It seems that now might not be a good time to invest in IT firms with both IBM and Intel reporting drops – Intel saw second quarter profits down 29% from last year at $2bn, and IBM’s earnings fell by 17% to $3.23bn.
When you look at revenues, you’ll see Intel’s fell by 5% and IBM’s by 3%. You’ll remember that last quarter IBM cut a large number of jobs (over 3,000) and started to make a big deal of its Big Data strategy and cloud computing. Intel is really being hit because of the drop in PC sales as people migrate to smart phones and tablets – and around 95% of those use ARM chips.
IBM’s sales were down 3.3 per cent to $24.92bn, and IBM reported adjusted second-quarter earnings of $32.91 a share. It also raised its guidance for the year and said it expects at least $16.90 a share in adjusted earnings. IBM saw zero revenue growth in its “growth markets”, the so-called emerging markets. Its earnings per share were reasonable and that was due to the earlier cost-cutting measures. IBM announced $1 billion write-off for downsizing. Services sales dropped by 5%, hardware sales dropped by 12%, but software revenue went up by 4%. Intel’s shares fell 3.7% to $23.23 after the company cut its forecast for the year.
It was also bad news for eBay, whose shares fell 6.4% to $53.70 after announcing their second-quarter results.
SAP AG, one of the biggest makers of business-management software, experienced its first software-sales decline in more than three years. Software licences fell around 3% to 982 million euros. Its software sales in Asia dropped by 9%.
Back in May, PC vendor, Dell, reported a 79% drop in net profit, which they attributed to a crash in PC sales as consumers migrate to smartphones and tablets. Dell’s net profit fell to $130m on revenue down 2% to $14bn. Michael Dell is still waiting for a vote on his proposal to buy out the company. He plans to transform the company from a PC vendor to one pushing higher-margin software and services to enterprises. He’s apparently got a $2bn loan from Microsoft.
But it’s not all doom and gloom, doing well is Sandisk, who reported a 43% jump in second-quarter revenue. Yahoo! posted an attributable net income of $331.15m for the second-quarter, which is an increase of 46%, which it attributes to its investment in Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba and product overhauls. However, its revenues declined by 7% to $1.13bn and that was attributed to a decrease in advertising revenues and Web traffic.
Interestingly, in the USA, tech advertising has increased by 30% with Microsoft, now being the biggest spender. Its spending on advertising has gone up 200% in an attempt to drum up business for Windows 8 and its Surface tablet. It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the company’s bottom line.
So, the picture isn’t all bad for IT companies, and some companies are trying to do something about it, and perhaps dividends are OK, but, taken together, the figures don’t make the happiest of reading for the IT industry as a whole.
Showing posts with label Dell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dell. Show all posts
Sunday, 21 July 2013
Sunday, 8 July 2012
Higgs boson exists
This week saw scientists at CERN pretty much claim to have found a new subatomic particle – the boson predicted half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. The discovery allows physics to work because particles can now have mass. But, of course, it opens the door to lots of other questions such as why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe.
So, in a week when scientists and non-scientists have been talking about bosons and fermions, and quarks and leptons, IBM has been pushing the envelope with an Augmented Reality (AR) app for shoppers owning a smartphone! The app, they claim, can automatically deliver personalized coupons, offers, customer reviews, and hidden product details to the potential customer.
The app doesn’t rely on barcodes or RFID tags to recognize products, but it does need a camera. The app compares a captured image with those in its database. If the product packaging matches the image-processing algorithm, it will automatically overlay digital details of the product on the image.
These details could include nutritional information, price, reviews, and discounts. And, you can opt into a social networking feature that delivers comments or reviews from friends and family about that product.
While a shopping AR app may, in many ways, seem trivial, it is opening the door for a whole new world of living. AR could be as revolutionary as the Internet. Think about it – you visit a new city, say Paris, for the first time, and on your phone screen comes information about every building and statue that the guide books know about. Or, perhaps, your car won’t start, so you point your camera at the engine and it identifies where the oil should go, or the brake fluid, etc. Not that I’d trust these ones, but an inexperienced surgeon operating on a patient could see AR information, or someone who’d never flown a plane before but needs to land it successfully (come on, you’ve seen it often enough in the movies and on TV).
Other news this week is that Dell is continuing to reposition itself with its $2.4 billion bid for Quest Software. With the growth in sales of tablet devices and the drop in sales of desktop and laptop PCs, as well as the growth in cloud computing, Dell is moving away from being just the hardware supplier that we’ve known for so long.
