VCE today introduced the VxRack – a rack-based addition to its converged infrastructure and integrated platform vBlock machines, expanding its participation in the CIandIS market from 2 to 4 of the 5 layers (see Figure). Read more »
For our latest disk, nand and storage systems findings click here.
There’s a lot of supplier consolidation going on – especially in established markets where economies of scale in production favour the larger operators. I recently covered Nokia’s acquisition of Alcatel Lucent and Atos’s – of Xerox’s ITO business. The same is definitely true in the hard disk market, where there are only 3 suppliers left – Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba.
The Figure shows quarterly shipments by supplier between 2003 and 2015, underlying the dramatic changes in the vendor landscape.
You’ll want to learn more about who bought whom and how the market is performing now. Read more »
Atos agreed to purchase Xerox’s IT Outsourcing business in the middle of December last year for $1.05B with an additional $50M for certain assets in a deal which should close in the first half of this year. I thought it would be fun to look at the consequences from a business and geographic point of view. Read more »
I had a chat with Giovanni Goduti (Giv), Arcserve’s Northern Europe Sales Director yesterday. It was an opportunity to discover what the new company has managed to achieve since being spun out of CA last August and to hear of how it has managed to speed up the processes at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability (CISL), a organisation providing thought leadership in the area of sustainability. Read more »
The deal announced today will need to be approved by Nokia’s shareholders, take account of work council consultations and pass regulatory approval around the world before completion, which is expected in the first half of next year. A combined company in 2014 would have been in second position in the overall network market (see Figure); however my experience suggests future revenues will be less than the addition of the 2 – as a rule ‘1+1<2’ in merger activities. If merged in 2014 the company would have had around 125k staff and revenues of €36.4B (split roughly equally) and net profits of €4.0B (skewed towards Nokia).
I thought you’d like to think about the implications for both companies and customers. Read more »
It’s been some months since I covered HP’s differentiated approach to Cloud Computing in Europe, so it was great to be able to catch up with Xavier Poisson and his team in Frankfurt last week.
Our Figure, which shows the total revenues of a handful of vendors I think of as ‘cloud native’ demonstrates the imbalance in cloud adoption at the regional level, with the Americas growing far more strongly than EMEA or Asia Pacific. Through working with the European Commission on a number of research projects and setting up Cloud 28+ HP in general – and Xavier in particular – are promoting something different in the EU. I’m sure you’ll want to know what, how and their chances of success. Read more »
BiPolar to CMOS, CISC to RISC, RISC to Itanium, RISC to x86 – the big changes in server processors always promised cheaper machines through disruptive technology. It reminds me of the nursery rhyme:
“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum,
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.”
However the speed of adoption is controlled by the availability of old workloads on the new platforms. In fact sometimes specific workloads stay put – IBM’s z Systems (CMOS processors) still run the vast majority of the world’s transaction processing for instance. Another barrier is the high cost of becoming a server chip manufacturer – these products ship a few million each year rather than the hundreds of million in the phone and PC markets. Read more »
HP has been claiming second position in the enterprise network area for some time: but it hasn’t always been true in my research, where it circulates with Huawei and Alcatel Lucent for the ‘also ran’ spot behind Cisco. It announced this week its intention to purchase Aruba for around $3B, which – if it had already happened – would have secured the second spot. Without it my research puts HP in fourth for the year.
You’ll want to assess why HP is making this move and think about its position post-acquisition. Read more »
I’ve been telling everyone for a long time that IBM’s the leader in Software Defined Storage, particularly for the hard work it’s been doing for so long to address other vendors’ arrays in its SAN Volume Controller (SVC). EMC may be the market leader in storage hardware now (see Figure), but IBM has 700 storage related patents and invented tape and disk drives. It announced its ‘Spectrum’ SDS brand, launched the new Spectrum Acclerate offering and a number of statements of direction in the storage area this week.
You’ll want to know more about what it all means.
I had a chat with Gavin Jolliffe and Peter Grant of Xtravirt ahead of the launch of SONAR this week. You’ll want to learn more about how they aim to help you manage your virtualised environment more effectively. Read more »
ARM Holdings announced its financial results today, which showed a substantial improvement for the quarter and calendar year. I wanted to provide a quick review of where it stands in 2015.Unlike Intel ARM doesn’t make its own chips. It makes money from licensees, which use its designs in a vast variety of devices. Nevertheless its business has climbed steadily over the quarters and years (see Figure). Its revenues were £225.0m for the quarter (up 19% over Q4 2013). Its calendar 2014 revenues were £795.2m – up 11%. Net profits are harder to calculate: but we estimate that it made c. £100m in the quarter and c.£285m in the year. Read more »
Avere continues to make progress in helping customers to address the separate issues of storage performance and capacity through adding features and functions to its edge filers. In its latest announcement it has added a virtual offering running on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud. You’ll want to know more about this innovative company and how it aims to save its customers money.
We took a look at Avere in October 2011, to weigh up the advantages of using its edge filer and in November 2013 to consider its invention of Cloud NAS. I spoke again to CEO Ron Bianchini and VP Marketing Rebecca Thompson recently to see what advances it has made since then. Read more »
I travelled up to London for the UK launch of the z13 mainframe this week. Launching a new mainframe is a very important task for IBM, which provided top rank local and worldwide execs to talk to multiple audiences in London. In the morning we had a chance to discuss the mainframe in-depth and the afternoon attended the launch event for 200 invited customers. Read more »
Cisco held its annual C-Scape Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia (EMEAR) conference in London a couple of weeks ago, where Chris Dedicoat and team outlined its strategy, vision and go to market activities. You’ll want to learn more about how its taking advantage of its strong position in networking to grow its business. Read more »
IBM introduced its new mainframe today and swapped the ‘z’ from back to front to re-brand the family as ‘z Systems’. It’s a good time to look at what was introduced and how the new features and offerings will help IBM’s customers.
Note: This bulletin reflects data as derived by ITCandor based on public IBM financial statements that only quote revenue growth each quarter. Read more »
As I get back into the swing of things this New Year I thought it would be fun to look at some regional issues. In particular areas in which one region or another has a strong or weak association with particular offerings.
The Americas accounted for 42% of the $56.1B spent on servers in the year to the end of September – a much larger ratio than the 34% it represented of the total $6.6T ITC market. They also accounted for 41% of the 15.6M shipments in the year.
The Figure shows unit shipments of servers by quarter. Apart from an understandable decline during the Credit Crunch shipments have continued to grow – they are now double 2003 levels.
Welcome ITCandor’s predictions for 2015. Undaunted from my unsuccessful attempt last year, I’m predicting growth in the market once more. I believe that spending will increase faster in Asia Pacific than other regions, although the dramatic changes in exchange rate will make it difficult to judge. As the big US vendors are offloading and splitting, so the Chinese ones are acquiring new divisions – I expect them to take a big bite out of the international enterprise market in the year. As for countries – Russia will do worst of all. We’re going to return to a more traditional world market as energy-exporting countries no longer call the shots and provide the most fertile technology markets. Many thanks to Pim, Marcel, Keith, Cartsen and John for their comments.
Click here for a pdf copy of this document.
I’m attending HP Discover here in Barcelona for a couple days as a blogger and attending a number of coffee talks. I thought you’d be interested in some of the topics.
I went up to London to hear a very interesting Healthcare presentation hosted by HP about the transformation and migration of a hospital’s IT system. You’ll want to learn more about the benefits and advantages as well as the partnerships that made it practical. Read more »
These are the presentation slides from my presentation to DataCenterDynamics Converged 2014 conference in the UK, based on a research paper commissioned by them.