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.

Oracle’s cloud deals questioned

Posted on July 13, 2015 by - News

Pic Mike MageeOracle appears to be forcing corporate clients to buy its cloud products using a complex orchestrated legal maneuver in the dark.

Business Insider claims that Oracle is pressuring some of its customers to add cloud to their contracts that they neither want nor plan to use by using a tactic insiders call “the nuclear option”.

After stuffing up its revenue and profits in the quarter that is traditionally its strongest, Oracle is under pressure. However Oracle’s CEO, Safra Catz, said  analysts blew past its own internal expectations for cloud computing sales. Cloud accounted for about $2.3 billion out of $38.2 billion in revenue.

Chairman Larry Ellison said that was great because every $1 million of cloud contract is worth $10 million over the life of the deal, compared to being worth $3 million for a typical software contract.

But Business Insider claims that Oracle is using its software licences to force customers into these lucrative contracts.

Oracle licenses its software under complex legal conditions. Users have to pay for Oracle software using a variety of metrics such as how many are using the software and which features of the software are being used.

Oracle makes it extremely easy for admins to turn on new features or add more users, and then pay for that increased usage later. That system involves an “audit.”

Much of the time, an audit is used as a sales tactic. Instead of simply paying a big bill, the customer agrees to buy more over the long haul.

If Oracle thinks the customer is really abusing the terms, it whips out the “breach notice,” which warns a customer that they are in violation and must stop using all Oracle software in 30 days.

That’s risky, because it allows the customer to walk away from its Oracle contracts.

They can’t really do that because it can take years to change a database and Oracle is giving them a month or forces them to negotiate.

When they do Oracle says they will have to pay an outrageously high out-of-compliance fine or add cloud “credits” to the contract.

Until this year, Oracle didn’t lightly use the “nuclear option” breach notice but now it is using it even more.

Oracle had an especially good quarter selling cloud in the EU were it was used six times so far in 2015. Business Insider said that it is being used more and more and Oracle is becoming more aggressive

Botched McAfee deal claimed Renee James’ job

Posted on July 10, 2015 by - Moving People, News

jamesThe dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn that the high profile exit of Renee James, president of Intel and head of the software group was because of the silly McAfee deal.

When Chipzilla wrote a check for McAfee  many people wondered why, and suspected it was about getting security onto the chip and other such plausible reasons. However since very little has emerged as a result of this deal, there were whispers that suggested that the whole McAfee thing was stupid.

Officially James is leaving to pursue an “external CEO role.” James will remain with the company until January to help out.

However that is not really how it works. Executives don’t announce what they are doing and they certainly don’t stay on if they are going to work for a rival.

Citibank research analyst Christopher Danely, James wasn’t doing all that well at her main job.

James was largely responsible for leading Intel’s $7.7 billion acquisition of McAfee in 2011, a merger that made absolutely no sense to anyone but a McAfee shareholder.

Intel’s software business had grown just 2.5 per cent  in the last three years, Danely pointed out.

When Intel bought the McAfee business it generated 2010 revenue of $2.1 billion with operating margins of roughly 11 percent. McAfee revenues have remained roughly flat since the company was bought, while operating margins have declined to the mid-single digit range, Daneley said.

It is starting to look like James took the fall for the waste of money on McAfee and underperforming software group.

It is also possible that Intel will have to do something with its underperforming security arm. Last week it borged McAfee and stopped it being independent any more, as our sister publication TechEye faithfully reported.

John Byrne joins Dell

Posted on July 9, 2015 by - Moving People, News

AMD's John ByrneDell has appointed a vice president of sales strategy and operations – and it’s charismatic Scotsman, John Byrne,  who has bagged the job.

John Byrne could well be described as an industry veteran and is well known to practically everyone in the UK channel business.

After a long stint at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), John decided to take some time off with his family.

But you can’t keep a John Byrne down for long, and he said: “Great to work at a company led by an industry legend like Michael Dell.”

ChannelEye sends our best wishes to him.

Indian security outfit shows how it is done

Posted on July 9, 2015 by - News

Statue of Hindu goddess KaliIndian security supplier Quick heal is putting the fear of Kali into the security industry with its 50 percent margins.

Now it seems that the Pune-based security vendor is wooing North American partners with a scheme called Quick Rewards which is a loyalty programme that has no limit on rewards.

According to the company, the programme is on top of the 50 percent margins that is already offered and gives reward credits on referred partners sales and more.

“The program (sic) is designed to provide unlimited financial benefits to active channel partners, with no limit on the amount of rewards cash that may be earned,” Quick Heal said in a statement.

Authorised channel partners can receive rewards credits representing up to six percent of a referred partner’s first-year Quick Heal Seqrite product line sales, and four percent of the second year’s sales.

The company emphasised that there are no limits to the number of referrals that a reseller can bring in, and no limits to the reward dollars that they can earn.

Although the moves are cantered on the US market, the cunning plan is an illustration of the sort of aggressive play which Indian companies can run in other markets too.

According to the Glassdoor  site the outfit has very aggressive marketing in PAN India by going vertical through government, corporate, SMB and other channels. It does have a good product and very good support from support engineers who know  it in and out, it is said.

Oracle takes on Rimini Street

Posted on July 8, 2015 by - News

oracleOracle has confirmed that its  copyright infringement case against software support services company Rimini Street and the smaller rival’s Chief Executive Seth Ravin will go to trial in September.

Oracle wants more than $200 million in damages and an injunction on Rimini’s current business model.

Oracle had sued Rimini and Ravin in 2010, alleging copyright infringement, computer fraud and related business torts.

A federal judge confirmed the lawsuit for trial on July 1, Oracle said.

The lawsuit alleged that privately held Rimini Street stole copyrighted material using the online access codes of Oracle customers.The US District Court in Las Vegas dismissed in August last year Rimini’s counterclaims against Oracle alleging “defamation and unfair competition.”

AMD’s woes deepen

Posted on July 7, 2015 by - News

frog-mouth-crocodile-blair_42596_990x742Fabless chipmaker AMD lowered its revenue estimate for its second second quarter saying the demand for personal computers was weaker than expected.

The company also cut its adjusted gross margin forecast for the quarter ended June 27.

The company has been shifting focus to gaming consoles and low-power servers but progress has been slower than anyone expected. This is partly because Intel has upped its game and new competitors are designing low-cost and power-efficient chips.

AMD was at the initial stage of reviewing whether to split itself in two or spin off a business, in a move to reverse its fortunes and take on Intel. Other rumours have suggested that it was going to sell itself off.

The company said that it expects revenue to have decreased about eight percent from the first quarter, compared with its previous forecast of down three percent, plus or minus three percent.

This implies revenue of about $948 million. Analysts were expecting $999.6 million.

AMD also cut its forecast for second-quarter adjusted gross margin to about 28 percent, as weak demand from PC makers also hurt demand of its APUs which combine both computing and graphic processing capability.

AMD had forecast margins of about 32 percent.

The company warned in April that it expected weak demand for personal computers to continue for some time as original equipment manufacturers focus on lean inventories.