Quest is probably best known for its TOAD product, which is used to build, manage, and maintain databases. But Quest also has a range of other products including Shareplex, Lightspeed, Netvault, and Foglight. Dell apparently plans to make Quest, which has 1,300 software developers, the core of its software group, which it expects to grow into a $2 billion-a-year business over the next three years.
Dell’s other recent acquisitions include Wyse Technology, Make Technologies, Clerity Solutions, AppAssure, SonicWALL, and Force10 Networks.
And finally, why not become part of the IBM System z poster? Go to http://part-of-z.de/, complete the form and upload your photo. You then have a chance of being one of the 150 faces that will appear on the poster. But if you’re not one of the chosen faces, you’ll still receive a printed poster afterwards. You’ve got until 31 July to send in your picture.
So, in a week when scientists and non-scientists have been talking about bosons and fermions, and quarks and leptons, IBM has been pushing the envelope with an Augmented Reality (AR) app for shoppers owning a smartphone! The app, they claim, can automatically deliver personalized coupons, offers, customer reviews, and hidden product details to the potential customer.
The app doesn’t rely on barcodes or RFID tags to recognize products, but it does need a camera. The app compares a captured image with those in its database. If the product packaging matches the image-processing algorithm, it will automatically overlay digital details of the product on the image.
These details could include nutritional information, price, reviews, and discounts. And, you can opt into a social networking feature that delivers comments or reviews from friends and family about that product.
While a shopping AR app may, in many ways, seem trivial, it is opening the door for a whole new world of living. AR could be as revolutionary as the Internet. Think about it – you visit a new city, say Paris, for the first time, and on your phone screen comes information about every building and statue that the guide books know about. Or, perhaps, your car won’t start, so you point your camera at the engine and it identifies where the oil should go, or the brake fluid, etc. Not that I’d trust these ones, but an inexperienced surgeon operating on a patient could see AR information, or someone who’d never flown a plane before but needs to land it successfully (come on, you’ve seen it often enough in the movies and on TV).
Other news this week is that Dell is continuing to reposition itself with its $2.4 billion bid for Quest Software. With the growth in sales of tablet devices and the drop in sales of desktop and laptop PCs, as well as the growth in cloud computing, Dell is moving away from being just the hardware supplier that we’ve known for so long.
Quest is probably best known for its TOAD product, which is used to build, manage, and maintain databases. But Quest also has a range of other products including Shareplex, Lightspeed, Netvault, and Foglight. Dell apparently plans to make Quest, which has 1,300 software developers, the core of its software group, which it expects to grow into a $2 billion-a-year business over the next three years.
Dell’s other recent acquisitions include Wyse Technology, Make Technologies, Clerity Solutions, AppAssure, SonicWALL, and Force10 Networks.
And finally, why not become part of the IBM System z poster? Go to http://part-of-z.de/, complete the form and upload your photo. You then have a chance of being one of the 150 faces that will appear on the poster. But if you’re not one of the chosen faces, you’ll still receive a printed poster afterwards. You’ve got until 31 July to send in your picture.
Sunday, 24 June 2012
On the surface
Do we need another tablet device? Hasn’t everyone who needs one got an iPad or an Android tablet? What was Microsoft thinking when it announced its own manufactured Surface tablet device this week?
Microsoft has a mixed history with hardware – you perhaps tend to forget about things like the Microsoft mouse, the keyboard, the IntelliMouse, etc, which you see around and were successes. And we all know about the ubiquitous Xbox and Kinect, but conversation after conversation seems to remind us about the Zune mp3 player and the Kin smartphone (which went on sale and disappeared from market in an amazingly short period of time) that weren’t such great successes.
So what exactly has Microsoft announced? Well, we know that the Surface tablet will come in two versions — one that runs on ARM and one on Intel chips. There will be two versions of Windows 8 – one for each chip. We also know that it comes with a USB port and includes a snap-on cover that acts as a keyboard and there’s a kickstand. You can see a picture of it here. It’s 9.3 millimetres thick and it weighs under 1.5 pounds (if I’m allowed to mix Imperial and metric units), which is a bit thinner and a bit heavier than the iPad. The screen size is slightly larger and (like Android devices) uses the more preferable 16:9 aspect ratio – iPad’s use a 4:3 ratio (like old-style TVs). We also know the Windows 8 Pro version on Intel will be slightly thicker and will have a stylus to allow users to make handwritten notes on documents!
