Columbus Day Highlights: Dell has deal with EMC subject to shop around period; ThingWorx parent PTC buys augmented reality platform from Qualcomm for $65 million for IoT strategy
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Dell to Acquire EMC for $67 Billion in the Largest Ever Tech Takeover (Re/code)
Six takeaways from Dell-EMC deal
(Fortune)
Dell to Buy EMC for $67 Billion: Five Initial Takeaways (Constellation Research)
Silver Lake Explored Sale of Dell’s PC Business Ahead of EMC Deal (Recode)
Why PTC just bought this augmented reality platform for $65 million (Fortune)
Is AWS The Most Important Enterprise Company? (TechCrunch)
The CFO who led Infosys during its toughest period is moving on (Quartz)
Campbell's Ready to Serve Recipe Ideas Through Amazon Echo (Ad Age)
Arris Launches DOCSIS 3.1 Modems (Multichannel News)
Dell to announce EMC deal in morning; report says EMC wants "go shop" clause
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EMC wants 'go shop' provision in Dell deal: Sources (CNBC)
Dell to Reveal EMC Purchase on Monday (Bloomberg)
If Dell and EMC really do merge, expect massive consolidation (The Register)
About me and my period of absence from Philly Tech News
Tom Paine
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So, for those who may have noticed, I was away from the site for a few months - roughly mid-April thruugh mid-August - I guess, though it was actually the end of August before I really started to write again.
And the problem was that I temporarily got very ill (infection) and recovery took a long time. In fact, even while recovering I didn't have much of an appetite for tech news frankly. as so much of it seemed mundane and repetitive at the time. And getting away from it was good for me. I tend to be a bit obsessive and perfectionistic, a "dot every i" type. And while I was getting bogged down in details too minute to be meaningful to some, I was missing the big picture - the shifting of tectonic plates in technology that really make things interestng. And I was not being true to myself or my abilities.
So I decided to start again. And while no change can or will be 100%, I'm confident I've got the background knowledge to see many issues in a deeper, historical, context. And I've tried to make some changes in the way I go about covering things. I don't see an important story as a single article with a beginning and end, but as part of an extended saga with numerous branches and connections to uncover.
I think I will leave to another installment something I was going to write about the events I missed while absent, and other things I experienced during my down time.
Sunday Morning Tech Fix 10/11/2015: Bubble Up? GE IoT & software moves
Tom Paine
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(Where I somehow try to answer questions I haven't been able to answer the rest of the week, at a time when I'm least capable of doing so.)
I'll be periodically posting updates on the so-called 'bubble scare' of 2015, trying to emphasize facts rather than gossip, mostly as it concerns private equity and private tech companies.
As always in a hot market, there are people who want to keep talking it up, and others who want to talk it down to cool off values a bit. And some (few) are straight shooters.
Fortune's Dan Primack, on his visit to Silicon Valley last week, said of the investment class there, speaking primaarily of unicorns (private startups valued at $1 billion or more), "As in the past, they are nearly unanimous in sentiment. The difference now is that their sentiment is fear."
Mattermark's (an emerging business information and research company) Danielle Morrill gets specific and names some unicorns that might be in trouble, including the FanDuel/DraftKings duo that have been spending huge amounts to batter each other's brains out. Some suggest that merging the two is the only solution.
Boston or Wilmington-based SevOne, which has very legitimate value, announced it had closed its latest round at $50 million (the Form D filed before the close indicated up to $60 million) and failed to indicate clearly to anyone whether it had reached unicorn status, which it was on the brink of. Which is probably just as well, since the attention that brings you may be more negative than positive now.
Of course, all of this is unicorn talk, and Philadelphia is neither Silicon Valley or New York. So I will try to focus future installmments on somewhat more micro indicators most of us need to know about.
I'm still trying to decipher all the moving parts involved in GE's enormous announcents about both its Internet of Things platform and its Predix software venture. Such as what it means for PTC's ThingWorx, which has a big role to play at least in IoT (not sure about Predix), and what it means for ERP players and the software industry in general. I think ThingWorx has to be fairly quiet, following the interests of GE and its own corporate parent.
I also noticed that ThingWorx had a presence at AWS re:Invent 2015, where it was a sponsor, though it wasn't prominently mentioned in AWS' releaeses about its new IoT platform, which was built upon the acqusition of anoter IoT platform vendor. But GE says it outsources much of its processing to AWS.
Also, waiting for some clarifcaion on Quentin Clark's new role at SAP. On SAP's website for at least the past few days, he has been listed as Chief Business Officer, rather than CTO (his prior position) though no trace of an external announcement has been found. SAP did post about two other significant appointments last week.
