Tag: IBM

Storage revenues continue to grow

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - News

storageThe generation of vast amounts of data continues to fuel the disk storage systems revenue in the third quarter.

With revenues of $8.8 billion, up 5.1 percent from the same period last year, 25 exabytes shipped in the quarter, said IDC.  Capacity shipments soared by 42 percent during the quarter, compared to Q3 2013.

IDC said sub $100K external array revenues grew by over six percent during the quarter, but shipments ODMs (original design manufacturers) directly to hyperscale datacentres showed positive growth.

EMC remains at the top spot for the quarter, followed by HP, Dell, IBM and Netapp.

ODM direct sales accounted for 24 percent of the market however, outstripping the traditional vendors.  And this trend is continuing, as we’ve reported previously, with ODMs also shipping more and more servers directly and bypassing the brand names,

Servers show mixed results

Posted on December 4, 2014 by - News

server-racksYesterday we reported that server revenues in Europe the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) only showed minor growth.

Those were figures from Gartner. But data from its deadly rival IDC indicate that things were less gloomy for server vendors in the third quarter of this year.

IDC said vendor revenues worldwide rose by 4.8 percent, year on year, to represent revenues of $12.7 billion.

This, said IDC, is the second quarter in a row that the server market has shown a year on year increase in revenue terms.

And shipments in the quarter improved 5.7 percent year on year, representing 2.38 million units.  This is largely down to increased spending on hyperscale datacentres.  IDC believes it is seeing signs of companies refreshing their servers, which is good news for 2015 too.

There is a difference depending on the type of server. Volume systems showed 8.8 percent revenue growth, midrange systems showed an 18.4 percent growth year on year. But high end enterprise systems plummeted by –23.2 percent, year on year.

IDC figures show HP is n number one place, followed by IBM, Dell, Cisco and Oracle.  The “ODM Direct” category is interesting because these are largely Taiwanese companies producing unbranded boxes for multinationals – with prices to match. This chart shows the changes.

idc_servers

Like Gartner, IDC saw a recline in non X86 servers – the thirteenth consecutive quarter of revenue decline.  IBM is in pole position here, with a share of 60.8 percent share.  Blade servers accounted for 18 percent of total server revenues in the quarter.

Server revenues grow as shipments fall

Posted on December 3, 2014 by - News

server-racksShipments of servers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) fell by four percent in the third quarter of 2014 but revenues rose by 1.2 percent year on year to amount to $2.9 million.

Gartner said that growth seen in the second quarter of this year was “a short lived phenomenon and marginal revenue growth…highlights the fragility of demand”.

But despite this, revenues grew for the third consecutive quarter following 10 previous quarters where revenues declined.

HP managed to grow its revenue lead in the regions with 6.4 percent growth, although shipments declined by 8.2 percent.  The growth was largely accounted for by demand for rack optimised and blade system.

Dell managed to displace IBM as second in place in terms of both revenues and shipments.  It managed to grow nine percent in revenues and 3.4 percent in shipments.  IBM, of course, is ridding itself of its X86 business to Lenovo, while its RISC shipments were hit by a fall in demand for Unix systems.  Its lucrative mainframe business is in stasis as Big Blue readies new launches.

Gartner thinks one of the problems is that IT departments in enterprises are struggling because there are datacentre modernisation initiatives which means they are taking their eyes off the ball in the traditional server marketplace.

If RISC, the Intel Itanium and Unix revenues are counted as one, they fell in the quarter by 13.2 percent.

IBM analyses Cyber Monday sales

Posted on December 2, 2014 by - News

Cyberman - Wikimedia CommonsWhile the concepts of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” are largely unknown in these isles, shops have jumped on the American bandwagon causing riots and mayhem in shops across the UK.

And now James Lovell, European retail guru, has got his analytics engines to work and notices that although sales fell compared to last year, the percentage of sales made on mobiles rose by around a third.

He said mobile phone usage as a percentage of overall sales rose by 42.88 percent, and tablets used to buy stuff rose by 12 percent.

The average order value on “Black Friday” was £88.86 percent, and mobile traffic represented 59.8 percent of all online traffic in the UK.

Contrasting different mobile operating systems, Lovell said Android OS sessions as a percentage of overall “Cyber Monday” sales grew by 55 percent, but only represented 11 percent of the overall sales spend.

But the desktop is not dead – over half of all online sales were made by people tip tapping into whatever flavour of Windows they’re being forced to use.

IBM goes Dutch on big cloud contract

Posted on December 2, 2014 by - News

blue_klompenBeleaguered Big Blue has signed a 10-year, multi-billion dollar deal to provide computer infrastructure services to Dutch bank Amro.

