Category: News

Notebook ODMs fleeing to the cloud

Posted on August 3, 2015 by - News

cloudbustThere could be a drastic cut back in the number of notebooks on the market.

Word in from the Far East is that  notebook ODMs, such as Quanta and Compal, have been expanding staff specifically for servers used in cloud computing data centres, their component suppliers, including thermal modules, power supplies and metal stamping, have also extended related production.

It seems likely that the manufacturers have had a gutsful of making PCs that no one wants and are seeing the future as being cloudy.

Intel’s datacentre business units had 10% growth in second-quarter revenues, while profits from the business also surpassed those of its PC business, making the datacentre centre business the CPU giant’s new main profit contributor. The trend also triggered upstream supply chains to start turning their focuses to the segment.

Choung Technology said that more than 40 per cent  of its revenues contributed by server-related products. CCI ships about eight million thermal modules for servers each year, and is supplying to clients including HP, Dell, and Quanta.

Furukawa Electric also stuck its foot in the door supplying Google and Microsoft to supply products for their datacentres. The company also started sending samples to Facebook and Amazon recently, looking to expand into their supply chains.

Quanta’s server team has about 1,000 employees and is focusing mainly on the integration between software and hardware. By the end of 2015, Quanta is looking to double the team’s personnel and will continue to recruit more talent in 2016.

Notebook makers get into servers

Posted on July 31, 2015 by - News

server-racksFed up with losing money in a shrinking PC market, notebook OEMs are getting into servers and datacentre hardware.

According to Digitimes, Quanta and Compal have been hiring staff specifically to create hardware for servers used in cloud computing data centres and their component suppliers. Apparently thermal modules, power supplies and metal stamping, have also extended related production makes a mile of cash.

The role model for the move is Intel, which saw its datacentre business units grow by 10 percent while profits from the business also surpassed its PC business.

The trend also triggered upstream supply chains to start turning their focuses to the segment.

Taiwan-based thermal module maker Chaun-Choung has 40 percent of its revenues contributed by server-related products. CCI ships about eight million thermal modules for servers each year, and is supplying to clients including HP, Dell, and Quanta.

Japan-based thermal module maker Furukawa also recently entered the supply chain of Google and Microsoft to supply products for their datacenters. The company also started sending samples to Facebook and Amazon recently, looking to expand into their supply chains.

Quanta’s server team has 1,000 employees and is focusing mainly on the integration between software and hardware and wants to double the team’s personnel by Christmas. Compal’s server team has recruited about 300 employees in two years and is still expanding.

New Egg beats patent troll

Posted on July 29, 2015 by - News

trollNew Egg has declared a victory against a patent troll who tried to claim its patent covered SSL and RC4 encryption.

For those who came in late, SSL and RC4 encryption is as common as muck and the troll in question has gone against over 100 other companies, and brought in $45 million in settlements.

TQP Development claimed that Newegg’s use of newer versions of SSL server encryption technology infringed on it patents. What is worse is that it managed to convince an earlier court that this was the case Newegg was ordered to pay $2.3 million.

At the time New Egg vowed to fight that result in the appellate courts. It did and it won.

Normally companies pay up and go away, but New Egg has a policy of fighting. It has beaten trolls in the past. In March it duffed up an outfit called MacroSolve which sued dozens of companies (including small app development shops) over patent No. 7,822,816, which it claims covers using questionnaires on a mobile app.

The company fought and won a lengthy battle over a patent on an electronic “shopping cart,” and it has defeated Alcatel-Lucent and Kelora

Lee Cheng, Newegg CLO said that patent trolls were bad for any business out there. They often prey on smaller companies, who would rather pay out than take them on directly in court. These trolls hurt innovation and end up costing everyone. It’s a sad situation as many of these small businesses end in million-dollar lawsuits that force them to close before they can even make it in today’s economy.

“Unfortunately, small businesses and even individual developers/entrepreneurs have been threatened and sued too.

“There are many different troll “species,” and bottom feeders send thousands of claim letters out or file hundreds of lawsuits. Their maths says that it always costs less to give them the money they demand than to mount a legal defence,” he said.

 

TV resellers can rejoice as Sky plans 4K service

Posted on July 28, 2015 by - News

tvOne of the sales problems for 4K TVs has been a lack of content, but it appears that Sky is getting ready to fix that.

Dubbed SkyQ, the gear will be in the shops soon. Coincidentally it appears soon after BT’s Ultra HD box began selling online.

Like EE TV, Sky’s new box will enable you to share broadcasts across smartphones and tablets as families move towards viewing TV on multiple devices.

It will also let you  watch or record at least four programmes at once although that will require you to learn how to programme the damn thing.

