Autodesk’s cloud move gets thumbs up from investors

Posted on September 28, 2015 by - News

IMG_04911Autodesk shares could jump 50 percent in the next 18 months as investors get more comfortable with the company’s transition to a cloud-based business model.

By the middle of next year, Autodesk will give up on selling “perpetual licences” and move to subscriptions to buy products on the cloud.

In the short term this will cause shares to tank. Shares of Autodesk have lost almost a quarter of their value in 2015, with investors grappling with the fact that the shift to the cloud will hurt earnings temporarily as the company’s revenue model shifts from one-time software purchases to smaller recurring payments.

But Barrons thinks that five years from now Autodesk could be earning over $4 a share, double its fiscal 2013 peak. The stock could benefit much sooner.

The thought is that a move to a cloud-based subscription model lowers upfront costs, which could help attract new customers.

However it is all a risky business. While many companies have moved to subscription based models, the results have been mixed.  A move to the better is by no means guaranteed.  Still, it is nice that the people who invest in the company think it will do well.

IoT needs to be sold to enterprises

Posted on September 25, 2015 by - News

map-of-internetBeancounters at IDC think that the Internet of Things is an important strategic move for companies and resellers need to convince them.

IDC said that the Internet of Things (IoT) was gaining traction in a number of verticals and is now seen as “strategic to the enterprise.”

The analyst asked  2,350 IT and business decision makers in 15 countries such as Brazil, China and Germany, and found that 73 percent of respondents have deployed or are planning on deploying IoT solutions in the next 12 months.

The survey found that 58 per cent of respondents believe IoT is “a strategic initiative”; while 24 percent see it as “transformative”. Healthcare is ahead of the overall awareness, with 72 percent of those surveyed seeing it as strategic in this field. Transportation and manufacturing followed with 67 percent and 66 percent respectively.

The analyst found that government is behind the overall awareness, and “often needs clarification around the IoT basics”.

Vernon Turner, senior vice president of IoT at IDC, said: “IoT momentum continues to grow and our survey shows that it is seen as strategic to the enterprise.”

IDC’s survey found that security was a key problem for IoT, as “upfront and ongoing costs have become the top challenges”.

Google partners have another Cloud product

Posted on September 24, 2015 by - News

LOD_Cloud_Diagram_as_of_September_2011Google is adding another product in its range of big data services on the Google Cloud Platform today.

Dubbed the Cloud Dataproc service, the product is in beta, but Google Beta products normally stay that way for years.

The service sits between managing the Spark data processing engine or Hadoop framework directly on virtual machines and a fully managed service like Cloud Dataflow.

This allows the partner to orchestrate data pipelines on Google’s platform.

Dataproc users can create a Hadoop cluster in under 90 seconds and Google will only charge 1 cent per virtual CPU/hour in the cluster. It is top of the usual cost of running virtual machines and data storage, but you can add Google’s cheaper preemptible instances to your cluster to save a bit on compute costs. Billing is per-minute, with a 10-minute minimum.

Users can set up ad-hoc clusters when needed and because it is managed, Google will handle the administration for them.

It is compatible with all existing Hadoop-based products, and it should be a doddle to port existing workloads over to Google’s new service.

Some punters want total control over their data pipeline and processing architecture and are more likely to want to run and manage their own virtual machines. Dataproc users won’t have to make any real tradeoffs when compared to setting up their own infrastructure.

Cloud no panacea as Citrix tries to sell itself

Posted on September 23, 2015 by - News, Products

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloudIt would appear that tacking “cloud” onto your product list is not proving to be a panacea for IT company woes.

Citrix, a US cloud computing company, is making a final attempt to sell itself as a whole before it embarks on asset sales, according to people familiar with the matter.

Citrix, which had attracted the interest of private equity investors before it agreed in July to give a man called Elliott a seat on its board of directors, is having new conversations with buyout firms.

Apparently the outfit is looking to hardware makers like Dell who might want to create a product and cloud package.

Citrix announced in July it would explore strategic alternatives for its GoTo family of products, including videoconferencing and desktop sharing service GoToMeeting. However, a sale process for these assets has not started yet because Citrix wants to see if it can still sell itself at a satisfactory valuation, according to the sources.

If Citrix does not sell itself it will sell or spin off its GoTo products, and other methods to asset strip itself.

Citrix provides communications software and networking solutions for businesses. It reported net income of $251.7 million in 2014, down from $339.5 million in 2013.

