Category: News

Cisco and Salesforce team up on Internet of Things

Posted on September 23, 2016 by - News

Cisco Kid Cisco and Salesforce are combining their Internet of Things and unified communications technologies in a cunning plan to provide joint offerings to drive channel sales in the new markets.

The networking giant will co-develop and co-market new joint offerings that combine its platforms in collaboration, IoT and contact center with Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud offerings.

Under the cunning plan Cisco Spark and WebEx will be integrated into Salesforce’s Cloud and Service Cloud. Combining these two technologies will allow customers to communicate in real time using chat, video and voice without leaving Salesforce or having to install a plug-in.

Cisco’s Jasper IoT platform, which it bought in its $1.4 billion acquisition of Jasper Technologies earlier this year – will be integrated with Salesforce’s IoT Cloud. Cisco said the joint offerings will empower organisations to quickly and cost-effectively use billions of IoT data points and provide businesses with a more comprehensive view of their IoT services.

Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of the IoT and Applications Groups at Cisco said that Cisco and Salesforce were coming together to form a strategic alliance can eliminate the friction users experience today so they can become more productive.

The alliance will also combine Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Enterprise and Salesforce Service Cloud to help customers manage call centres more efficiently, according to a release.

IDC thinks the IoT market is set to explode

Posted on September 22, 2016 by - News

hindenburg_burningBeancounters at IDC think that the Internet of Things (ioT) is suddenly going to stop being a buzz word and “explode.”

According to an IDC report IoT  is gaining traction as enterprise companies pivot away from proof-of-concept projects to scalable IoT deployments in 2016.

A third of companies have announced IoT offerings incorporating cloud, analytics and security capabilities, while an additional 43 percent of companies are looking to deploy offerings in the next year.

Carrie MacGillivray, vice president of mobility and Internet of Things at IDC said that outfits are starting to understand the benefits that IoT can bring.

She added that a strong partner ecosystem is essential and channel and systems integrators as playing an increasingly important role.

Companies are seeing vendors leading with an integrated cloud and analytics offerings as “critical partners” in an organization’s IoT investment, IDC found.

IDC’s survey found that 55 percent of respondents see IoT as strategic to their business to help them compete more effectively, there are still challenges – many organizations cited lack of internal skills as a top concern in deploying an IoT offering.

Bad time to be flogging servers

Posted on September 21, 2016 by - News

titanic-life-preserverBeancounters at IDC have said that it is a jolly bad time to be trying to flog servers and the numbers are sinking so fast that it is unlikely that the spotty kid with the posh girlfriend will escape before Celine Dion starts to sing.

The latest server sales figures for Europe, Middle East and Africa show that branded servers are losing ground to Far Eastern ODMs.

IDC numbers showed revenues down 3.7 per cent to $3 billion despite. All this happened while there was a  modest 0.8 per cent increase in the number of boxes shifted, which means that prices have fallen too.

Eckhardt Fischer, research analyst at IDC, said contract manufacturers, some of whom have launched their own branded gear, are doing well and the  HPEs, Dells and Lenovos of the world are suffering.

“This is strongly driven by the continued expansion of original design manufacturers (ODMs) in EMEA, a trend that IDC predicts will continue as mega datacenters and larger enterprises begin to source their hardware directly.”

HPE is still top server seller with 35.4 per cent market share in the second quarter of 2016, up 0.4 per cent. However its year-on-year revenues fell 2.7 per cent.

Dell grew market share to 17.9 per cent and saw revenues creep up by 1.6 per cent.

However Biggish Blue suffered the worst with a 36.9 per cent slump in revenues and a market share which fell to 9.3 per cent. IDC said the fall could largely be blamed on refresh cycles for IBM legacy mainframes last year – this was big enough to hit overall numbers for all vendors.

Oddly the place to try and peddle servers is Russia and the Ukraine where the improved political situation led to increasing IT investment. But the Middle East and Africa saw a decline of 8.5 per cent in revenues because lower oil prices led to cuts in tech investment.

