Tuesday 28 October 2014

Move To Value: IBM Sells Microelectronics To GlobalFoundries

Just last week, I shared about IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s interview at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, where she talked about the corporate strategy of moving towards higher value and differentiation.


For decades, IBM has been synonymous with innovation, cutting-edge technology, and cool research and developments that pushed the boundaries of what computers were capable of doing. Today, the innovation shifts to create breakthrough R&D innovations that will fuel the next era of computing systems.


In line with the delivery of that strategy, IBM has announced that it will pay $1.5 billion to GLOBALFOUNDIRES to take over IBM Microelectronics, its chip-making factories. According to an anonymous source, IBM will in return receive $200 million worth of assets as part of the supply of chips, making the net deal value $1.3 billion. 

IBM will become a major customer for GlobalFoundries, buying Power chips from the manufacturing company for its own mainframe and “scale-out” systems as well as for next-generation storage systems.  IBM will continue to design high-end chips and sell servers and supercomputers.  The deal is expected close in 2015.


Why GlobalFoundries?

GLOBALFOUNDRIES, which is owned by the Mubadala Development Co, the Abu Dhabi government's investment fund, has been collaborating with IBM since their inception in March 2009.  GlobalFoundries was created in 2009 when Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) sold its manufacturing operations to Advanced Technology Investment Co., which is wholly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, a part of the United Arab Emirates.


It is the world’s first full-service semiconductor foundry with a truly global footprint. Launched in March 2009, the company has quickly achieved scale as the second largest foundry in the world, providing a unique combination of advanced technology and manufacturing to more than 160 customers.  With operations in Singapore, Germany and the United States, GLOBALFOUNDRIES is the only foundry that offers the flexibility and security of manufacturing centers spanning three continents.


According to Forbes’ contributor Roger Kay, there are only two foundries and one integrated manufacturer that have the investment capabilities to undertake risk in the semiconductor industry - Taiwanese TSMC, GlobalFoundries and Intel.  The integrated manufacturer Intel fights a lonely battle, doing all its R&D internally, building its own factories, making its own chips, and selling them to customers who build systems.  

In contrast, the industry has Common Platform, an alliance formed with IBM, Samsung, GlobalFoundries who picked up AMD and Singapore’s Chartered Semiconductor and an alliance potentially in British ARM for Qualcomm and Apple.  The alliance has great benefits of reduced cost, technology development and physical risk.  

This means a serious threat to Intel and a bold reason for IBM to pay GlobalFoundries for IBM Micrelectronics just after divesting their x86 business.


Thursday 23 October 2014

3 Steps To Transforming The Economics Of Data

Data is growing at an explosive rate - over 667 exabytes of data will flow through the Internet alone in 2014. What is exabyte - that's 667 quintillion bytes ... 667 with 18 zeros after!! 

This tremendous growth places intense demands on storage systems, especially flash arrays and storage virtualization.  How can clients transform the economics of data? 



 Watch this video: This clear and simple white-boarding video below explains the details. 

New Challenges From Big Data

Companies are facing challenges from data:
1. Growing Data – not just the traditional structured data from traditional, but also the unstructured data from social media
2. Storage inefficiency – companies are buying 24 percent more storage but less than half is used.
3. Storage complexity – More data is generated across departments which is not linked across the organization

Making Sense of Data

How can we make sense of the data and enable the infrastructure to support it?
1. Optimize the storage with real time compression technology – store 5x more data and reduce cost by 60%
2. Maximize performance with flash – business applications can run 3.5x faster
3. Enable new workload with software defined storage – simply storage management and access to get data when needed, easy to deploy cloud, social and mobile platforms.


Data Helps To Stay Ahead Of Competition

With the right infrastructure and technology, business can stay ahead of competition. Each division can access data and use it for competitive advantage:
1. Sales gets insights and are able to run analytics needed to make more profitable business
2. Marketing can run highly effective marketing campaigns with better customer insights
3. Finance can keep cost under lock with more efficient technology

Request for a 1-on-1 Demo

Register for Storage Solution Demo:

For more specific demo related to Cloud & Big Data Analytics:
  • IBM Elastic Storage for Big Data
IBM Software Defined Storage transforms data economics for traditional and new era workloads with new data flexibility, agility, and responsiveness – all delivered through software.  And at the same time, maintaining the required security and reliability that are critical for your data systems. IBM Elastic Storage provides high performance for petabytes of data and billions of file using a mixture of disk and LTO tape under a single global namespace and reduce TCO up to 15x and energy consumption up to 230x. This demo shows automatic data placement policy and movement across disk and tape tiers and still retains data availability for your applications at all times.
  • IBM Storage on Cloud
Enables enterprises to implement a private cloud storage service where users, with a few clicks, can request & receive storage capacity, share files with other users, and administrators can easily monitor & report usage. Simplify work for your storage admin, and reduce SAN & NAS storage provisioning time from days and weeks to minutes!