Earlier this year, Elliott called on Citrix to sell some units, cut costs and buy back shares to make up for six years of underperformance. In addition to the GoTo business, Elliott has called for Citrix to explore the sale of NetScaler, which helps speed up Web-based applications.

Elliott clinched a deal with Citrix in July that gave Jesse Cohn, one of its senior partners, a seat on the company’s board. Citrix also said it would start a search for an independent board member, mutually agreeable to Citrix and Elliott.

It also said at the time that Chief Executive Mark Templeton was retiring and that it would search for a new CEO.

Earlier this month, Citrix said it would repurchase up to an additional $500 million of its common stock.

 

 

 

HP sued over decade old failed project

Posted on September 22, 2015 by - News

courtroom_1_lgThe maker of expensive printer ink HP is in hot water over a new lawsuit over a $49 million project a US state said is still not finished after 10 years.

The contract – filed by the state of Michigan –  dates back to 2005 and called for HP to replace a legacy mainframe based system built in the 1960s that is used by more than 130 Secretary of State offices.

The job was supposed to have finished by 2010, but HP could not manage it. This means that Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget and SOS staff dependent on the old technology for functions such as vehicle registration.
Michigan has paid HP a total of roughly $33 million.

In the suit filed in Kent County Circuit Court, the state seeks $11 million in damages along with attorney’s fees and the funds needed to rebid the contract.

Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said in a press release that she inherited a stalled project when she came into office in 2011 and, despite her aggressive approach to hold HP accountable and ensure HP delivered, it didn’t.

The state wants the source code for an online services portal HP delivered as part of the project.
HP said that it was unfortunate that Michigan chose to terminate the contract, but HP looks forward to a favourable resolution in court.

HP’s VSI is still running

Posted on September 21, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1While it has been scaled back because many in the Channel hate it, HP’s daft Value System Integrator sales programme is still running.

The brilliant idea was started as a way to beat Dell on pricing by removing distributors from the supply chain and using that margin to give customers discounts.

It did not work very well and miffed the hell out of the channel. The cunning plan was that HP would not pay resellers any soft margin or marketing funds, just a one per cent rebate, and allow them to boost their coffers by wrapping products in their own tech services.

The model expanded to the private sector, and saw HP competing against its trusted channel allies.
VSI was one of two decisions which killed off HP’s business. The other one was to ask account managers in the Enterprise Group to manage PC resellers to build direct sales.

The move was great for Lenovo who suddenly had SCC, Softcat, Kelway and other big resellers wanting to work with them.

Apparently though HP has now re-purposed so that it is only used in the public sector again. Even that is less of a focus.

HP CEO Meg Whitman promised to remove channel conflict when she started, setting out rules to govern the behaviour of internal sales reps; and passed some enterprise accounts that were directly managed to channel types.

Lenovo to merge server brands

Posted on September 17, 2015 by - News

lenovo2Lenovo is planning to merge its two server brands into one and use the unified brand to release products in 2017.

The outfit has just written a cheque for IBM’s server division and is already developing new products for 2017

Lenovo’s Taipei server R&D Centeoduct marketing director, Andrew Huang told Digitimes  that  y, Lenovo has two product brands under its server business, ThinkServer and System X, and Lenovo is no longer using the IBM name to sell System X servers.

The outfit’s share in worldwide server market rose to seven percent in the second quarter of 2015 to become the fourth largest vendor. It has recently landed orders from Alibaba for 50,000 servers.

The move has been expected, but it is surprising that Lenovo kept its own product name rather than the Biggish Blue equivalent.

AMD forms new graphics business group

Posted on September 16, 2015 by - Moving People, News

AMD-Technician-Poses-With-Chip-WaferAMD has formed a new business group dedicated to the company’s graphics chip business.

Raja Koduri will head the new Radeon Technologies group as its senior vice president and chief architect. Koduri will report to AMD president and CEO Lisa Su and assume responsibility for all aspects of AMD’s graphics technologies, the company said.

Su said through a statement that the company was creating the new business group to put in a place “a more agile, vertically-integrated graphics organization focused on solidifying our position as the graphics industry leader” and recapturing market share across graphics markets while going after new markets such as virtual and augmented reality.

In July, rumours swirled that AMD was considering the spinoff of its graphics chip business. AMD issued a denial after the Reuters news service reported that AMD was at the initial stage of reviewing whether to split up the company and had engaged a consulting firm to help it review such options.

Koduri, a 20-year industry vet, was most recently responsible for driving AMD’s visual and accelerated computing technology, including the development of the industry’s first graphics chip with integrated high-bandwidth memory. He has also been responsible for leading AMD’s LiquidVR virtual reality initiative.