 

Tech Data buys Avnet

Posted on September 20, 2016 by - News

jonah2Tech Data is to buy Avnet Technology Solutions for $2.6bn in a move which will create one of the biggest enterprise IT distribution companies.

Tech Data will write a cheque for $2.4bn in cash and 2.785 million of its shares.

Tech data surpremo Bob Dutkowsky said the “strategic and financial benefits resulting from this transformative combination are compelling for both our company and our shareholders.”

Avnet  president Patrick Zammit claimed the scale of Tech Data, which is the second largest tech distribution company worldwide – would allow it to “unlock value in ways we could not historically.”

Avnet gives Tech Data access to multiple franchises including IBM, HDS, and NetApp, and makes it the undisputed king of EMC distribution.

Things have not been so hot for both outfits lately. Tech Data sales fell to $26.37bn for FY’16 ended 31 January, versus $27.67bn in the prior year, and it reported operating profit of $401.4m from $267.6m. Data centre kit accounted for roughly 30 per cent of this. Avnet TS sales fell to $9.65bn for FY’16 ended 2 July vs $10.58bn, and operating profit came in at $725.9m compared to $797.4m.

All this menas that Tech Data operations will go up from 21 to 35 countries worldwide. Europe will account for a little over half of group sales. Avnet trades with 20,000 customers, though how much overlap there already is with the 105,000 that Tech Data sells to is unclear at this stage.

Tech Data said it expects to make $100m in cost savings within two years after closing the transaction.

 

Vtech punters hit by hack

Posted on September 19, 2016 by - News

vtech-mobiogo2Half a million British families, including 750,000 kids, have been affected by the massive hack of kids computer tech outfit Vtech.

The VTech breach is one of the largest in history, including 5 million adults’ information. Its hacked database includes 560,487 accounts identified as belonging to people in the United Kingdom.

What is worrying the world is that a big chunk of the accounts were set up for children which makes for an all you can eat buffet for paedophiles.  The children’s data included their name, username, gender and date of birth.

A Vtech spokesperson did not answer press questions on the issue of the children’s data but it confirmed “an unauthorised party accessed VTech customer data housed on our Learning Lodge app store database on November 14, 2015. Clearly those are the sort of unauthorised parties we never get invited to.

“The investigation continues as we look at additional ways to strengthen our Learning Lodge database security. We are committed to protecting our customer information and their privacy, to ensure against any such incidents in the future.”

The company said it immediately conducted a thorough investigation put in place measures to defend against further attacks.

 

Gartner says public cloud is bigger than Jesus

Posted on September 16, 2016 by - News

PAY-Lion-King-cloud-MAINBeancounters at the analyst outfit Gartner group claims that the public cloud just getting bigger, will be worth $200bn in 2016.

After adding up the numbers and dividing by its shoe size, Big G claimed that the global public cloud services market is set to grow by more than 17 percent in 2016.

According to Gartner, cloud services were worth $178 billion in 2015. This is set to increase to $208.6 billion in 2016, higher than the nominal GDP of Portugal.

Apparently all this will be driven by cloud system infrastructure services, which are projected to grow 42.8 percent year-on-year. Cloud application services, one of the largest segments in the global cloud services market, is expected to grow 21.7 percent to reach $38.9 billion.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner said that the growth of public cloud is supported by the fact that organisations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption, according to Gartner’s 2015 cloud adoption survey.

However at the moment the aspiration for using cloud services outpaces actual adoption and while organisations might be keen to use cloud services, but there are still challenges for organisations as they make the move to the cloud.

“Even with the high rate of predicted growth, a large number of organisations still have no current plans to use cloud services,” Nag wrote.

Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner said that his outfit’s position on cloud security has been clear.

“Public cloud services offered by the leading cloud providers are secure. The real security challenge is using public cloud services in a secure manner,” he said.

