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Is IBM Going After HP?
IBM has announced a unified branding for its commerce cloud based enterprise products and services with a presentation at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Tampa, Florida.
Hot on the heels of HP, which unified its cloud offerings under the Helion brand last week, IBM Experienceone is designed to allow companies to improve engagement with their customers by leveraging big data through the cloud.
Deployment comes from a unified offer of consulting services, software and infrastructure from IBM subsidary Softlayer, which can be used to gather data, mine analytics and improve customer commerce via a mixture of traditional and cloud services.
IBM has already committed 1,000 new employees for its IBM Interactive Experience who will staff 10 “IBM Interactive Experience Labs” that are being set up to help customers understand the rules of engagement and hopefully increase their level of customer engagement.
IBM GM of Industry Cloud Solution Craig Hayman said, “IBM Experienceone provides a secure and simplified portfolio – including innovation from more than 1,200 partners – to help clients design and deliver more valuable customer engagements. With cloud, on premise and hybrid options, IBM Experienceone quickly scales to engage every customer in the moment while protecting their privacy.”
The IBM Experienceone brand is a coming together of many acquisitions that IBM has made in the field over recent years, including Sterling Commerce, Tealeaf, Coremetrics, Unica, Demandtec, Xtify and Silverpop. The only obvious omission from the top to tail offer is a specific CRM database, however IBM Experienceone is compatible with most of the leading solutions, including those of its arch rivals. This leads to the question, could a CRM be next on the company’s shopping list?
As well as on desktop and server equipment, Experienceone analytics will also be available through apps for iOS and Android.
Is A Shield Tablet Forthcoming?
May 29, 2014 by admin
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We got some fresh information about Nvidia’s Tegra plans. The company is working on a new tablet based on the Tegra K1 processor. This is nothing new and could be easily predicted, but this time we have confirmation that the project is known as Shield tablet.
Alongside the Tegra K1, or TK1 as Nvidia refers to this chip internally, you can bet that there is 5GHz WiFi support in the latest tablet. Last time we heard talk of a Tegra Note 7 successor we were told that there would be an 8-inch version, but we cannot confirm whether or not the Shield tablet is an 8-incher.
Nvidia Mocha tablet getting Shield branding?
We already wrote about the Mocha 8-inch tablet powered by a 2.1GHz TK1 chip, 2GB of memory, 7.9-inch 2048×1536 resolution screen and 16GB of storage. We can only hope that this will be the specification of Shield tablet. In case you didn’t notice, the 7.9-inch 2048×1536 resolution is what you get from Apple in the iPad mini and it is no coincidence that Nvidia chose this form factor and this resolution. If it works for Apple it should work for Nvidia, too.
Since Nvidia managed to excite quite a few fans with the Shield gaming console, it was just a matter of time before it offered a Shield tablet. We know that Tegra Note 7 was lacking 5GHz WiFi, something that Nvidia requires for Gamestream technology and with the new Shield tablet this problem has been addressed.
A Shield tablet with Gamestream support will give Nvidia what it needs – clear differentiation from hundreds of Android tablets available today. This was not the case with the Tegra Note 7, although it ships with a neat stylus which is not common on affordable Android tablets.
Second screen for gamers
With a Shield tablet Nvidia can target a niche audience that would like the ability to play some PC games via Gamestream on their beloved tablet. People complained about the resolution of the Tegra Note 7 and with the larger version Nvidia will definitely increase the resolution to 1080p or more. However, a 1920×1080 or 2048×1535 tablet won’t cost $199, it will be a bit pricier than the Tegra Note 7. It will be based on a more elaborate SoC, it needs more RAM, more storage and of course a pricier screen.
The LG G Pad 8.3 Google Play Edition tablet is currently selling for $349 which can give you an idea of the price. Nvidia’s 8-inch gaming specced tablet will probably cost between $299 and $349. Apple charges $399 for the iPad Mini with Retina. We can only speculate, but this is just something that makes sense to us considering to approximate BOM and Nvidia’s traditional margin in this space.
We expect to see the new Shield tablet in the next few months, probably around Google I/O if not at Google I/O which takes place in the last week of June.
IBM Goes BlueMix
IBM has put together a vast array of hosted cloud services, and now it has a single location to offer them for sale.