Wednesday 22 October 2014

Ginni Rometty On Leading An Organization | Fortune Most Powerful Women



IBM CEO Ginni Rometty was interviewed by Fortune Magazine and also on stage at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit on 7th October 2014.


How do you make a 430,000-person organization move fast? Big Blue’s CEO shares her tips.

Here are a few key points that Ginni does as the leader of IBM.

1. Reinforces IBM's move to higher value, 
2. Requests IBM leaders that they make decisions that only they can make as leaders that others cannot make, which should be strategic decisions, 
3. Aligns a large corporation with 1-3-9 values

The three IBMers value are:
1. Dedication to every client's success
2. Innovation that matters, for our company and for the world
3. Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships


Ginni also shares her 3 key management tips on running an organization:
1. Never protect the past, 
2. Never define yourself as a product or from competitions, 
3. Relentless reinvention

Check out this video recording of her sharing at the summit.

IBM Races Ahead With Infiniti Red Bull Racing

IBM Asean GM Kellar Neville urges all to race forward, just like how Infiniti RedBull Racing partners with IBM STG platform computing as Innovation Partner to win in Formula One races!


Check out the video from IBM XCITE Business Leaders Day below

#smartercomputing #redbullracing #infrastructurematters #technology #storage #bigdata #analytics

Al Peasland of Infiniti Red Bull Racing on Innovation Partnership with IBM Platform Computing

Al Peasland (Head of Technical Partnership) from Infiniti Red Bull Racing talks about the continued Innovation Partnership with IBM STG's Platform Computing (Symphony, Elastic Storage & Software Defined Storage).
#smartercomputing #redbullracing #infrastructurematters #technology #storage #bigdata #analytics

Saturday 18 October 2014

Symantec Splits Up. Perhaps 2 Is Better Than 1.


Symantec Splits Up In A Series Of Silicon Valley Heart Breaks.

First,  EBay Inc (EBAY) decided on 30th September to spin off its PayPal payments unit from its market place business. Then Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) announced their split on 6th October into two companies by end of fiscal year 2015.  Barely a week away, Symantec (SYMC) announced its plans on 10th October to separate the company into two with an even more aggressive deadline of end December 2014.




Symantec’s split essentially reverses its $13.5 billion acquisition of storage company VERITAS Software in 2005, and follows the trend of splitting up to focus on faster growing business.

1. WHY SPLIT
The reason given was that the security and storage industries are changing at a fast pace. Both businesses need different strategies, investments and go to market. Symantec said the split will allow each company to:
  • Focus on growth opportunities, research and development  investments, and go-to-market capabilities
  • Reduce operational complexity
  • Enhance strategic flexibility, pursue partnerships, and develop independent mergers and acquisition strategies
  • Set distinct capital allocation policies


2. SECURITY
 
Michael A. Brown will continue as the President and CEO of Symantec focused on security
  • This business will focus on Symantec and Norton end point security and cyber security services. 
  • According to Gartner, Symantec is the market leader at $4.2 billion with 18.7% market share, almost double of the nearest competitor McAfee at 8.7%, followed by IBM at 5.7%.  The market is expected to reach $38 billion by 2018. 
In the security segment, Symantec helped pioneer anti-hacking technologies and its Norton product line, made it one of the best known security vendors.  However, it has increasingly found itself out of step with the security industry. Symantec faces escalating threats from professional hackers who rage battles beyond traditional security protection of viruses and cyberthreats.  The recent data breaches at Target Corp, eBay, Home Depot and JPMorgan show how hackers are finding new sophisticated ways against advanced detection systems.

On top of that, Symantec’s anti-virus software which is attached to PC sales took a beating with the PC slum, as its software was often bundled with the new computers.  Symantec had failed to catch onto the mobile market boom with mobile security. If Symantec wants to be successful in security, it must gear itself towards where more than half of the market spends and the fastest-growing security areas  of services, which includes consulting, outsourcing and implementation. 


3. INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

John Gannon will be General Manager of the new information management business. 
  • This business will focus on backup and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery, storage management and information availability services. 
  • Symantec claims to serve 75% of Fortune 500, estimated at 15% market share. This market is expected to grow to $16 billion by 2018.  Symantec’s appliance products have a 27% year on year growth and its back up products are among the leaders in the segment.
The information management market is likely to grow with new investments in virtualization, software defined data center technologies and cloud solutions.  Increasing data growth requires technology for data management from back up, recovery, access, storage anywhere and everywhere.

4. WHAT'S NEXT
The split up companies are up for grabs from EMC, HP, Cisco, Netapp and private investors.  It would be interesting to watch who will buy which company up, depending on the investors' focus on revenue from the cash cow or growth.