Amro thinks that the men in suits are exactly the sorts of types it wants running its cloud operations. However it is a case of “better the devil you know”. IBM has been running Amro’s computer services for a while now.

Under the first €1.5bn deal in 2005, 1,500 people in IT lost their jobs when the bank outsourced most of its IT to the global outsourcing arm of IBM.

At the time, IBM took over the management of the datacentres for the bank’s commercial and consumer clients, private clients, asset management, and new growth markets.

IBM has had some difficulty attracting much interest in its internet-delivered services, as it seems a bit outclassed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon.

IBM will provide fully managed services for mainframe computers, servers, storage and end-user computing as well as a help desk and other technical support. IBM did not disclose financial details of the deal.

Actually it has been a good few weeks for IBM. It recently won a 7-year outsourcing contract from Germany’s Lufthansa worth $1.25 billion that will see the U.S. company take over the airline’s information technology infrastructure services division and staff.

 

Indian software market grows again

Posted on December 1, 2014 by - News

flaggThe accession to power by the “business friendly” BJP party in India has resulted in the software market starting to grow again.

That’s according to a report by market intelligence firm IDC, which said during the first half of this year, the market grew by 10.7 percent, compared to the first half of 2013.

IDC thinks the market will continue to grow in the next five years with a compound annual growth rate  (CAGR) of 10.5 percent.

Areas of growth include mobile application development and device management, security software, systems software and engineering applications.

Shweta Baidya, a senior market analyst at IDC, said that large and small to medium enterprises want to curb capital expenditure and move into the cloud.

Virtualisation and cloud players like Vmware, Salesforce and Red Hat generated good business, and database and analytics companies including Teradata, Oracle, Qlik and others saw double digit growth.

IDC provided a pie chart which shows market share in the region.

indiapie

IBM bets on the mobile market

Posted on November 26, 2014 by - News

horseraceEnterprises wanting to leverage their legacy systems using devices like smartphones and tablets are being tempted by IBM to enter its garden of mobility delights.

The company said it has added a number of pieces to its Mobility Services jigsaw.

That includes “desktop as a service” (DaaS) intended to let companies implement desktop features on mobile devices using a subscription service offered using the IBM Cloud.

IBM, using research figures from Juniper, estimates that one billion smartphones and tablets owned by workers will be use in enterprises by 2018.

That gives IBM the chance to sell enterprises services that include integration, support, maintenance, security and compliance.

Big Blue claims that will give enterprises the ability to deliver applications to hosts of mobile devices in hours rather than months.

IBM is also offering what it describes as the “trifecta” of mobile, cloud and analytics services.  Trifecta usually means a type of bet on horse races – usually called a triple – which we’re not sure IBM wants to mean by this word.

The DaaS offering uses the Citrix Worspace Suite via cloud infrastructure from its subsidiary, Softlayer.  IBM explains that, for example, this would let a saleswoman or man to click an icon on a tablet and turn it into a personal work desktop with access to large sales presentations and the like.

IBM strengthens cloud security

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

bluemixEnterprise IT firm IBM doesn’t think that people trust the cloud enough and has introduced tools to help developers strengthen their offerings.

The recipe is called Bluemix which although it sounds as it might be a kind of cement, is actually IBM’s platform as a service (PaaS).

Bluemix is intended to help build applications to use the benefits of cloud computing without stumbling into the quagmires of compliance, regulation and performance that are the baggage of public clouds.

It has introduced a private application programming interface (API) as part of Bluemix and that lets developers build cloud which connect data from legacy back end systems and link them to mobile and social networking applications.

Bluemix gives access to a cloud hosted in an IBM cloud centre, more or less anywhere across the world. Developers will be able to use services from IBM’s Bluemix catalogue including Watson APIs for data analutics and its Aspera data integration tools.

Customers will have the choice of using an IBM data centre in their own country, to avoid regulatory problems companies might face as well as giving better performance because public clouds have so-called “noisy neighbours”.

Windows bug fixed after 18 years

Posted on November 12, 2014 by - News

oldfathertimeA researcher with IBM said that a dangerous bug that existed in every version of Windows from Windows 95 onwards has finally been fixed.

Robert Freeman, manager of IBM X-Force, said that it told Microsoft about the bug in May this year and at last Microsoft is fixing it.

The bug can be used by crooks in so called “drive by” attacks to run code remotely and take over peoples’ PCs.

Freeman said that there may well be other bugs that go back decades.  “This vulnerability has been sittting in plain sight for a long time despite many other bugs being discovered and patched in the same Windows library,” he said.

He said that although his unit hadn’t found any evidence that the bug had been exploited, it “would have fetched six figures on the grey market”.

You can find more of IBM’s findings at Freeman’s blog, here.