At IBM Cloud online marketplace, that went live on Monday, enterprises can find the full range of IBM’s offerings behind a single gateway.
“So many of our customers want to build new cloud-based, front-end systems, but they want to tie them into their back-end infrastructure. We’re delivering a whole set of integration components and control services to do the connection, and monitor and control what is taking place,” said Steve Mills, IBM senior vice president and group executive for software and systems.
The marketplace has more than 100 hosted IBM applications, as well as middleware components from IBM’s Bluemix platform as a service (PaaS). It also serves as a portal to IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and houses a collection of services from IBM partners.
“It’s an open platform. It supports all the popular application development tools and structures. So it’s not uniquely IBM. There’s a lot of open source and partners,” Mills said. In addition to IBM’s own offerings, other services will be offered on the site by SendGrid, Zend, Redis Labs and other IBM partners.
IBM is banking heavily on the cloud. The company’s revenue has been declining lately, due in part to sagging hardware sales. The cloud is likely to be a good place to look for more money: Gartner expects 80 percent of organizations to use cloud services in some form by the end of 2014.
Although IBM got a late start in the cloud, at least compared with rivals Amazon and Microsoft, it’s aggressively repositioning itself as a one-stop cloud services company. It generated $4.4 billion in cloud-related revenue in 2013 and has made a number of additional investments in the area as well.
In January, the company announced it would invest $1.2 billion into expanding its SoftLayer cloud service, which it acquired last year for $2 billion.
It is also investing $1 billion in the effort to adapt its middleware software as cloud services, part of the Bluemix offering.
The new online marketplace ties together a number of these initiatives from IBM within a single portal. It can be accessed from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, and it can customize the service offerings based on the user’s needs.
Can Qualcomm Move Forward?
Qualcomm has posted its smallest quarterly revenue increase since 2010, which saw its share price plummeting five percent in after hours trading.
Qualcomm reported its second quarter earnings on Wednesday for the three months to 30 March, and its revenue rose to $6.37bn during the period, up four percent from a year ago, with net profit up five percent to $1.97bn.
However, that was the smallest year over year percentage increase since the June quarter of 2010, when revenue declined by two percent, and was far lower than the quarterly growth rates of over 20 percent that Qualcomm investors have seen previously.
“We delivered another solid quarter, driven by demand for our leading multimode 3G/LTE chipset solutions and record licensing revenues,” said Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf in the earnings report, not mentioning that earnings reflected a much lower increase than seen in recent quarters.
“Looking forward, we are pleased to be raising our earnings per share guidance for the fiscal year. We continue to see increasing demand for our industry-leading chipsets and strong growth in calendar year 2014 of 3G/4G smartphones around the world.”
Qualcomm also forecast sales of between $6.2bn and $6.8bn for the April to June quarter, with the low end of that estimate representing a decline of one percent from a year ago.
It’s probable that while growing smartphone penetration in emerging markets is helping to keep the firm’s unit sales high, it’s also having an negative effect on Qualcomm’s average selling price (ASP) levels of mobile chipsets and devices.
Following Qualcomm’s earnings report, analysts said that the dip in revenue was attributable to a decline in sales in China as the country’s biggest network, China Mobile, prepares to launch a faster network with 4G, or LTE, technology, and customers are anticipating the launch before buying new smartphones.
Qualcomm now expects to make a profit of between $5 and $5.25 per share, five cents above its earlier projection, the firm said.
Can AMD Grow
AMD posted some rather encouraging Q1 numbers last night, but slow PC sales are still hurting the company, along with the rest of the sector.
When asked about the PC market slump, AMD CEO Rory Read confirmed that the PC market was down sequentially 7 percent. This was a bit better than the company predicted, as the original forecast was that the PC market would decline 7 to 10 percent.
Rory pointed out that AMD can grow in the PC market as there is a lot of ground that can be taken from the competition. The commercial market did better than expected and Rory claims that AMD’s diversification strategy is taking off. AMD is trying to win market share in desktop and commercial segments, hence AMD sees an opportunity to grown PC revenue in the coming quarters. Rory also expects that tablets will continue to cannibalize the PC market. This is not going to change soon.
