  undervalued the company. We would have thought that they only have to look at the numbers to see that it is probably a good idea.

The Netsuite board seems to think the shareholders will go for it. They have said that this is the last time that the company would be making the figures public.  After all it is going to be part of Ellison’s empire if the vote goes ahead.

Weak pound gives Computacenter a temporary lift

Posted on October 24, 2016 by - News

boris-parachuteThe weak pound helped Computacenter’s bottom line by boosting the value of its business in mainland Europe.

The London-listed firm reported a two percent year-on-year rise in turnover to £735 million, more than £400 million of which was generated in Germany and France. Group services revenues grew by four percent as reported and the supply grew one percent.

The UK side of the business was as soft as a baby’s bottom but thanks to Brexit sinking the pound that hardly got noticed.

Sales were down three percent to £314 million, including a ten percent slump in services revenues. However the supply chain grew two percent.

“We are pleased to see a return to growth in our supply chain business, however, as broadly anticipated, our services revenue remains challenged principally due to the buoyant nature of projects in 2015,” the firm said.

In Germany things were much better. Revenues grew eight percent as reported to £325 million, but decreased two percent in constant currency. Service revenue was up 22 percent and the supply chain increased two percent.

France which normally was a blackspot on Computer Center’s revenues grew three percent to £83 million. Services and product sales also benefited from the currency translation.

Group funds totalled £96.7 million at the end of the quarter, up £29 million on the same period a year earlier.

The company forecasted sales of £3.1 billion for 2016, which would equate to a three percent rise as reported.

Wipro to buy Appirio

Posted on October 21, 2016 by - News

overview-2xIndian outsourcing giant Wipro is going to write a cheque for half a billion dollars to buy cloud services powerhouse Appirio.

The $500 million all-cash acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year.

Wipro said that bringing Indianapolis-based Appirio’s 1,250 global employees on board will create one of the world’s largest cloud transformation companies. This would make it the partner of choice for clients looking to modernise their processes and platforms on next-generation cloud applications.

Chris Barbin, Appirio’s CEO, said in a statement that if you combine Wipro’s global scale and deep digital focus with Appirio’s transformative worker and customer experience expertise, and best in class team, brand and partners, you create a formidable force in the industry.

“Our aim is to dominate the market and claim the top spots in industry Net Promoter Score, market share, and best places to work.”

Wipro’s existing Salesforce and Workday cloud applications practices will be consolidated under the Appirio brand and structure. Barbin will lead the expanded business,.

Appirio is a close chum of Google and created the Topcode marketplace that connects more than a million designers, developers and data scientists around the world with customers. It works with leading brands such as Coca-Cola, eBay, Facebook, Home Depot, Stryker, Johnson Controls, Cardinal Health and Sony PlayStation.

Appirio was founded in 2006 and incubated inside Salesforce’s San Francisco headquarters. The company today has offices in Indianapolis, San Francisco, Dublin, London, Tokyo and Jaipur, India.

The systems integrator has seen its revenue grow from $137 million in 2013 to $178 million in 2014 to $196 million in 2015, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Board of India.

 

Dell says diversification was the best thing he did

Posted on October 20, 2016 by - News

dellchannTin box shifter and CEO Michael Dell has said that moving away from grey boxes for a bit was one of his cleverer moves.

Talking to the assorted throngs at Dell World, Dell claimed the firm’s wider range of offerings and its EMC deal was a key to helping it thrive at a time when former PC rivals have faltered.

“In fact this last quarter we outgrew our competition and the last year to date all of our major PC competitors have declined while Dell is growing. We are the only one that is growing.”

He believes that the “physical reality is transforming into a digital reality” and firms that used to have a ‘physical businesses’ strategy must transform as well to stay afloat.

“This is what the best leaders are focused on,” he said.

Dell rejected claims that the firm would be overly distracted by its acquisition of EMC and the huge array of technology tools and products that it now owns. But nothing like that was happening.

Dell said the firm will still focus on the PC hardware space, as PCs were just as relevant now and in the future of connected devices and the burgeoning internet of things.