Apparently SkyQ’s killer feature is 4K football which means that it will be only useful for people who want to watch grossly overpaid, tax dodging morons running up and down a field kicking a ball.

For the rest of the world who wants entertainment that investment in a 4K telly is still a waste of money until Sky and its ilk start upgrading their lower res content.

Sky will launch its box within a month or two so we will know then. The company has not released much in the way of content pricing either. If it is like 3D it will probably be a bit expensive.

EC approves Nokia’s Alcatel-Lucent buy

Posted on July 27, 2015 by - News

euThe European Commission has approved Finnish telecom equipment group Nokia’s planned buy of Alcatel-Lucent because the two were not close competitors.

It said the merged Fin-French outfit will still face shedloads of competition even if it will have combined market shares around or above 30 percent for several specific types of equipment.

“The overlaps between the two companies’ activities are effectively limited,” the Commission said in a statement.

Nokia had a strong presence in Europe, where Alcatel-Lucent was small, with the positions reversed in North America.

Nokia launched its all-share deal then worth 15.6 billion euros to buys its smaller French rival in April. The move is seen as the company building up its telecom equipment business to compete with market leader Ericsson.

The merged group is smaller than the son of Eric, but bigger than Chinese rival Huawei’s and ZTE.

 

BlackBerry shows off its security escape route

Posted on July 24, 2015 by - News

Andy-Dufresne-with-arms-wide-openTroubled smartphone maker BlackBerry revealed its cunning plan to escape doom by becoming a security company.

BlackBerry showed off a suite of security products that safeguard everything from medical gear to Hollywood movie scripts.

BlackBerry whose smartphone market share has dwindled, is trying become a little more software-focused. BlackBerry’s Chief Executive John Chen said in an interview just before an event in New York said that he was satisfied with the progress on the turnaround so far.

“I laid out the $500 million software revenue target and I’m still comfortable with that commitment for this fiscal year, it looks good,” he said.

The full turnaround he has been promising could take longer than initially promised. Going by his early timetable, BlackBerry would now be about six months away from seeing real traction from its overhaul.

Chen said he now sees it taking about 12 to 18 months for investors to reap rewards.

Analysts have been sceptical about the company’s ability to steadily and sustainably grow software revenue, even as revenues from its smartphone unit and legacy system access fees decline.

“We’re patiently building the product pipeline and the sales channel,” he said.

“There is still much work to do, I’d love for everything to move faster, but I caution people to be a bit patient because we can’t rebound in a very short period of time, no company can. We are doing all the right things for the long term and the company is out of financial trouble.”

The outfit does have a few problems as it had not set itself up as software delivery company and did not have a decent channel.

BlackBerry’s Chief Operating Officer Marty Beard, adding that measures taken in the last year have improved BlackBerry’s ability to identify and target potential clients.

Accounting scandal could be the last straw for Tosh PCs

Posted on July 23, 2015 by - News

toshiba-logoOne of the casualties of Toshiba’s accounting scandal could be the outfit’s mediocre PC business.

The company is desperate to cover a huge billion dollar accounting hole and it is thought that flogging its notebook division might help.

Tosh has said that it could be forced to divest non-core activities and “accelerate concentration and selection of business areas and promote restructuring to enhance efficiencies”.

Tim Coulling, senior analyst at Canalys, said the PC division was a key part of the probe and flogging it off made sense.

The question is, who would want it?

Toshiba shipped 2.5 million notebooks globally in Q1 2015 which is not bad but not great when you consider that figure is based on cooked books. However it does have a brand power in the West  which would make it an attractive target for a Chinese player looking to deepen its foothold in Europe or the US.

The downside is that Tosh’s PC business has not been performing well recently. Last year it said it wanted to get away from the consumer business and focus on B2B.

Cisco tells analytics to get more evil

Posted on July 22, 2015 by - News

1682942-dr.evilCisco’s head of digital transformation and analytics has told his marketing minions to stop using analytics to get brand awareness and concentrate on making more dosh.

Writing in his bog,  Pascal Lendermann said that the “the primary responsibility for the Cisco marketing organization (sic) has shifted from brand awareness to revenue generation”.

In other words everyone knows who Cisco is, it is time to encourage people to sell more of its gear. He also thinks it is better to focus on web-based marketing, which is cheaper, than prime-time television advertising.

If you visit the Cisco website, the outfit will apply analytics to put you in front of something to buy as quickly as possible.

If Cisco’s can tag you as owning a Catalyst switch or you have a license that’s up for renewal, it should guide you better to a “Click here to issue invoice” button.