That’s about all the detail – the rest is a bit vague, such as delivery dates, prices, etc. If the ARM version is the same price as an Android tablet, and offers much the same capability, what’s the selling point? If it offered Office bundled in, that might work – certainly in a business sense.
If the Intel version actually ran applications rather than cut-down apps – and bear in mind Apple has scaled down applications to add to the apps available with each iPad announcement – then Microsoft will have a winner. The pricing problem is that a laptop could be cheaper than the new Surface tablet. Therefore the tablet has to score points in terms of thinness in order to justify the extra money spent on it. So how much RAM are you going to be able to have? What can you actually run on it? These, along with price, are the questions that businesses are going to ask.
With the soaring sales of tablet devices, Microsoft needs to be in this space. But the fact they are making their own hardware (like Apple) must come as a blow to other hardware companies, like Dell and HP, that build Windows-based tablets.
To be honest, I’d really like an ultra-thin tablet-like PC that I could do real work on using high-end applications (such as Adobe’s Creative Suite). One that I could carry around like a book, that didn’t need its own bag and other baggage. One with battery life that lasts for a long meeting – at least three hours – while I’m doing more than just browsing minutes in Word and forecasts in Excel.
One day!
One a completely different topic, you’ll be interested to know that Mozilla (the Firefox browser people) have announced Thimble, which is part of the Webmaker project. Thimble is designed to help people write and edit basic HTML and CSS in a Web-based code editor. You can start from scratch or pick a project. Like Dreamweaver, you get instant previews. There’s a code editor on the left and your preview on the right. You can then publish your site to the Web in a Webmaker domain with just one click. Have a go at https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor.
Microsoft has a mixed history with hardware – you perhaps tend to forget about things like the Microsoft mouse, the keyboard, the IntelliMouse, etc, which you see around and were successes. And we all know about the ubiquitous Xbox and Kinect, but conversation after conversation seems to remind us about the Zune mp3 player and the Kin smartphone (which went on sale and disappeared from market in an amazingly short period of time) that weren’t such great successes.
So what exactly has Microsoft announced? Well, we know that the Surface tablet will come in two versions — one that runs on ARM and one on Intel chips. There will be two versions of Windows 8 – one for each chip. We also know that it comes with a USB port and includes a snap-on cover that acts as a keyboard and there’s a kickstand. You can see a picture of it here. It’s 9.3 millimetres thick and it weighs under 1.5 pounds (if I’m allowed to mix Imperial and metric units), which is a bit thinner and a bit heavier than the iPad. The screen size is slightly larger and (like Android devices) uses the more preferable 16:9 aspect ratio – iPad’s use a 4:3 ratio (like old-style TVs). We also know the Windows 8 Pro version on Intel will be slightly thicker and will have a stylus to allow users to make handwritten notes on documents!
That’s about all the detail – the rest is a bit vague, such as delivery dates, prices, etc. If the ARM version is the same price as an Android tablet, and offers much the same capability, what’s the selling point? If it offered Office bundled in, that might work – certainly in a business sense.
If the Intel version actually ran applications rather than cut-down apps – and bear in mind Apple has scaled down applications to add to the apps available with each iPad announcement – then Microsoft will have a winner. The pricing problem is that a laptop could be cheaper than the new Surface tablet. Therefore the tablet has to score points in terms of thinness in order to justify the extra money spent on it. So how much RAM are you going to be able to have? What can you actually run on it? These, along with price, are the questions that businesses are going to ask.
With the soaring sales of tablet devices, Microsoft needs to be in this space. But the fact they are making their own hardware (like Apple) must come as a blow to other hardware companies, like Dell and HP, that build Windows-based tablets.
To be honest, I’d really like an ultra-thin tablet-like PC that I could do real work on using high-end applications (such as Adobe’s Creative Suite). One that I could carry around like a book, that didn’t need its own bag and other baggage. One with battery life that lasts for a long meeting – at least three hours – while I’m doing more than just browsing minutes in Word and forecasts in Excel.
One day!
One a completely different topic, you’ll be interested to know that Mozilla (the Firefox browser people) have announced Thimble, which is part of the Webmaker project. Thimble is designed to help people write and edit basic HTML and CSS in a Web-based code editor. You can start from scratch or pick a project. Like Dreamweaver, you get instant previews. There’s a code editor on the left and your preview on the right. You can then publish your site to the Web in a Webmaker domain with just one click. Have a go at https://thimble.webmaker.org/en-US/editor.
Sunday, 27 May 2012
Who'll buy BMC?
With the Facebook share launch turning into a bit of a fiasco, high tech company shares may not look like such a good deal at the moment. But taking the long view, is BMC Software ripe for picking?
