NTT DATA Business Solutions has snapped up London-HQ channel partner Sapphire to improve its ServiceNow business.
Sapphire has a headcount of around 420 people and delivers software and services to primarily mid-market customers in the US and UK through its partnerships with SAP, ServiceNow and more.
The buy out will help NTT DATA improve its efforts in the SAP mid-market sector while Sapphire, will help its global expansion.
Sapphire has announced it has acquired SAP Business ByDesign partner InCloud Solutions.
The move is to strengthen Sapphire’s ERP offering and accelerate growth. The company said that the move will expand its Business ByDesign expertise, as well as help consolidate its position as a top SAP partner.
InCloud Solutions offers a portfolio of SAP aligned products that will enable Sapphire to strengthen its ByDesign capabilities, as well as benefit from its team of skilled employees.
The deal is Sapphire’s third this year and follows the recent acquisitions of ITOM Solution and Pioneer B1.
Enterprise software applications outfit Sapphire Systems has snapped up ServiceNow partner ITOM Solution.
ITOM Solution specialises in IT operations management, AiOps, application performance management, and IoT (internet of things) cloud services and is a partner of ServiceNow, Cisco AppDynamics and Dynatrace.
Ian Caswell, CEO at Sapphire Systems, said: “Our acquisition of ITOM is pivotal in pursuing our vision to become a leading provider of digital operating platforms, which capitalise on the cloud to optimise the value of enterprise software investment, while reducing both risk and cost.
Fruity cargo cult Apple wants to invest $2 billion to convert a failed sapphire glass plant in Arizona into a data centre.
Apple set up the plant with GT Advanced Technologies in Mesa in 2013 to manufacture scratch-resistant sapphire screens for Apple’s shiny toys.
However, GT Advanced filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October and closed the plant, after what appears to be a case of Apple shafting its partner by leaving sapphire glass was left out of Apple’s newest iPhones.
Since Apple owned the plant, it wants to turn it into something more useful. The $2 billion investment will stretch over 10 years with a 30 year commitment from Apple to keep the facility running.
But Apple does not really need another data centre. We have written before that it is hugely over capacity now. Jobs’ Mob said that the facility will be a data centre as well as a command centre for managing Apple’s other data centres and networks, which handle traffic from services like iTunes, iCloud and Siri.
It claims it will create 600 engineering and construction jobs at the data centre and the whole lot will be powered by solar energy.
As it wound down its Sapphire production in October, GT Advanced said it was laying off about 650 employees at the plant.
MIT Technology Review has been going through the bankruptcy documents of GT Advanced and seems to have found out what went wrong – and why the iPhone 6 bends.
Apple invested more than $1 billion in an effort to make sapphire one of the device’s big selling points. Making screens out of the nearly unscratchable material would have helped set the new phone apart from its competitors. It would have also enabled it to be structurally strong
When Apple announced the iPhone 6 this September, however, it didn’t have a sapphire screen, only a regular glass one and was structurally weak, so that it bent in your pocket.
GT Advanced Technologies, declared bankruptcy as without Apple it was doomed.
Apple had been using sapphire to cover the cameras and fingerprint sensors in some iPhones since October 2013. But making large pieces of sapphire—enough for a smartphone screen—would normally cost 10 times as much as using glass.
In 2013, GT claimed it could cut the cost by two thirds by increasing the size of its equipment and adapting the crystal growth procedures to make cylindrical crystals—called boules—that are more than twice as large as ordinary sapphire crystals.
Apple originally offered to buy sapphire growing furnaces from GT. But according to sources familiar with negotiations, after five months Apple demanded a major change in terms, requiring GT to supply the sapphire itself. Apple wanted to drive costs down by having GT build the world’s largest factory to produce the stuff.
Apple moaned in the court documents that GT failed to produce “any meaningful quantity of useable sapphire”.
However GT’s bankruptcy filing said that was mostly Apple’s fault.
Producing sapphire requires a very clean environment, but construction at the factory meant that sapphire was grown “in a highly contaminated environment that adversely affected the quality of sapphire material,” according to GT.
It also needs uninterrupted supplies of water and electricity to regulate the temperature of the molten aluminium oxide used to form the boule. GT said that to save costs, Apple decided not to install backup power supplies, and multiple “outages” ruined whole batches of sapphire.
GT said in the documents that there were problems with much of the sawing and polishing equipment used to slice the boule—equipment that it says Apple selected. For example, a diamond-wire saw that was supposed to cut sapphire in 3.6 hours took 20 hours to do it and had to be replaced. According to GT, problems like these increased the costs of processing the sapphire boule by 30 percent.
Then came the worst of it. The terms Apple negotiated committed GT to supplying a huge amount of sapphire, but put Apple under no obligation to buy it.
Creditors of GT Advanced Technologies are fuming that the outfit got too little in its proposed settlement with Apple over legal claims stemming from a deal to supply sapphire screens.
GT Advanced shocked investors by filing for bankruptcy in October in a case that was initially shrouded in secrecy due to confidentiality agreements with Apple. GT Advanced’s chief operating officer has said in court papers that the iPhone maker pulled a “bait and switch” to force the sapphire maker into a money-losing deal in 2013.
