Tag: IBM

SAP founder dies

Posted on April 1, 2015 by - Moving People, News

Klaus-TschiraThe bloke who created an empire based on really expensive management software, which no one was quite sure what it did, has died.

Klaus Tschira, one of the co-founders of European software giant SAP, has died unexpectedly at the age of 74, his foundation said.

Tschira,  a trained physicist, left IBM to found SAP in 1972 together with four IBM colleagues: Hasso Plattner, who is still the company’s chairman, Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector and Claus Wellenreuther.

SAP began by developing software that could process data in real time rather than overnight in batches, and went public in 1988.

It is now Europe’s biggest technology company, with revenues of $18.9 billion and had more than 74,000 employees in 2014.

He also founded the Klaus Tschira Foundation (KTF) in 1995 as a non-profit organisation to support projects in natural and computer sciences and mathematics.

Tschira, a billionaire, stepped down from SAP’s supervisory board in 2007. He is survived by his wife Gerda Tschira and two sons.

IBM cosies up to China

Posted on March 23, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeThe CEO of IBM said she has a strategy in which her company will share tech with Chinese firms.

Virginia Rometty was speaking in Beijing at a government sponsored conference, according to Reuters.

She said that a country of over one billion people needed its own IT industry and it was unfair of foreign multinationals just to milk the market or use it as a place to manufacture kit.

Many foreign companies have made successful businesses in China by taking a partner in the country – the government makes this something of a condition in order to trade there.

The report said that IBM would let local companies build servers using the Power chip and also use the software for the mainframes.

The first beneficiary of the deal is a Chinese firm called Suzhou Powercore, which will manufacture the Power chips for home grown servers.

Rometty didn’t appear to speak of human rights in China, which remain an obstacle for other firms.

IBM sounds alarm over mobile app security

Posted on March 20, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-20 at 14.39.31The Ponemon Institute and IBM have jointly released a report which they said displays “the alarming state” of mobile insecurity.

According to the research, 40 percent of large companies – including many in the Fortune 500 – aren’t protecting the mobile apps they build.

And they’re not good against protecting their BYOD (bring your own device) gizmos against cyber attack. That leaves the gates to their corporate treasure chest effectively open.

The survey looked at security practices in over 400 large enterprises and claims that the average company doesn’t test half of the mobile apps they build. And what’s even worse is that 50 percent of these enterprises don’t devote any budget whatever towards mobile security.

IBM and the Ponemon Institute estimate that malicious code infests and infects over 11.6 million mobile devices.

The organisations surveyed spend an average of $34 million a year on mobile app development, with only 5.5 percent spending part of the budget on security.

“End user convenience is trumping end user security and privacy,” IBM said.

 

Back up kit worth over a billion

Posted on March 20, 2015 by - News

emcboxThe market for customised backup appliances reached $1 billion worldwide in the fourth quarter of last year.

This market represents standalone disk products that use software, disk arrays, server engines, and more specifically data coming from backup software.

IDC said that the market for this kind of kit rose by four percent in 2014 and generated revenues of $3.26 billion.

Annual capacity in 2014 rose by 42.8 percent compared to 2013 to a staggering 2.68 exabytes.

Liz Conner, a research manager at IDC, said reasons for the rise in revenues included better software, data tiering, file sharing, data analytics and more investment in integrated systems.

In the fourth quarter, top of the storage pile was EMC with 63.8 percent market share, dwarfing the other players Symantec (11.5%), IBM (6.7%), HP (4%) and Quantum (2.3%).

 

OpenPOWER reveals hardware plans

Posted on March 19, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-19 at 09.25.15The OpenPOWER Foundation – a group backed by Google, IBM, Nvidia, Mellanox, Tyan and others, revealed its hardware plans to capture data centre business.

OpenPOWER has over 100 members worldwide and IBM claims, for example, that Power 8 microprocessors offer something close to 60 percent better price performance than the competition. The competition, by the way, is mainly Intel.

IBM claims the Power 8 microprocessor is the first CPU designed specifically for Big Data and analytics workloads.

OpenPOWER members showed a number of hardware elements in their plan to grab data centre business.

IBM and Wistron showed off a prototype of a high performance server using tech from Nvidia and Mellanox. IBM will deliver two systems to Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, with a throughput five to 10 times faster than existing supercomputers.

In the second quarter of this year, Tyan will release its TN71-BP012, using an OpenPOWER customer reference system and aid at large scale cloud projects.