Hybrid cloud faces challenges, however, and Gartner reported that organisations are concerned about integration challenges, application incompatibilities, a lack of management tools, a lack of common APIs and a lack of vendor support too.

Anderson said that while public cloud services will continue to grow. We also know that private cloud services (of various types) will become more widely used.

“Providers must focus on the top hybrid cloud challenges to be successful in meeting the growing demand for hybrid cloud solutions.”

Dell becomes the king of the servers

Posted on September 15, 2016 by - News

Michael DellNew numbers from the Gartner Group show that Dell has beaten HPE to the top spot for server shipments.

To be fair, though, the market shrank and worldwide server revenue is down 0.8 percent.  Shipments are up by two percent which means that there is some pretty nasty price cutting going on.

Everywhere except for Asia/Pacific and North America is in decline, though shipments in those areas grew by 5.6 percent and three percent respectively.

Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner said: “Dell garnered 19.3 per cent of the market and moved into the No. 1 position in worldwide server shipments due primarily to growth resulting from programmes it has in place in the Asia/Pacific region, most notably in China. However, HPE continued to lead the x86 market in revenue with 26 per cent of the market.”

He added: “x86 servers grew 2.1 percent in shipments and 5.8 percent in revenue in the second quarter of 2016.”

Dell’s strong performance did not see its revenues match the growth. HPE continues to hold more of the market share in revenue though that contracted by 6.4 percent year-on-year, while Dell saw almost 10 percent growth.

IBM’s server revenues dropped by 34.4 percent but then it did flog its business to Lenovo.

HPE’s shipments also contracted year-on-year, shrinking by more than 18 percent, while Dell, Lenovo, Huawei, Inspur and others pulled up their socks.

Staines’ Attenda sold to void dreamers Ensono

Posted on September 14, 2016 by - News

zen_as_a_frogThe Staines-based managed service provider Attenda has been sold to Ensono.

The news will be a great relief to Attenda which has been on the market longer than a haunted house whose occupants have all died in mysterious circumstances. It was put up for sale by its owner Darwin Private Equity last year, but no one was interested because of its poor results.

Ensono is based in Chicago and is an infrastructure-based MSP. It is better known as Acxiom IT but it changed its name in January to Enso which apparently is a Zen term meaning enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void). The work site said that this workd is also fused with the Italian one for “in dreams”. Unfortunately in Italian it is singular which means that we are only talking about “one dream” rather than dreams. Still at least it has focus. So basically after their rebranding they were “enlightened by a dream” which was probably not the one about a Mars bar and Eva Green I keep having.

Mark Fowle, Attenda’s CEO and co-founder, will join the board of dreamers and Ensono’s CEO, Jeff VonDeylen, will remain in charge of the combined company

Dell names top channel execs

Posted on September 13, 2016 by - Moving People, News

michael-dell-2Dell has announced its regional execs to run its channel after completing the $60bn buy-out of EMC.

Most of the names are similar to those who ran Dell’s channel before.  In the Asia Pacific region is Ng Tian Being, who was veep of South Asia and Korea; for Latin America is Alvaro Camarena, who was exec director of channel programmes; and for EMEA it’s Michael Collins at least after January.

Collins was only given the channel role and replaced Laurent Binetti, who had been in the job for 30 years. .

Until then, both Collins  and Philippe Fosse (the current EMC EMEA channel head] will continue to jointly-lead the Dell EMC EMEA Channel business in their established roles.

Fosse was EMC’s EMEA East, before he moved into the position more than four years ago. Prior to that he was at HDS, Xiotech and further back in the annals of time he was at StorageTek.

He is yet to have a role in the glorious new Empire. He apparently has a job but it has not been “formally announced” yet.

The only EMC person to have a role announced is Greg Ambulos, who ran global channels for EMC and will control North America channels at Dell.

 

Brexit stuffed up HPE’s bottom line

Posted on September 12, 2016 by - News

logoFormer maker of expensive printer ink Hewlett Packard Enterprise has said that Brexit did have an impact on its bottom line.