Kaveri and Kabini will definitely help this effort as both are solid parts priced quite aggressively. Kabini is also available in AMD’s new AM1 platform and we believe it is an interesting concept with plenty of mass market potential. Desktop and Notebook ASPs are flat which is something that the financial community really appreciated. It would not be so unusual that average selling prices were down since the global PC market was down.
Kaveri did well in the desktop high-end market in Q1 2014 and there will be some interesting announcements in the mobile market in Q2 2014 and beyond.
Dell RedHat Join Forces
The Dell Red Hat Cloud solution, a co-engineered, enterprise grade private cloud, was unveiled at the Red Hat Summit on Thursday.
The Openstack-based service also includes an extension of the Red Hat partnership into the Dell Openshift Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Linux Container products.
Dell and Redhat said their cloud partnership is intended to “address enterprise customer demand for more flexible, elastic and dynamic IT services to support and host non-business critical applications”.
The integration of Openshift with Redhat Linux is a move towards container enhancements from Redhat’s Docker platform, which the companies said will enable a write-once culture, making programs portable across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat said, “Cloud innovation is happening first in open source, and what we’re seeing from global customers is growing demand for open hybrid cloud solutions that meet a wide variety of requirements.”
Sam Greenblatt, VP of Enterprise Solutions Group Technology Strategy at Dell, added, “Dell is a long-time supporter of Openstack and this important extension of our commitment to the community now will include work for Openshift and Docker. We are building on our long history with open source and will apply that expertise to our new cloud solutions and co-engineering work with Red Hat.”
Dell Red Hat Cloud Solutions are available from today, with support for platform architects available from Dell Cloud Services.
Earlier this week, Red Hat announced Atomic Host, a new fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) specifically tailored for containers. Last year, the company broke bad with its Fedora Linux distribution, codenamed Heisenbug.
Source
Microsoft Updates Office Online
April 28, 2014 by admin
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Microsoft is updating its Web-based Office Online suite, closing the features gap with the main Office 365 and Office 2013 suites installed on users’ devices.
“We know you want features that allow you to move as seamlessly as possible between Office Online and the desktop,” wrote Kaberi Chowdhury, an Office Online technical product manager, in a blog post Monday.
Improvements to Excel Online include the ability to insert new comments, edit and delete existing comments, and properly open and edit spreadsheets that contain Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.
Meanwhile, Word Online has a new “pane” where users can see all comments in a document, and reply to them or mark them as completed. It also has a refined lists feature that is better able to recognize whether users are continuing a list or starting one. In addition, footnotes and end notes can now be added more conveniently inline.
PowerPoint Online has a revamped text editor that offers a layout view that more closely resembles the look of finished slides, according to Microsoft. It also has improved performance and video functionality, including the ability to play back embedded YouTube videos.
For users of OneNote Online, Microsoft is now adding the ability to print out the notes they’ve created with the application.
Microsoft is also making Word Online, PowerPoint Online and OneNote Online available via Google’s Chrome Web Store so that Chrome browser users can add them to their Chrome App launcher. Excel Online will be added later.
The improvements in Office Online will be rolled out to users this week, starting Monday.
Office Online, which used to be called Office Web Apps, competes directly against Google Docs and other browser-based office productivity suites. It’s meant to offer users a free, lightweight, Web-based version of these four applications if they don’t have the desktop editions on the device they’re using at that moment.
Oracle Updates NoSQL
Oracle has announced the availability of the latest edition of its NoSQL datatabase.
NoSQL is Oracle’s distributed key-value database. Now in it’s third version, the enhancements this time are heavily centred around security and business continuity.
Oracle NoSQL 3.0 features improvements in security with cluster-wide password based user authentication and integration with Oracle Wallet. Session level Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption and network port restriction are also included.
For disaster recovery and prevention, there’s automatic fail-over to metro-area secondary data centres, while secondary server zones can be used to offload read-only workloads to take the pressure off primary servers under stress.
For developers, there is added support for tabular data models that Oracle claims will simplify application design and improve integration with SQL based applications, while secondary indexing improves query performance.
“Oracle NoSQL 3.0 helps organisations fill the gap in skills, security and performance by delivering […] enterprise-class NoSQL database that empowers database developers and DBAs to easily, intuitively and securely build and deploy next generation applications,” said Oracle’s EVP of Database Server Technologies, Andrew Mendelsohn.