Nviia, Tyan and Cirrascale have developed the Cirrascale RM4950, which is a GPU accelerated developer platform which will be available in volume in the second quarter of this year. That’s aimed at big data analytics and scientific computing applications.

Apple buys into white box servers

Posted on March 18, 2015 by - News

novità-apple-2013Cupertino based Apple Inc has decided to ditch HP and Dell to supply its servers and instead is looking to Taiwanese firms to supply its data centre needs.

That’s according to Taiwan wire Digitimes which said some of the local white box server manufacturers have already received orders from Apple for boxes.

One of the major manufacturers of servers is Quanta, which used to specialise almost wholly in making notebooks for big vendors but has diversified its business over the last two years.

It offers servers at a price that undercuts Dell and HP and will customise the machines for customers which already include giants like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Apple said recently it will open data centres in Ireland and in Denmark and it’s also spending billions on building up data centres in the USA.

The company is also cuddling up to IBM and wants to release tablet machines that will appeal to enterprises rather than the home users it has depended on in the past.

IBM teams up with Twitter

Posted on March 17, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeBig Blue is very busy with its cloud data services and data analytics and today has penned an agreement with Twitter aimed at enterprises and developers.

The deal means IBM will deliver cloud data services with Twitter built in – meaning that companies can use analytics to mine meaningful data from the flood of tweets that hit cyber space every day.

IBM described Twitter as unlike any other data source in the world because it happens in real time, and is public and conversational.

IBM claims it can separate the signal from the noise by analysing tweets with millions of data points from other data that is public.

The deal means that developers can search explore and examine data using its Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix.

The company said it can also analyse Twitter data by configuration Biginsights on Cloud and combine the tweets with IBM’s Enterprise Hadoop-as-a-service.

It has already given 4,000 of its own staff access to Twitter data.

 

A billion people get their data leaked

Posted on March 16, 2015 by - News

IBM logoA report from IBM’s security division estimates that in 2014 “at lease” a billion records of people across the world were leaked.

That’s about one in seven of this planet’s humanoid population.

IBM released its X-Force quarterly report and relays information about over 9,000 security “vulnerabilities” affecting over 2,600 vendors in 2014. That’s an increase of 9.8 percent compared to 2013 and Big Blue said it’s the highest single year total in the 18 years it’s been tracking such things.

The USA has suffered the most because at 74.5 percent that’s far higher than other territories. IBM said that 40.2 percent of the most common attacks didn’t get described by those surveyed but malware and DDoS accounted for as much as 17.2 percent each.

IBM said that there was a big rise in so-called designer vulnerabilities.

All operating systems seemed to be under attack – including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

One key vulnerability happened in October with a researcher showing there are thousands of security problems in Android apps.

 

Big Blue suits fight over redundancy

Posted on March 16, 2015 by - News

Backstreet_Boys_-_Black_&_Blue_album_coverSuits in Biggish Blue’s Systems Middleware division are fighting over the right to flee the company and collect a nice redundancy.

Some 110 people want to be paid to leave the company which is way more than the ten per cent of the division’s 736-strong workforce that IBM wanted.

IBM has said that if too many people applied for redundancy then it would choose from the list of volunteers.

The voluntary redundancy process is “coming to an end” and some will be offered redundancy. But the sheer size of the numbers of people who want out will be bad for IBM. It shows staff no longer have much confidence in the company and would rather take the money and run.

IBM has also bought in spending and travel restrictions to manage costs and it is investigating property portfolio projects which are aimed at reducing overall occupancy costs across IBM UK.
IBM staffers asking for redundancy will leave on 5 April, and compulsory lay-offs are not expected – at least, by employees.

Big Blue has restructured internal divisions, placed a big bet on cloud systems. It is also cutting costs by reducing its worldwide headcount. This follows eleven straight quarters of revenue decline.
IBM said it would take a $600m restructuring charge to expunge several thousand people this year, although the number of leavers depends on their seniority and pay scale.

 

IBM pushes low power WANs

Posted on March 12, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeBig Blue said it is cooperating with Semtech to create a new technology using low power wide area networks (LPWANs) that it says has advantages over wi-fi and cellular nets for machine to machine communication.

The long rage wide area networks (LoRaWAN) uses a spec and protocol for low power nets that uses a wireless spectrum that can contact sensor over long distance in anticipation of the emergence of the internet of things (IoT).

These networks have better mobility, security, bi-directionality and localisation as well as being cheaper than existing networks, IBM said.

Semtech, IBM and other firms have formed an organisation called the LoRa Alliance to develop and provide standardisation for the technology.