The vendor said that there had been a slowdown in public sector spending following the referendum decision to exit the EU. HPE mentioned the slow down of public sector activity in its  latest results announcement but this was largely missed when HPE announced it was off-loading its software business in a spin merger with UK firm Micro Focus.

Speaking to analysts, HPE CEO Meg “Yahoo” Whitman said that Brexit was something that it had felt in its order books in the UK and across the continent.

“What we saw was actually a pause in purchasing in the UK. Certainly the UK public sector, but also the UK and then more broadly Europe which was, this was unexpected, a big change, let’s take a pause and decide what we want to do here. What I will say is that in the last couple of weeks we’re actually seeing orders pick up again,” she added.

But the result of Brexit and the shock to the UK economic system, particularly the value of the pound, has led to ongoing price scrutiny.

“We continue to also monitor the pricing, competitive pricing environment that we see and we adjust as necessary particularly in the channel. So the channel is where we serve SMB and that’s where our ability to sort of move the pricing in response to competition, we look at that actually every single week sometime multiple times a week,” added Whitman.

 

Google buys Apigee for $625 million in cloud plan

Posted on September 9, 2016 by - News

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudGoogle is buying software development toolmaker Apigee for $625 million, to improve its cloud-based businesses offerings.

Alphabet’s Google has agreed to pay a 6.5 percent premium to Apigee’s shareholders and the deal will be completed by the end of the year.

For those who came in late, Apigee sells a platform that aids companies manage APIs to help developers build software that talks to each other and shares information without revealing the underlying code. APIs have become an integral part of cloud software development, allowing one application to pull data and use services from multiple other programmes.

Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google’s cloud business wrote in her bog: “The addition of Apigee’s API solutions to Google cloud will accelerate our customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high quality digital interactions.”

Apigee has customers which include Walgreens Boots Alliance, AT&T, Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and Burberry Group. Green said that Walgreens uses Apigee to offer APIs and analyse how the tools are being used.

Google has been improving enterprise-focused products, having lagged behind Amazon.  and Microsoft in flogging public cloud computing software.

The Apigee acquisition will also help support Google’s own set of APIs, which include ones that allow developers to pull information from YouTube as well as the Translate and Maps software to imbed in their own apps.

HPE spins and goes British

Posted on September 8, 2016 by - News

hp_enterprise_logoThe former maker of expensive printer ink HPE will spin off and merge its non-core software assets with Britain’s Micro Focus in a deal worth $8.8 billion.

The move is part of HPE Chief Executive Meg Whitman’s cunning plan to shift HPE’s strategy to a few key areas such as networking, storage and technology services since the company separated last year from computer and printer maker HP. It will also off-load the troubled software side of the business.

HPE acquired part of its software portfolio through the $10.3 billion purchase of Britain’s Autonomy in 2011. HP’s $11 billion purchase of Autonomy was supposed to form the central part of the US group’s move into software.

HP later wrote off three-quarters of the company’s value, accusing Autonomy executives of financial mismanagement.

Whitman said in a statement that HPE was taking another important step in achieving the vision of creating a faster-growing, higher-margin, stronger cash flow company well positioned for customers and for the future.

The deal with Micro Focus, a multinational software company based in Newbury was announced along with HPE’s latest quarterly earnings. In the third quarter, HPE reported net revenue of $12.2 billion, down 6 percent from $13.1 billion a year earlier.

The transaction is expected to be tax free to HP. Micro Focus will pay $2.5 billion in cash to HPE, while HPE shareholders will own 50.1 percent of the combined company that will operate under the name Micro Focus and be run by its executives. HP said it would pay $700 million in one-time costs related to the separation of the assets.

Other HPE assets that will be merged include software for application delivery management, big data, enterprise security, information management & governance and IT Operations management businesses.