It’s already been a big week for the SQL community with NoSQL arriving on MariaDB for the first time, courtesy of a tie-up between SkySQL, Google and IBM on Tuesday, while yesterday Fusion-IO announced the use of Non-volatile memory (NVM) compression in MySQL to increase the capacity of SSD storage.
Both the community and enterprise versions of Oracle NoSQL Database 3.0 are available for download now from the Oracle Technology Network.
Dell Unveils Laptop/Tablet Hybrid
Dell unveiled a new 11.6-in. screen rugged laptop that has literally has a twist — the screen can rotate 180 degrees to turn the device into a tablet.
At first, the Latitude 12 looks like a laptop. But within the display panel, the screen rotates 180 degrees and the laptop turns into a tablet once placed on the keyboard.
The new Latitude 12 laptop is part of a new Rugged Extreme line of laptops, which also includes the Rugged Extreme 14. The new laptops are robust and can withstand six-foot drops and remain protected from extreme weather conditions.
The laptops have hard covers that add a layer of protection, but also make the products heavy. The Latitude 12 Rugged Extreme weighs 2.72 kilograms with a four-cell battery, while the 14-in. counterpart weighs 3.54 kilograms with a six-cell battery and no optical drive.
The laptops can also withstand solar radiation, “explosive atmosphere” and weather ranging from -20 degrees to 145 degrees Fahrenheit (-29 degrees to 63 degrees Celsius), according to specifications provided by Dell. The products are targeted at field workers like emergency responders and the military, and will compete against Toughbook rugged laptops from Panasonic.
The Latitude 12 rugged laptop has a starting price of $3,649, while the Latitude 14 begins at $3,499. The laptops will ship next month.
The hybrid design in Latitude 12 has been borrowed from the company’s XPS 12 Ultrabook Touch, which has a 12.5-inch screen that can similarly flip to turn the laptop into a tablet. The resistive touch screens on both laptops can show images at a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels.
The laptops will have storage options of up to 512GB solid-state drives. Users can configure the laptop with Intel’s latest fourth-generation Core processorscode-named Haswell. The laptops will come with either Windows 8.1 or 7, or Ubuntu Linux operating systems.
Other features include support for up to 16GB of DRAM, Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet through a connector. The laptop also has USB 3.0, USB 2.0, VGA and HDMI ports. Mobile broadband and docking are available as options.
Can DirectX-12 Give Mobile A Boot?
Microsoft announced DirectX 12 just a few days ago and for the first time Redmond’s API is relevant beyond the PC space. Some DirectX 12 tech will end up in phones and of course Windows tablets.
Qualcomm likes the idea, along with Nvidia. Qualcomm published an blog post on the potential impact of DirectX 12 on the mobile industry and the takeaway is very positive indeed.
DirectX 12 equals less overhead, more battery life
Qualcomm says it has worked closely with Microsoft to optimise “Windows mobile operating systems” and make the most of Adreno graphics. The chipmaker points out that current Snapdragon chipsets already support DirectX 9.3 and DirectX 11. However, the transition to DirectX 12 will make a huge difference.
“DirectX 12 will turbocharge gaming on Snapdragon enabled devices in many ways. Just a few years ago, our Snapdragon processors featured one CPU core, now most Snapdragon processors offer four. The new libraries and API’s in DirectX 12 make more efficient use of these multiple cores to deliver better performance,” Qualcomm said.
DirectX 12 will also allow the GPU to be used more efficiently, delivering superior performance per watt.
“That means games will look better and deliver longer gameplay longer on a single charge,” Qualcomm’s gaming and graphics director Jim Merrick added.
What about eye candy?
Any improvement in efficiency also tends to have a positive effect on overall quality. Developers can get more out of existing hardware, they will have more resources at their disposal, simple as that.
Qualcomm also points out that DirectX 12 is also the first version to launch on Microsoft’s mobile operating systems at the same time as its desktop and console counterparts.
The company believes this emphasizes the growing shift and consumer demand for mobile gaming. However, it will also make it easier to port desktop and console games to mobile platforms.
Of course, this does not mean that we’ll be able to play Titanfall on a Nokia Lumia, or that similarly demanding titles can be ported. However, it will speed up development and allow developers and publishers to recycle resources used in console and PC games. Since Windows Phone isn’t exactly the biggest mobile platform out there, this might be very helpful and it might attract more developers.