“PCs in all their various forms are deeply integrated into the computing, and this is especially so in the internet of everything and the innovation that is happening at the edge, and in another 15 years, we are going to have another 1000 times improvement.”

Softcat gets the cream

Posted on October 19, 2016 by - News

fatter catChannel outfit Softcat is reporting some rather good figures for its first public full year.

The channel player reporting strong results and a £28m special dividend. The firm saw a 12.8 percent  increase in revenues to £672.3m and gross profit coming in at 17.5 percent up on last year at £120.7 for the year  ended 31 July. That gross profit number was helped by a one-off procurement saving of £3.4m.

Softcat saw a 7.5 percent  increase in customer numbers and increasd its staff by 21 per cent to support its growth plans.

The channel outfit went public in November last year and the share price has consistently outperformed the initial valuation.

Martin Hellawell, Softcat CEO, said that the last financial year had seen it open an office in Glasgow, add 133 to the workforce and pick up a clutch of best partner awards from leading vendors.

“We are pleased to report continued strong organic growth at Softcat with 12.8 per cent revenue growth, 17.5 per cent growth in gross profit and 15.2 per cent growth in adjusted operating profit, achieved against a backdrop of very modest growth in the UK economy which has equally been reflected in the IT market,” he said.

“We have continued to win large numbers of new customers and earn increased spend from our existing customers.  This has been achieved by our relentless focus on customer service, which is in turn driven by an excellent and engaged team of people at Softcat,” he added.

Dell spruces up its channel with EMC blood

Posted on October 18, 2016 by - Moving People, News

Michael DellDell has named its new channel and sales executives and appears to be leaning on EMC bigwigs to improve its channel.

EMC channel chief Gregg Ambulos is now in charge of the North American channel, after EMC’s John Byrne was made global channel supremo in July.

Ambulos reports to Byrne, and his appointment came along with a host of other executive moves designed to streamline and unify the Dell Technologies sales and channel operations.

Byrne, who worked for AMD, is now the president of global channels and reports directly to Marius Haas, Dell COO and president of commercial solutions.

This looks like Dell intends to lean heavily on EMC’s channel expertise and moving towards partner-led customer engagements, similar to EMC’s programme.

Jim DeFoe is now the head of global distribution. DeFoe is a 20-year Dell veteran, and has spent almost all that time as vice president of global sales channels and programmes.

Cheryl Cook is now the head of partner marketing, reporting to Nina Hargus, senior vice president of global field marketing. Cook was the face of Dell’s channel operation after coming from Sun.

Kimberley DeLeon, another former AMD bod, was hired by Dell last January. She will be the head of global channel programmes at Dell Technologies,.

Randy Huey, also from Dell is now the head of channel strategy, Huey will lead channel strategy and planning. He and Byrne will map out plans for partner spending and coverage across Dell and EMC.

Pilar Schenk will be head of channel sales planning and operations.

Tian Beng Ng will be the head of Asia-Pacific and Japan channel sales. He has been with Dell 17 years, most recently as vice president and managing director, South Asia and Korea. Alvaro Camarena  is now the head of Latin America channel sales. Camarena has been with Dell eight years as executive director of Latin America channel programmess. Michael Collins will head Dell’s EMEA channel sales operation. The 14-year Dell veteran was most recently vice president of strategy and channel, EMEA.

Salesforce says Twitter Ye Not

Posted on October 17, 2016 by - News

frankie-loopmasters1Salesforce has said it has given up on its plans to buy social notworking site Twitter.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told the Financial Times his company has “walked away” from cutting a deal and he was pretty much the last one left.

Neither Google nor Disney plan to bid on Twitter, despite reports saying both were interested. Apple is long gone and Verizon immediately launghed off the speculation.

Facebook was said to be uninterested, and someone mentioned Microsoft but then realised that it made no sense for Vole which is becoming an increasingly enterprise-focused company.

This is going to put pressure on the social notworking site to work out a way to restart user growth and improve its revenue.

Twitter will update investors on its earnings again two weeks from now, on 27 October and it’s likely the company will either address or be asked about where any acquisition talks go from here.