Micro Focus has been bulking up on acquisitions to boost growth, and this would be its largest deal to date. Earlier this year, Micro Focus acquired U.S. firm Serena Software for $540 million.

Kevin Loosemore, executive chairman of Micro Focus, said that “the time is right for consolidation in the infrastructure software market and this proposed merger will create one of the leading players in this space.”

HPE is the latest firm looking to Britain for expansion opportunities after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Valuations of British companies have been relatively low given current exchange rates.

Bill Amelio is Avnet boss

Posted on September 7, 2016 by - Moving People, News

long.amelio.cnnAvnet has named former Lenovo leader Bill Amelio as its CEO.

Amelio  held the job since July after longtime leader Rick Hamada stepped down. The outfit needs to make a few changes particularly when it comes to making more cash for shareholders and the adoption of emerging technologies.

William Schumann, chairman of Avnet’s board, said in a statement that the company was lucky to have someone of Amelio’s character and experience.

“He brings energy and focus to the business, and the board unanimously agreed that making him the permanent CEO was in the best interest of our customers, employees and shareholders.”

Amelio said that the company had an experienced management team and an engaged workforce.

“By better aligning those resources with our competitive solutions specialist, embedded and supply chain strengths, Avnet will undoubtedly be positioned to achieve profitable growth for our shareholders.”

Amelio told investors he is busy identifying and doubling down on the profit-generating sources within Avnet, and fixing or exiting from Avnet’s areas of poor profitability.

He will be rolling out new business management systems that emphasise accountability, address organisational barriers and allow the distributor to work more effectively through collective operating groups.

Amelio said he values Avnet’s Internet of Things and digital technologies initiatives, he is more interested in getting the outfit’s margin and return performance more in line with long-term financial goals.

Amelio will earn a prorated base salary of $850,000 annually and be eligible for a bonus of up to 100 percent of his base compensation, according to a July filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received an award of stock options and restricted stock units worth a total of $2 million.

 

Equistone buys a slice of print services outfit Apogee

Posted on September 6, 2016 by - News

history-of-print-16th-century-printing-companyManaged print and document services outfit Apogee has woken up and found a big chunk of itself has been bought by private equity investor Equistone Partners Europe.

Maidstone-headquartered Apogee employs around 450 staff across 14 offices in the UK and mainland Europe selling hardware and managed services on kit from Canon, Xerox, Konica Minolta and Kyocera.

The Apogee founders Jason Collins and Robin Stanton-Gleaves will stay in charge but Equistone’s minions Steve O’Hare and Andrew Backen will join the board. Equistone’s cash means that the company is valued at £185m, the parties said.

Money raised from sale will be used to fund an expansion programme.

Apogee sells its services to the likes of McDonalds, which bought a print infrastructure and managed service, as well as fashion label Ted Baker, PC maker Dell and BDO.

It is doing quite well. In 2014, Apogee turned over £66.1 million and reported operating profit of £7.47 million. In 2015 the firm bought fellow print managed print services business Balreed Group.

 

Kaspersky ends reseller contract with Quadsys

Posted on September 5, 2016 by - News, Products

40153923-1-kaspersky1Russian security outfit Kaspersky Lab has told security reseller Quadsys to go forth and multiply after its company bosses admitted hacking rivals.

Quadsys owner Paul Streeter, MD Paul Cox, director Alistair Barnard, account manager Steve Davis and security consultant Jon Townsend pleaded guilty to securing unauthorised access to computer material, contrary to section 1 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

The five were charged in summer 2015 with hacking into a rival’s database to plunder customer information and pricing details. Sentencing is set for 9 September.

Quadsys, which was accredited as a Kaspersky Gold partner, the vendor’s top tier certification has moved to distance itself from the troubled outfit and has ended its business relationship with the company.

Others are expected to follow, but still have not gone on record.  Sophos had actually promoted Quadsys to its platinum certification on 1 August, just nine days after the Quadsys Five pleaded guilty at Oxford Crown Court.