Labels: Dan Primack, DraftKings, fanduel, GE, Mattermark, Predix, Quentin Clark, SAP, SevOne, ThingWorx, Unicorns
Philly Tech People News 10/11/2015: Bentley adds new General Counsel, First Chief Talent Officer
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Michael Kleinemeier to Join the Executive Board of SAP SE (PR Newswire)
SAP Names Lori Mitchell-Keller Executive Vice President and Global General Manager of Consumer Industries (SAP News)
Hank Summy Joins LiquidHub as Partner, Vertical Markets Lead
(Business Wire)
Bentley Systems Appoints David Shaman as General Counsel
In His New Role, Shaman Will Report to Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley (Business Wire)
Florence Zheng Named Bentley Systems’ First Chief Talent Officer
In Her New Role, Zheng Will Report to Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley (Business Wire)
Comcast Ups Soto to Global Chief Information Security Officer (Multichannel News)
OnGolf names vice president of sales
Amanda Koss will work to grow client roster in North America. (Golf Course Industry)
Previously with ThingWorx.
Labels: Peoplenews
Saturday Highlights: Uber pushes for statewide legislative solution; GE Predicts Predix Platform Will Generate $6B In Revenue This Year
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Uber pushes for statewide legalization (The Times Leader)
GE Predicts Predix Platform Will Generate $6B In Revenue This Year (TechCrunch)
BlackBerry CEO wants to sell 5 million phones a year (The Verge)
Amazon Web Services: We Are Coming For Your Cloud (Applause)
AWS re:Invent Wrap 10/9: AWS' new found relationship with Accenture; GE and Capital One endorse AWS
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digibyte: Amazon and Accenture get cozy, watch out everyone else (Diginomica)
AWS jabs at rivals, proclaims cloud the 'new normal' (The Register)
Jaws takes a bite out of AWS Lambda app deployment (Infoworld)
How Amazon wants to dominate in enterprise tech (CNBC)
Amazon takes a swing at Oracle (CNBC)
New Massive-Memory AWS Cloud VMs First IaaS to Use Intel’s Latest Xeon
(Data Center Knowledge)
GE and Capital One endorse AWS at re:Invent (ZDNet)
Amazon Web Services: Staggering numbers: dominant now, but nothing lasts forever (I think)
Tom Paine
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Amazon gave everyone an idea of whst Amazon Web Services'(AWS') numbers might look like for 2015 earlier in the year, but some revised estimates AWS Chief Andy Jassy showed the day before yesterday at AWS re:Invent were stunning.
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| Andy Jassy / Courtesy Amazon |
Revenue for 2015 is now forecasted to be $7.3 billion. AWS now has more than 1 million active customers, and database revenue alone now accounts for more than a $1 billion annual run rate. AWS reported year-over-year revenue growth of 81% and operating margins of 21%, but I believe these were for quarterly results only.
It seems that in less than 10 years of existence as an active business, AWS has fsr surpassed the expectations of the classic disruptor in Clayton Christiansen's "innovative disruptor" model. These are enterprises which typically enter the market with a low cost/low quality (on some attributes) offering and gradually move upmarket to the point where they can attack the core posiions of the market leaders.
(This week I published a comparison of AWS and Salesforce.)
Not quite so fast? Well, I don't now how Amazon did its accounting to arrive at some of these conclusions, but its probably true that the profits margins in particlar reflect a considerable amount of cost sharing / cost savings with the core Amazon business. And its not clear to me for how long the unique advantages of having a dominant position in the market for public cloud computing will last.
Everyone with an understanding of computer industry history knows what happened to the previous 'Age of Timesharing"; it died, due to the minicomputer, cheaper peripherals and companies' desire to have more control over their computing environments. I"m not sure for how long we are locked into the "age of public cloud computing."
Highlights 10/9: Dell offer for EMC reported to be on table; Comcast completes third party Home Automation Integration
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Oracle, SAP, IBM: They're rubbish and charge you billions for Excel, says man
(The Register)
Dell offer for EMC worth at least $30/shr, could be next week — sources (CNBC)
Report: Dell may spin out one of its businesses in an IPO (Fortune)
Dell Said to Offer EMC $33 a Share With VMware Stock (Bloomberg)
As cloud goes mainstream, partner channels mature (Diginomica)
Microsoft is light years ahead of IBM, Oracle, and SAP in the cloud, analyst says
(Business Insider)
Comcast Completes Third Party Home Automation Integration (Cablefax)
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