PA's Rite-Aid gives it up to Walgreens, but at nice premium; IBM says SEC looking at its revenue recognition practices, while Weather Channel deal looms

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Can Oracle lead in the cloud? Only if customers follow (PC World)

Oracle talks up a slew of Amazon-like cloud services (Fortune)


Oracle’s moment clouded by the likes of competitor Workday (Fortune: Data Sheet)

Oracle cloud ERP adds manufacturing, supply chain planning (TechTarget)


IBM Says the SEC Is Investigating Accounting for Revenue Recognition (Bloomberg)

IBM nears $2B deal for Weather Channel’s digital assets (MarketWatch)
Comcast's NBC owns about 1/3 of TWC, along with two private equity firms who own the rest. The deal would only include TWC's weather data and various analytical tools, not the broadcasting operation.

You might be happy to hear that Al Roker wasn't included in the deal, but his show was dropped late last month anyway, though he'll continue to make mobile-only video clips in the morning. TWC's owners (Bain and The Blackstone Group, both very smart, have been Comcast's PE partners) have been unhappy with broadcast ops, though I think their own missteps have added to the problems. A major programing overhaul began in September.

The three current owners paid a bit less than $3.5 billion in 2008 to acquire TWC from Landmark Communications, according to a report at the time in the New York Times.


Walgreens says will buy smaller drugstore rival Rite-Aid (Reuters)


Rite Aid purchase shocks East Pennsboro Twp. officials (PennLive)



Dreamit day shows off latest health start-ups (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Fast-growing Center City tech company (RJMetrics) keeps expanding (Philadelphia Business Journal)

UPDATE 1-Sports fantasy trade group creates control board, wants to self-regulate (Reuters)

Comcast CEO: 'Great quarter' across the board'; will test wireless

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Comcast Revenue Jumps 11% to $18.7 Billion (NY Times)


Comcast CEO: 'Great quarter' across the board (CNBC)




Comcast in ‘Test and Learn Mode’ for Wireless (Multichannel News)

Comcast's X1 deployment accelerates to 40K boxes a day, reaches 25% of footprint (FierceCable)

Altice Completes Cablevision Funding (Multichannel News)


Comcast Cable CEO on Altice’s $10B Cablevision Play: ‘Good to See Others Recognize the Value in the Cable Market’ (The Wrap)

Monday Highlights 10/25: Will mobile net strategy built on Comcast Wifi hotspots work?; Ellison takes on everyone at Oracle Open World

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Comcast's Weapon to Take on Wireless Giants: Wi-Fi Hotspots (Bloomberg)

Comcast Board OKs Plan to Streamline Stock Structure (Variety)


Oracle Open World 2015 – Larry Ellison’s first keynote, a mass of unintended contradiction (Diginomica)

Oracle's Ellison Says Cloud Industry Still in Early Days (Bloomberg)

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd's OpenWorld Keynote: Highlights and Analysis (Constellation Research)

Salesforce — not a VC firm — is now the top investor in one of the hottest tech industries (Business Insider)


IBM Announces Six New Watson Ecosystem Partners Building Cognitive Applications (IBM)

IBM: Modernize your business or risk being Uber-ized (Fortune)
Urban Outfitters app one of those featured.


Hoopla launches digital signage solution for employee engagement (Digital Signage Today)

Monday Morning briefs; Ellison dismisses SAP; says AWS is main competittor

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Intel and Oracle push into big data, label IBM and SAP cloud clowns (The Register)
Ellison says AWS top competitor, as OpenWorld opens.
Ellison: The fact so many of SAP's in-memory system run on Oracle shows his competition are feeble.
/How true? Quantify. Maybe he should make use of his 2nd tweet to add specifics.

Burning question for Oracle: What's your response to Amazon? (Fortune)

SAP CIO Engineers the Digital Boardroom (Wall Street Journal: CIO Journal)


New York is investigating if Verizon shortchanged customers with slow Internet (Reuters vis VentureBeat)

phillytechnews bytes

In word processors, Exxon had considerable success, pioneering important innovations in electronic typewriters and word processors through its Qwip, Qyx and Vydec product lines, eventually consolidated into Exxon Office Systems. In 1978, it had a 7% share of the electronic word processing market, although that would shrivel to 4% by 1980. and of course the entire standalone category would soon be made irrelavant by PCs and Macs. Exxon exited the business in 1985.

In microprocessors, it first bought half of Zilog, and lster the entire company in 1980. Zilog's first microprocessor, the Z80, had been a big success. but under Exxon it was mostly downhill, until Exxon exited from the business, also in 1985.