The technology promises communications of over 60 miles in favourable environments, nine miles in semi rural environments and 1.2 miles in urban environments with data rates of 300 bit/s up to 100 kbit/s.

Sensors can run on one AA battery for 10 years and AES128 keys make for good security, IBM claimed.

Applications include machines telling distributors when they’ve run out of supplies or need fixing; cities could offer smart metering; distributors can track cargo containers; and home heating firms would get alerts when oil tanks are running low.

IBM has made the LoRaWAN protocol open source to encourage standardisation.

 

IBM teams up with Carnegie Mellon

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-03-09 at 16.47.23Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is working with IBM to create “smarter buildings”.

CMU wants to save 10 percent on utilities using a cloud based analytics system to reduce energy and operating costs.

It thinks the savings will be worth up to $2 million a year when the IBM system is used over 36 buildings on its campus in Pittsburgh.

Donald Coffelt, a VP for CMU’s facilities management service said using the IBM system will give a “very attractive return on investment”.

He said: “This technology offers us important gains in initiatives related to advanced infrastructure systems research, the Pittsburgh 2030 initiative and a more proactive building and infrastructure management model.”

Estimates are that buildings will be the biggest consumer of global energy in 10 years time but while systems report data across building networks, most organisations don’t use the the data as well as they could.

The CMU technology will kick off with a pilot in nine buildings and then be extended to other buildings, with full implementation ready in three years, said IBM.

Hyper scale data centres give storage boost

Posted on March 6, 2015 by - News

emcboxIDC said that the storage market ended well. In the last quarter, worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue grew 7.2 percent year on year to amount to close to $10.6 billion.

And capacity shipments rose by 43.7 percent compared to the same quarter the previous year to represent 99.2 exabytes.

Eric Sheppard, a research director at IDC, said spending on enterprise storage grew in most markets worldwide with factors including demand for midrange systems using flash memory and systems designed for hyper scale data centres.

EMC was the top dog in fourth quarter, with a 22.2 percent market share. That company was followed by HP (13.8%), Dell (9%), IBM (9%) and Netapp (7.2%).

Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 14.37.20

Connect to your mainframe with your smartphone

Posted on March 5, 2015 by - News

ibm-officeMacro 4 said it is now a piece of cake to connect via the web to your IBM mainframe -if you have one of those in your back room using a smartphone and a tablet.

The company has released a new version of Tubes for z/OS.

The software gives access to mainframe applications using a web browser on a smartphone or tablet.

The company claimed that the software avoids enterprises having to update web interfaces at some cost.

R&D manager Keith Banham said there is no development overhead at all, and you don’t need to run a computer running a terminal emulator.

The software avoids the need to buy 3270 emulation software to access mainframe applications, he said.

IBM makes gold for Alchemy API

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

IBM logoBig Blue said it has bought a company that specialises in creating scalable cognitive computing application program interface (API) services and deep learning technology.

IBM said it has bought the company because it is complementary to its own development of next generation cognitive computing apps.

The move brings 40,000 developers into its own Watson framework.

The Denver based company was founded in 2005 and its software processes billions of API calls per month, IBM said. It’s available in eight different languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

IBM didn’t say how much it paid for AlchemyAPI but it will integrate the firm’s software into its own Watson offerings.

Server market grew in Q4 2014

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

HP-MicroServerFigures supplied by market analyst company Gartner showed that the worldwide server market grew 4.8 percent in shipments for the fourth quarter of 2014.

And revenues grew 2.2 percent in that quarter, compared to the fourth quarter of 2013.

Jeffrey Hewitt a VP at Gartner, described server market for the whole of 2014 as showing strong growth. Growth for the whole year was 2.2 percent.

“Hyper scale data centre deployments as well as service provider installations drove the X86 market upwards,” he said. “Enterprises had less unit growth impact because of the ongoing presence of physical server consolidation through X86 server virtualisation. This overall market growth developed despite declines in both mainframe and Unix platforms.”

HP was the leader server vendor in the quarter in terms of revenues, but only grew 1.5 percent in the whole year. Its market share is 27.9 percent worldwide. IBM showed a decline of 50.6 percent, and Lenovo had extraordinary growth of 743.4 percent. This is because IBM sold its X86 server business to Lenovo in the fourth quarter.

Dell is the second biggest vendor with 17.3 percent in terms of revenues, IBM third, Lenovo fourth and Cisco fifth. “Others” had a market share of 28.6 percent.
HP also led the pack in terms of shipments, pushing out 642,007 units in the fourth quarter.