Koduri joined AMD from Apple, where he was director of graphics architecture. Prior to joining Apple, Koduri served in graphics leadership roles at AMD and ATI.

“AMD is one of the few companies with the engineering talent and IP to make emerging immersive computing opportunities a reality. Now, with the Radeon Technologies group, we have a dedicated team focused on growing our business as we create a unique environment for the best and brightest minds in graphics to be a part of the team re-defining the industry,” he said in a statement.

Koduri, Burke and Chris Hook, director of global marketing for computing and graphics, would provide strong leadership for the new group.

Exertis becomes Kaspersky B2B distributor

Posted on September 15, 2015 by - News

40153923-1-kaspersky1Anti-virus outfit Kaspersky has named Exertis UK as its new B2B channel distributor.

Exertis will offer its reseller base Kaspersky’s range of value-add B2B products, including anti-virus, malware detection and firewalls.

Kaspersky said that the appointment followed a substantial growth in the UK B2B space over the last year.  It now has 250 new resellers registering as a partner, giving 582 in total.

The two firms already have an existing partnership in the consumer space space (B2C) but now Exertis can offer the security companies products to business-to-business resellers.

Kaspersky UK and Ireland MD Kirill Slavin said: “Protection is not just about patching on basic security for businesses today, it is about building cyber-resilience into the very heart of operations. There is an immense opportunity for the channel and we’re delighted to use Exertis  to bolster sales.

“Exertis brings two  distinct approaches to the market. Its value added distribution offering encompasses technical excellence and experience in the security arena. It can also help our business get further reach into the mass reseller community, a move which is invaluable for resellers and customers alike.”

Exertis VAD Solutions MD Grahame Smee said: “We’re looking forward to working with Kaspersky as it enters an exciting stage of growth in the channel.

“The cyber-threat landscape is evolving and this relationship will help us to deliver a value-add proposition for businesses from a company that is globally renowned for its knowledge and expertise in the cybersecurity arena.”

Cyber Insurance market to triple

Posted on September 14, 2015 by - News, Products

Republic_Fire_Insurance_Company_certificateThe cyber insurance market will triple in size to $7.5 billion in annual premiums by 2020 according to a new consultant’s report.

But PwC said insurance companies would not be laughing all the way to the bank as the insurance industry could face competition from disruptors such as Google.

Insurers and reinsurers are charging high prices for cyber cover and putting a ceiling on potential losses, deterring companies from buying cyber polices, in the report. Some insurers have kept out of the market, wary of the risks.
PwC’s Paul Delbridge said that if the industry takes too long, there is a risk that a disruptor could move in and corner the market by aggressively cutting prices or offering much more favourable terms.

Millennials – people in their 20s and 30s – are more likely to trust brands such as Google than conventional insurers and Google would be very creative.

Technology companies may also be better equipped than insurers to price cyber risk, he added.
Most of the $2.5 billion written in cyber insurance last year was in the United States, where requirements to notify data breaches have focused attention on cyber protection.

But the European Union is expected to follow suit, contributing strongly to growth in cyber insurance, Delbridge said.

Mixing IBM and Lenovo is proving tricky

Posted on September 11, 2015 by - News

mixing-doughLenovo’s chief operating officer said that folding IBM’s System x practice into his company has been tricky.

Gerry Smith, COO and executive vice president of Lenovo’s PC and Enterprise Business Group, said it was taking a lot to retrain the IBM suits in a culture which was a little faster and less stodgy.

Smith told 300 attendees of the 2015 Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) Summit in San Francisco there had been supply chain challenges and integration issues Lenovo since its purchase of IBM’s $2.1 billion x86 server business.

Lenovo has been focused on making the IBM server acquisitions mainstream brands where channel partners of all shapes and sizes feel like they can come in, win deals and make money.

“It’s about speed to market, and it’s about the volume of our go-to-market,” Smith said. “It’s not just about having cool-looking, high-performance servers.”

Smith said that integrating IBM’s x86 workforce, and employees from Motorola’s $5 billion smartphone practice, was the single biggest challenge the Beijing-based vendor is facing today.

Microsoft delivers Surface through Dell

Posted on September 10, 2015 by - News

surface-pro-2Software giant Microsoft has unveiled a partnership to allow businesses to buy  Surface Pro tablets and Surface accessories through Dell’s enterprise sales division.

Starting next month, it is part of a cunning plan, which will involve Microsoft working with other companies like HP and Accenture on promoting its tablets for business use. In fact the idea seems similar to the one drafted up between Apple and IBM, only it is more likely to work as Microsoft and the others have more experience in the business market.