In fact, one of Exxon Office Systems' major production facilities was in Lionville, Chester County. If anyone has memories to share about that plant or Exxon's electronics business, I'd love to hear from you (phillytechnews@gmail.com or @phillytechnews).

Of course, Sunoco (nee Sun Oil) was a bit more successful, starting by selling spare time on its mainframes (which eventually became SunGard Availability), and ultimately building through a series of adroit niche acquisitions SunGard Financial Systems, a dominant player in banking and corporate treasury that just sold for $9.1 billion.

Friday Highlights: What's new in SAP CRM; How much is Amazon's Cloud Business really worth?

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ASUG Briefing: SAP Product Chief Bernd Leukert on SAP’s CRM Strategy (ASUG News)
Talks about how hybris, HANA is being used in new SAP CRM.

Amazon's Cloud Business Is Worth At Least $70 Billion
(ReadWrite)

Here’s how much Amazon paid to acquire Portland’s Elemental Technologies (GeekWire)


Analysts react to rising tide of Charter-Time Warner Cable deal opposition (SNL)

Look For Comcast Upside From Weak AT&T, Verizon Q3 (Investor's Business Daily)

Safeguard Scientifics Announces Third Quarter 2015 Financial Results (PR Newswire)

Athenahealth, Quality Systems Surge On Earnings (Investor's Business Daily)

Phorum Announces 2016 Theme: Systems of Insight (Business Wire)

New from PTN - Earnings Highlights: Amazon Web Services delivers big again; Qlik down 13% after hours on "revenue slippage"; Updated for Unisys & Quality Systems

Tom Paine

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Amazon Web Services, a part of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and a big part of its earnings, once again (now that its broken out) produced extraodinary results for the 3rd quarter, as revenue grew 78% year over year and profit margins reached 25%. I've already written about AWS' successes.

The AWS story reminds me, on a larger scale, of First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman's "market shrinkage theory" (nothing to do with Seinfeld). That's when you use disruptive technology (Kopelman uses Microsoft's Encarta on CD-ROM as an example) to metaphorically blow up a market and shrink it through lower pricing, hopefully growing volume through the reduced pricing and coming out as market leader in a smaller market. (Those are my words, not his.)

Whst AWS is doing to the computer industry is remarkable. I assume its momentum will slow somewhat, or else there are going to be many computer sales people out of work.




Locally based QLIK Technologies reported third quarter total revenue of $141.2 million, an increases of 8% year-over-year and 20% in constant currency (still trying to get my head around that.) The Radnor-based BI vendor produced a GAAP net loss of $16.4 million, up slightly from the year before.

For the full year, it expects revenue of between $613 and $618 million, a 10% to 11% increase over last year, and non-GAAP income from operations of $50 to $53 million. Cash and equivalents were $321.2 million at the end of the quarter.

Barron's Tech Trader Daily reported that Qlik fell 13% after hours. CEO Lars Björk said on the earnings call:

"We continue to experience healthy selling trends as strong customer appreciation for our product into September […] We did experience some slippage of larger desktop particularly in Asia-Pacific […] While we are disappointed to finish at the lower-end of our revenue guidance range, our profit performance in the quarter were strong."

QLIK shares fell another 11% on Friday.



Old-line enterprise systems provider Unisys (perhaps the oldest) saw its revenue drop 16% for the quarter, but its stock went up 15% the next day.

"There was nothing radically new," said Wm Smith & Co. analyst Ned Davis, as quoted by the website CRN about a report which preceded a late-afternoon conference call with analysts. "The company seems to be clearly on track, and that is encouraging."

I'm not quite certain where the optimism originated from, but CEO Peter Altabef seemed to convey a better grasp of Unisys' cash flow needs and indicated that the company would stop competing for some very low margin services business it had gone for in the past.




Quality Systems (NASDAQ:QSII), parent of Horsham-based NextGen Healthcare (once a high-growth star), stock was up nearly 8% at midday Friday after reaching a two-month high of 16 earlier in the day.

Quality Systems beat earnings estimates by 50%, though revenue was up only 4%. Quality also announce the borrd's decision to sell NextGen's Hospital Solutions Division. NextGen is big in mostly outpatient ambulatory care, but built
and acquired pieces of a Hospital division that many said it needed to compete for larger contracts. But it didn't take off, and thus the sale to Virginia-based QuadraMed Affinity Corp. The price wasn't disclosed.

Revenues for the fiscal 2016 second quarter reached $125.4 million, and net income was $8.3 million. Most of Quality's revenue comes from NextGen.