Nvidia and IBM get it together

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News

Jülich SupercomputersIBM and Nvidia will work in collaboration with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre – a German institute for supercomputer simulation – to push the creation and optimisation of research apps on GPUs (graphics processing units) accelerated OpenPower systems.

A new centre will be opened to develop the high performance computing (HPC) space combining researchers from Nvidia and IBM and using the Jülich centre.

There are currently 70 members of the OpenPOWER Foundation formed late last year looking at new ways to develop supercomputers.

Stefan Kraemer, director of HPC business development at Nvidia said: “By providing systems combining IBM Power CPUs and Nvidia’s Tesla GPU accelrators via the NVlink high speed interconnect technology, we can help the new centre address both areas, and enable scientists to achieve new milestones in their research.”

IBM and Jülich have worked together since 2011 to create exascale architectures, and Nvidia has worked with Jülich since 2012.

The aim of both Nvidia and IBM is to create systems that will tackle the challenges of big data.

Why Apple’s corporate plans are doomed

Posted on November 11, 2014 by - News, Opinions

Map09_oh_noes_two_elementalsKing of consumer toys, Apple is attempting its biggest push into the consumer market, according to Reuters.

Reuters claims that Apple is hiring a dedicated sales force just to talk with potential clients like Citigroup.

This is on top of its partnership with IBM to develop apps for corporate clients and sell them on devices, the iPhone maker plans to challenge sector leaders HP, Dell, Oracle and SAP.

Of course no one is saying much in the way of details, Reuters seems to think that the deal with Big Blue will mean that Apple will be welcomed into the corporate world and give HP and Dell a kicking.  This will result in the collapse of Microsoft, Samsung and Google’s own efforts in mobile work applications.

Apparently Job’s Mob is working closely with a group of startups, including ServiceMax and PlanGrid, that already specialise in selling apps to corporate America. Apple is already in talks with other mobile enterprise developers to bring them into a more formal partnership.

For example, PlanGrid is a mobile app for construction workers to share and view blueprints. ServiceMax is a mobile app that makes it easy for companies to manage fleets of field service technicians by ensuring they have access to the right information.

ServiceMax, whose existing customers include Procter & Gamble (PG.N) and DuPont, has co-hosted eight dinners with Apple over the past year in locations across the United States. About 25 or 30 chief information officers and “chief service officers” typically show up at these joint marketing and sales events.

But there are huge problems with Reuter’s desire to see Apple in charge of the world. The most obvious is that Apple makes toys it does not make corporate devices. Corporates are obsessed with security, Apple’s iCloud can’t even protect b list celebs from having their naked pictures being hacked.

Tablets were an Apple inspired Fad and any belief that corporates will rush to buy them never really happened. If they are ever adopted by corporates, they will be a low-level function which will require something a lot cheaper than Jobs’ Mob wants to support. Apple really needed BYOD to take off, which it didn’t.

Apple’s success has been due to its cult following, but religion does not work very well when it comes to business. Apple lacks functionality with business systems, corporates also take a dim view of the sort of things that Apple user agreements desire from their followers. Apple is also slow to confirm security flaws, and even slower to fix them. Its insistence on its own security, rather than that of the client also does not sit well with big business.

In short, to get business customers, Apple needs to change its mentality – something historically it has been unable to do. It not only has to deal with the experts in business, such as Microsoft, HP, Dell and SAP, its traditional rivals, such as Samsung are also harbour similar ambitions.

Samsung has confirmed that it is stepping up its efforts to sell devices to large enterprise clients and hired former chief information officer Robin Bienfait to spearhead that effort. It might hit the same experience problems that Apple has, and there is no reason to suspect it will be any more successful.

Apple’s IBM partnership might not be that key to the corporations either. It relies on IBM’s sales team selling Apple projects. IBM has as much experience selling consumer products as Apple has selling into business. Jobs’ Mob also has no clue about business software, which is the key to getting into the business market — for decades its networking technology has been the weak point of the few Apple installations in corporates.

Apple appears to hope that if it can hook the client on the software and content, they will keep them coming back for the hardware. However, that simply does not work in the corporates. Hell, Microsoft was unable to get corporates to upgrade to Windows 7 because they could not see a need.  What chance does Apple’s business model have against that attitude?

IBM takes aim at cloud entrepreneurs

Posted on November 10, 2014 by - News

IBM logoB2B startups are being given the chance to get up to $120,000 worth of credit if they buy into the IBM cloud.

The company said it wants to provide entrepreneurs with “instant infrastructure” to launch businesses and use their resources to code, build, scale and bring their products to market.

IBM is also offering the startups the chance to connect into its enterprise client base which, it said, are always looking to startups to help them with their own problems.