Dell will also make Microsoft’s tablets available through its online enterprise sales website later this year. Companies that purchase Surface Pro tablets through this partnership can also purchase Dell services, such as up to four years of a hardware warranty, ProSupport with Accidental Damage Service, and Configuration and Deployment Services.

HP will also be selling Microsoft’s tablet through its enterprise sales force, and will be offering a set of Care Packs to help companies plan, configure, deploy and manage a Surface Pro 3 rollout. In addition, the company plans to release “mobility workflow transformation tools and services” next year.

Businesses already buy services and support from Dell for other computers and servers and it means that Dell and HP will sell Microsoft tablets alongside their own tablets and 2-in-1 convertible PCs.

Microsoft has dubbed all this the Surface Enterprise Initiative. The programme could improve adoption from enterprises that want to purchase their technology products from a partner that can also provide service and support for deploying devices.

Amazon shoes Reno out of the market

Posted on September 9, 2015 by - News

shoeBricks and mortar shops are continuing to die as consumers realise they do not have to leave their homes to go shopping.

The latest casualty to report being in trouble is family owners of German shoe chain Reno.

Chief Executive and co-owner Matthias Haendle needs to find a buyer by the end of the year.

Reno owner HR Group is Germany’s largest shoe retailer after Deichmann, and $672.24 million in annual sales and staff of 4,500.

Haendle said in an interview the group needs fresh capital for investment and acquisitions as it is being squeezed by online groups such as Amazon and Zalando

The business comprises wholesale unit Hamm, which is doing well, and struggling retail unit Reno, which has 750 outlets, a source familiar with the matter said earlier this year, without providing an estimate on HR Group’s prospective enterprise value.

Ironically Reno should have done a bit better.  It was founded in 1977 as a mail order group which later merged with Hamm – a leather trading company in 1888.  It should have been the sort of outfit which did well from the online boom.

The difficulty is that Amazon and Zalando did it much better and have carved up a nearly impregnable niche.

Similar patterns are being seen in the UK where established bricks and mortar companies with a large high street presence have been killed off because they did not adapt quick enough to compete with Amazon.

Amazon plans $50 tablet

Posted on September 8, 2015 by - News

amazonAmazon will release a $50 tablet in time for the Christmas sales.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the 6-inch screen tablet comes with a mono speaker and is priced much lower than Amazon’s Fire tablet. The Fire sells for $99.

Amazon also plans to release 8-inch and 10-inch screen tablets, the report said.

While other Amazon Fire tablets show advertisements as screen savers, it was not clear if the new 6-inch tablet’s cost included ads.

The move is part of a cunning plan to attract buyers looking for a simple device for straightforward tasks like streaming video at home and shopping on Amazon.com.

The inexpensive tablet will have compromises like inferior screen quality, durability or battery life in comparison to more expensive tablets like Amazon’s larger Fire.

Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has said, the company prefers to make money by selling services that work with the devices, like e-books and video rentals.

He set a $50 price tag for versions of both the Fire tablet and Kindle e-reader, viewing the rock-bottom prices as a crucial lure for a more cost-conscious group of buyers.

E-reader screen technology from its vendors ultimately proved too expensive to drop the retail price, the people said. Amazon’s cheapest Kindle sells for $79.

Analysts are less enthusiastic about the idea claiming that halving the price for a tablet which is less useful defeats the purpose.

Microsoft updates volume licensing use rights

Posted on September 7, 2015 by - News, Products

Microsoft campusSoftware giant Microsoft has changed the way companies will have to update volume licensing use documents.

In the past, business consumers of Microsoft’s products and services have needed a Product List and the Product Use Rights. These determined the purchasing requirements and licencing rules applicable to those products and services. Both documents were incorporated into Microsoft’s volume licensing agreements and were updated periodically by Redmond on its website.

Now Microsoft has combined the Product List and the Product Use Rights into a unified document with the catchy title “Product Terms.” Users of Microsoft’s subscription-based Online Services like Office 365 still will need to use the Online Services Terms, which define service-specific use rights.

Product Terms come into effect when a volume licensing agreement is signed typically will remain in effect during the term of that agreement.

Upgrades to new product releases during the term will result in the incorporation of the then-current Product Terms for those products. Microsoft’s channel partners and resellers will have to point out the changes made to the incorporated terms to their customers, or there is going to be a pile of legal mess later.

Some changes in the new document already have been the cause of some confusion and concern. So fair most of the problems are about the General Licensing Terms for Developer Tools like Visual Studio.