Apple agreed to release GT Advanced from the deal and allow it to sell more than 2,000 sapphire furnaces located in Mesa, Arizona.
The agreement needs approval by US Bankruptcy Court Judge Henry Boroff, who has been hearing the Chapter 11 bankruptcy case in Springfield, Massachusetts. He is not too happy about things dot com.
But holders of GT Advanced’s notes, including Aristeia Capital and an affiliate of Wolverine Asset Management, said in court papers the “extraordinary allegations against Apple … call into question the adequacy of the settlement agreement.”
The concept that Apple breached its contract and acted unfairly as GT Advanced’s lender and the fact that Apple’s claims on GT Advanced’s equipment were unsecured would put Jobs’ Mob among the last creditors to be paid, not the first as Apple claimed.
Apple has denied GT Advanced’s allegations. In court filings, Apple has called the accusations “scandalous and defamatory” and “intended to vilify Apple and portray Apple as a coercive bully.”
However, the noteholders want access to internal records and documents from Apple and GT Advanced to investigate if the settlement lets Apple off too cheaply. The noteholders asked Boroff to postpone the settlement hearing, currently scheduled for Nov. 25, to give them time to complete their investigation.
GT Advanced said it is negotiating with potential buyers for its sapphire furnaces and said in court papers an extended delay in approving the Apple settlement could hurt its ability to reorganise and repay its creditors.
It seems that the maker of Sapphire glass is about to go through a messy divorce with its partner Apple and already the name calling has begun.
GT Advanced Technologies said it will cut 890 jobs, close an Arizona plant expected to make scratch-resistant screens for Apple and has threatened to pursue legal claims against the iPhone maker while revamping under bankruptcy.
The outfit said that if GT winds down these Apple based operations it will be able to stop its mounting losses and re-focus its resources on the operation of its core business of selling sapphire furnaces and other products.
GT Advanced said it was burning through $1 million a day at the operations it intended to close.
The company said that it has many claims against Apple arising out of its business relationship with Jobs’ Mob.
The company said it could not pursue the unspecified claims at the outset of its bankruptcy, but that the claims would allow GT Advanced to terminate several Apple agreements that it said were burdensome and of no value.
Apple said that it was committed to preserving jobs in Arizona and was consulting with state and local officials on its next steps.
Apple still needs GT to make the glass for its iWatch.
The company has provided only scant details of the cause of its bankruptcy and turnaround plans. But it appears to have relied a little too much on Apple.
The outfit reached an agreement with Apple last year to transform itself from a supplier of sapphire furnaces to a manufacturer of sapphire for Apple. The iPad maker provided $578 million in funding for the Arizona plant, and GT Advanced agreed to repay the money over five years, starting in 2015.
However in September when Apple indicated its iPhone 6 would use rival Gorilla Glass instead of sapphire material.
GT Advanced asked the bankruptcy court to end 13 contracts with Apple, including a confidentiality agreement that has forced the bankruptcy to be conducted with unusual secrecy.
At the moment GT Advanced would be liable for $50 million for each violation of the confidentiality agreement.
The Tame Apple Press is fuming that the Chinese phone maker Huawei has managed to steal Apple’s thunder by releasing a phone days before Jobs’ Mob’s traditional Nuremberg style rally.
Normally we do not think of a phone release as being sent as a spoiler to a rival’s event, but it is clear that someone in Reuters does.
Huawei unveiled shedloads of devices meant to showcase the Chinese company’s hardware technology, and Reuters was clearly upset that it was putting the spoilers on Apple September 9 launch.
Dubbing the iPhone 6 as “highly-anticipated” it reminded its gentle readers that Apple was releasing the phone on September 9, even though the story was about Huawei.
Today Huawei markets its devices as comparable to Samsung and Apple products, which are often viewed by consumers as the technological cutting edge, patronised Reuters.
So what has Huawei released? There is a limited edition of its high-end Ascend P7 phone with a sapphire glass display. For those who came in late, Apple was rumoured to be mass-producing devices with sapphire technology and it so far has not happened.
The Ascend Mate Ascend P7 phone7 “phablet” will also be the first Android smartphone on the market with a fingerprint sensor. A fingerprint censor was something that Apple had installed on the iPhone 5s last year, Reuters fumed.
In a statement, the company’s smartphone division chief Richard Yu said the sapphire glass phone demonstrated Huawei’s “advanced craftsmanship” and its ability to “deliver the most advanced technology into the hands of consumers”.
Reuters seemed to think that this particular quote was rubbing it in a bit. The logic being that Huawei is releasing all these products which copy Apple just days before Jobs’ Mob is about to reveal its masterpiece.
That masterpiece, as it turns out, will be likely to be similar to everything else that is already on the market, but will still be plugged to the heavens by journalists who sacrifice their credibly to act as Apple’s unpaid press office.
Sapphire has appointed Micro-P as its latest tier on UK distributor. Micro-P is a leading B2B distributor and Sapphire hopes it will help it broaden channel reach in Britain, create more market demand and generate more revenue, naturally.
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