The global programme includes access to BM’s Bluemix platform that includes over 75 runtimes and services. Bluemix provides integration with Twitter, high speed data transfer tools, application health and performance monitoring services and database as a service (DaaS).

IBM estimates that by 2016 a quarter of all apps will sit on the cloud and 85 percent of new software is built for the cloud.

Entrepreneurs are also being offered technical support and consulting using IBM’s 43 “Innovation Centres”, and incubator space in Silicon Alley.

IBM bets on Watson

Posted on November 10, 2014 by - News

Sherlock-Holmes-and-WatsonBig Blue is hoping that its AI based supercomputer Watson can come up with a few ideas which will help turn it around.

IBM  is taking a kicking from cheap cloud computing services and the outfit is  facing an uncertain future.

Apparently, IBM’s research division is building on the research effort that led to Watson, the computer that won in the game show Jeopardy! in 2011. The hope is that this effort will lead to software and hardware that can answer complex questions by looking through vast amounts of information containing subtle and disparate clues.

John Kelly, director of IBM Research told MIT Technology review  that IBM was betting billions of dollars, and a third of this division now is working on artificial intelligence techniques related to Watson.

Earlier this year the division was reorganised to ramp up efforts related to cognitive computing. The push began with the development of the original Watson, but has expanded to include other areas of software and hardware research aimed at helping machines provide useful insights from huge quantities of often-messy data.

So far, the research has created new recipes by analysing thousands of ingredients and popular meals, and, less interesting, electronic components, known as neurosynaptic chips, that have features modelled on the workings of biological brains and are more efficient at processing sensory information.

The hope is that the technology will be able to answer complicated questions in different industries, including health, financial markets, and oil discovery; and that it will help IBM build its new computer-driven consulting business.

There is a growing belief that machine-learning techniques may provide ways to use big data.  Already Google, Facebook, and Amazon have their own methods for hunting through vast quantities of data for useful insights.

So far those Watson has proved a bit elementary.  Some companies and researchers testing Watson systems have reported difficulties in adapting the technology to work with their data sets. However that has not stopped IBM’s CEO, Virginia Rometty, said in October last year that she expects Watson to bring in $10 billion in annual revenue in 10 years, even though that figure then stood at around $100 million.

IBM is aggressively commercialising the technology. Last week the company announced it had teamed up with Twitter and the Chinese social network Tencent to offer a service that will try to find useful insights from messages daily sent through these services, as we reported here. A company that sells phones might, for example, learn about a possible problem with one of its products from comments made by restaurant patrons.

 

IBM claims first for intelligent cloud security

Posted on November 5, 2014 by - News

clouds3Big Blue claimed it is the first company to build an intelligent security profile that protects data, applications and people in the cloud.

The offerings it announced use what IBM described as advanced analytics to react to threats across enterprise, public, private and mobile clouds  – so called hybrid clouds.

IBM said that while the cloud is being rapidly adopted worldwide, attackers are more sophisticated and more able to hide their activities.  Indeed, IBM claims that three quarters of security breaches take days, weeks or months to be discovered.

Its managed security services platform is intended to protect IBM customers as well as customers of firms like Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.

It said that its intelligent threat protection monitors the cloud environment, analysing billions of security events and including correlation and external data feeds.

IBM estimates that nearly half of large enterprises will use hybrid clouds by the end of 2017 and claims that it is the largest hybrid cloud vendor.

Dell counter attacks against rivals

Posted on November 5, 2014 by - News

Conan 1While Michael Dell was fighting to take his tin box outfit private, his rivals used the uncertainty to steal his customers – now he is counter-attacking.  

Dell opened the Dell World conference and wasted no time denouncing the “turmoil” his rivals in the industry are going through.

“They’re splitting away businesses, spinning off pieces of their businesses, and one has to ask the question: who is this for? Does this actually help the customers? Does it help them create the next great innovative products?”

It is deeply ironic for Dell. At the time HP Meg Whitman was calling Hewlett-Packard a “paragon of stability” compared to his company and IBM smugly told his customers that he was doomed.

Now Dell can point out that Whitman is breaking the the company in two. And IBM is selling its x86 server business to Lenovo and fighting to keep its profits above water.

Because the company is private, Dell does not have to worry about those quarterly targets and can plan.  He even had a dig at Carl Icahn who made him pay millions more to take his company private.

“Dell can focus on a future that’s “beyond the next quarter, the next year or the next shareholder activist,” he said.

Dell’s PC shipments grew almost 20 percent in the U.S. last quarter, Michael Dell said, faster than those of HP and Apple.

Today Dell is expected to announce a new “converged infrastructure” system called the PowerEdge FX, he said, which combines servers, network and storage in a new design that offers “the most density in the world.”