“Cisco IT is using big-data analytics to predict which solutions each online visitor is likely to be interested in. Cisco IT plans to collect, store, and analyse this customer data from various sources to identify clusters of interest, such as Cloud, Data Center, Switches, and Social. Our data sources include search history, webinar registrations, company demographics, and the solutions that other people in the same company are also researching”, Lendermann said.

 

SAP does well in the cheap cloud market

Posted on July 21, 2015 by - News

cloudbustThe maker of expensive, esoteric business software, which no-one is really sure what it does, is making a lot of dosh flogging cheap cloud products.

SAP reported mixed quarterly results as revenues topped expectations due to a surge in newer, lower-margin cloud software.

This should have been good but it stuffed up company margins pushing down profit to the very low end of forecasts.

SAP said second-quarter operating profit, excluding special items,rose 13 percent to $1.50 billion, which was the low end of what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected.

Europe’s largest software maker reported total revenue of $5.38 billion, up 20 percent.

Operating margin dropped to 28 percent from 29.8 percent a year ago. The decline reflected increased investments in SAP’s newer cloud-based software services, where revenues from new sales come later in the form of subscription payments.

SAP is taking on Oracle, IBM and Microsoft to boost Internet-based software sales and fend off pure cloud-based rivals Salesforce.com, Workday and, less directly, industry pacesetter Amazon.com’s web unit.

Salesforce.com in May raised its revenue forecast for the full year, after the cloud software company reported a profit for the first time in seven quarters.

SAP’s cloud subscription and support revenue from continuing operations jumped 129 percent. On the same basis, revenues from its mainstay software license business rose 13 percent. Without currency effects, software licenses grew 3 percent.

 

Cisco kid sees setback in court

Posted on July 20, 2015 by - News

Cisco Kid Cisco’s US legal battles with its rival Arista have been suffering from a bad case of not being able to make much stick, at least for now.

A US federal judge has chucked out Cisco’s claims for indirect infringement against its rival Arista Networks that occurred prior to the filing of its patent infringement lawsuit in December, and also one of its wilful infringement claims.

For those who came in late, Cisco filed two lawsuits against Arista alleging the company infringed on a number of its patents and had stolen Cisco copyrighted material. Cisco claims Arista, whose CEO Jayshree Ullal was the former senior vice president of Cisco’s data centre switching business, took 12 “discrete and important” Cisco switching features covered by 14 different US patents to use in its own products.

It also claimed Arista took 500 of Cisco’s command-line expressions from its IOS network operating system to use in Arista’s own EOS software.

At the centre of the scrap was the fact that Arista, unveiled an enhanced EOS product line, EOS+, a version of the operating system with deeper programmability.

US District Judge Beth Freeman decided that the specific facts alleged by Cisco in its First Amended Complaint — which involve marketing made by Arista regarding EOS+ — were not sufficient to support a willfulness claim.

Allegations summarising Arista’s “puffery in sales and marketing” materials was not enough and Cisco had to claim that Arista’s conduct did more than continue selling the alleged infringing product, the judge said.

Because Cisco conceded it was not seeking damages for pre-suit indirect infringement, Judge Freeman directed it to clarify in its amended complaint that the damages it seeks in this regard are only for Arista’s conduct that allegedly occurred after the initial lawsuit.

However if Cisco’s revised claims do not impress the court the case will hardly be dead in the water, but it does weaken things a bit.

 

Apple and Samsung push for carrier agnostic Sims

Posted on July 17, 2015 by - News

Smartphones

In what might end up being the end of an era in telecom packages the major smartphone makers Apple and Samsung are moving to force suppliers to telco agnostic Sim cards.

The technology first appeared in the iPad Air 2, which ditched typical carrier-linked SIM cards in favour of an Apple one that let users switch freely and easily between multiple providers.

Now it seems that both Apple and its rival Samsung want to bring that technology to the cut-throat smartphone market.

Apple and Samsung have joined the push to standardise these newer embedded electronic SIM (e-SIM) cards with the GSM Association, which represents many worldwide carriers.

Anne Bouverot, the GSMA’s chief executive, said that involved companies are all working on an agreement for a standard to drive the technology, and make it work across carriers and countries. The report says that carriers expected onboard include Orange, Vodafone, AT&T, Hutchison Whampoa, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, and Telefónica.

This will be good for consumers but not so hot for the carriers and their channel partners who could lock the technology into their own networks, making it difficult for users to escape. Changing suppliers is a headache if you have to swap sim cards and it also means global roaming is easier.

Telcos have also been pretty slow when it comes to providing updates for Android resulting in fragmentation.

In a statement, the GSMA said that the majority of operators were on board. The plan is to finalise the technical architecture that will be used in the development of an end-to-end remote SIM solution for consumer devices, with delivery anticipated by 2016.