As you know, BMC sells software that runs on mainframes. And, like everyone else, its moving into the cloud space. And it would be a pretty big organization for anyone to acquire. Bloomberg (the business and financial experts) reckon that it would be the eighth-largest US software acquisition on record. Bloomberg also suggest that the last similar-sized acquisition occurred before the 2008 crash.
If you were going to spend your money, perhaps a better choice would be to snap up a suffering Hewlett Packard, who this week layed off 27,000 people, and who’s profits slid 31 percent.
But for many investors, getting a foothold in the cloud space provides more opportunities going forward than buying into current technologies where sales are perhaps more stagnant.
So, who might be discussing a takeover of BMC? We can discount HP. But whatabout Dell? This year, Dell has acquired Make Technologies (a provider of application modernization software and services), Clerity Solutions (a provider of application modernization and legacy system re-hosting solutions and software), Wyse Technology (a leader in thin client computing devices and software), SonicWALL (a provider of network security, content security, Web and e-mail security, secure remote access, and business continuity solutions), and AppAssure (who do back-up software). Dell definitely appears to be moving into the enterprise software space – while still retaining its hardware base.
Cisco has also been acquisitive this year, getting its hands on Truviso (who supply scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software), ClearAccess (suppliers of TR-069-based software to service providers for the provisioning and management of residential and mobile devices), NDS Group (a provider of video software and content security solutions that enable service providers and media companies to securely deliver and monetize new video entertainment experiences), and Lightwire (who develop advanced optical interconnect technology for high-speed networking applications).
And then there’s always Oracle, who, this year, have acquired ClearTrial (a cloud-based clinical trial operations and analytics product) and Taleo (talent management software). They might feel that acquiring BMC protects them from rivals.
Or maybe someone will buy BMC and sell off the mainframe software that we’re familiar with and retain and develop the cloud stuff as a way of making money in the future.
SAP has only recently spent $4.3 billion on cloud computing firm Ariba. Perhaps they would like to get their hands on that part of BMC.
It will be interesting to see whether organizations are willing to risk such large sums of money that an acquisition of BMC Technologies would require in these straightened times. Or maybe asset stripping is the only way forward?
We’ll be keeping an eye on the news.
As you know, BMC sells software that runs on mainframes. And, like everyone else, its moving into the cloud space. And it would be a pretty big organization for anyone to acquire. Bloomberg (the business and financial experts) reckon that it would be the eighth-largest US software acquisition on record. Bloomberg also suggest that the last similar-sized acquisition occurred before the 2008 crash.
If you were going to spend your money, perhaps a better choice would be to snap up a suffering Hewlett Packard, who this week layed off 27,000 people, and who’s profits slid 31 percent.
But for many investors, getting a foothold in the cloud space provides more opportunities going forward than buying into current technologies where sales are perhaps more stagnant.
So, who might be discussing a takeover of BMC? We can discount HP. But whatabout Dell? This year, Dell has acquired Make Technologies (a provider of application modernization software and services), Clerity Solutions (a provider of application modernization and legacy system re-hosting solutions and software), Wyse Technology (a leader in thin client computing devices and software), SonicWALL (a provider of network security, content security, Web and e-mail security, secure remote access, and business continuity solutions), and AppAssure (who do back-up software). Dell definitely appears to be moving into the enterprise software space – while still retaining its hardware base.
Cisco has also been acquisitive this year, getting its hands on Truviso (who supply scalable, real-time network data analysis and reporting software), ClearAccess (suppliers of TR-069-based software to service providers for the provisioning and management of residential and mobile devices), NDS Group (a provider of video software and content security solutions that enable service providers and media companies to securely deliver and monetize new video entertainment experiences), and Lightwire (who develop advanced optical interconnect technology for high-speed networking applications).
And then there’s always Oracle, who, this year, have acquired ClearTrial (a cloud-based clinical trial operations and analytics product) and Taleo (talent management software). They might feel that acquiring BMC protects them from rivals.
Or maybe someone will buy BMC and sell off the mainframe software that we’re familiar with and retain and develop the cloud stuff as a way of making money in the future.
SAP has only recently spent $4.3 billion on cloud computing firm Ariba. Perhaps they would like to get their hands on that part of BMC.
It will be interesting to see whether organizations are willing to risk such large sums of money that an acquisition of BMC Technologies would require in these straightened times. Or maybe asset stripping is the only way forward?
We’ll be keeping an eye on the news.
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