It will be a year after that before any products hit the shelves.

Amazon’s Prime Day miffs customers

Posted on July 16, 2015 by - News

amazonAmazon’s Prime day failed to live up to the hype generated sending a strong message to e-retailers of the dangers of overreaching customers’ expectations.

Merchants participating in Amazon.com’s much-advertised “Prime Day” sale saw an 80 percent rise in US sales from a year earlier but it appears that the event caused more trouble that it was worth.

The one-day sale on Wednesday for members of Amazon’s $99 per year Prime subscription service is similar to an annual sale by China e-commerce merchant Alibaba.

Wal-Mart panicked and also launched an online sale, fearing that the Prime Day would lose it customers.

Amazon was trying to create a Black Friday frenzy and partly managed it., Amazon did not give detailed sales numbers but said it sold 35,000 Lord of the Rings Blu-Ray sets in 15 minutes and that a Kate Spade handbag was sold out in a minute.

However Amazon shoppers were completely underwhelmed by the experience. Twitter polls show that Prime Day deals were selling out too quickly and complained that deals were not attractive enough.

Other shoppers used the #PrimeDayFail hashtag on Twitter. One user tweeted: “Hey @Amazon, #PrimeDay is not Black Friday in July. It’s April Fools’ in July. #primedayfail”.

Adobe Digital Index said that 50 percent of overall sentiment related to Prime Day on social media was about disappointment.

“Much of the disappointed chatter focused on the lack of blockbuster deals,” it said, adding that users cited sales of less desirable items like socks and towels.

“It was a sale of Amazon’s junk, there was nothing exciting there, and the limited ones which were s were either sold out in seconds,” one irate shopper said. “It was a missed opportunity for Amazon… they should have offered special deals and an across the board discount.”

An Amazon spokeswoman said the retailer was listening to its customers and planned to add more deals like TVs next time.

Wal-Mart launched a three-month online sale of some 2,000 items on Wednesday. The company said customers “shouldn’t have to pay a fee” to get low prices, a dig at Amazon, which it did not name. Deals should be around for more than a single day, a spokesman

Microsoft partners hold breath over Windows server 2003

Posted on July 15, 2015 by - News

windowscomputexThe date of doom of Windows Server 2003 is nearly here and Microsoft’s partners are worried that millions of customers have left themselves wide open to security breaches.

Some suppliers have more than a third of their customer base on Windows Server 2003 and will wake up and discover they are wide open to hackers..

This is of course an opportunity worth millions to solution providers but so far companies are only nibbling.

Any Server 2003 opportunity goes way beyond an upgrade and many companies will have to take on big projects. Some machines will have to be totally replaced.

Microsoft will no longer issue patches to keep outdated software protected, the risk of a security breach rises. There were 37 critical updates released in 2013 for Server 2003, an average of just more than three per month.

Most suppliers say that they don’t have customers who will not migrate, but some are still dragging their feet. Older applications run on 32-bit architecture and development for many of these applications has been discontinued.

This means that some companies are finding that they cannot run on Server 2008 or Server 2012, which feature 64-bit platforms.

This means a software upgrade which is taking time. All this is happening at a time when companies are broke and their boards will not let IT departments start new projects.

Blackberry calls in the Cisco kid

Posted on July 14, 2015 by - Moving People, News

hqdefault (2)Troubled smartphone maker BlackBerry has named former Cisco Kid Carl Wiese as head of global sales – a move which is expected to shake-up the company’s channel.

Wiese has spent the past 12 years at Cisco, first heading advanced technology sales and later its collaboration-product sales efforts. Those teams focus on aspects such as security and web conferencing, areas that BlackBerry is trying to expand within.

Wiese, who has previously worked with Apple, Avaya, Lucent and Texas Instruments, will be responsible for driving its go-to-market strategy and global sales efforts.

BlackBerry Chief Executive John Chen said in a statement said that Wiese had extensive experience in enterprise software and emerging technology solutions, which will be instrumental as BlackBerry moves toward stabilising revenue. Or in English, making money again.

The move comes less than three weeks after BlackBerry posted weaker-than-expected sales growth from its software business in the first quarter.

Chen, who set a software revenue target of $500 million for the current fiscal year, has built his turnaround plan around a software growth strategy, hoping sales from device-management software and fledgling areas like the Internet of

Things can replace BlackBerry’s traditional service fee structure and falling revenue from smartphone sales.

BlackBerry declined to comment on whether Wiese’s appointment, which followed his successor John Sims’ exit was tied to weaker-than-expected software revenue growth. But it is expected that he will look to the channel to improve the company’s bottom line.

BlackBerry is also widely expected to debut a new Android-based smartphone this year in an attempt to boost its hardware sales.