BeachRider

HP’s Acquisition Further Pits Tech Giants Against One Another

3Com's 8800/7900/7700 offerings aren't typically favored over CSCO's 6500/4500 strategy. Management of 10+ switches also favors CSCO (mainly due to software). HP even had CSCO switches for its blades, because their proprietary switches got into management problems interoperating with CSCO.

It is clear the CSCO 'declared war' when they issued blades, so some response from HP was needed, there just needs to be more on the planning-horizon to justify 3Com as the best response.

Thursday Options Recap

This ORCL/JAVA work just sends some chills through the JAVA stockholders. What if JAVA burns through a substantial amount of its cash-on-hand to keep the company viable while the EC 'fiddles'.

Ellison could simply go-away and watch MySQL lose a ton more money (and staff). It only costs him $165MM (or so) to do that. He has clearly lost much more than that in lost-value due to the delay in the acquisition.

Don't even get me started on what this has done to SPARC...

IT Needs to Innovate or Consumerize

Certainly there are end-user and datacenter-centric components to increasing the flexibility of Network IT. The author tries to draw both together in this discussion, but he also shows that they are driven by totally-separate forces.

IT constrains the user because users otherwise cause problems for one-another. In my shop, some users were putting in their own Best-Buy wireless routers in an attempt to remedy an immediate need. The Routers slow down to the slowest current-user device so high-speed connections were sporatic. The user would also not-be-able to move from one Router to another unless infrastucture was robust enough to deal with that.

OTOH, overly conservative IT practices constrain legitimate user-visible improvements. If Gigabit switches (or 10Gb uplinks to core switches) are needed for a small fragment of users, IT needs to find a way to present those capabilities, at acceptable cost. Too many times, users perceive that their needs are diluted to meet the needs of a non-associated groups in their proximity.

Four Companies Poised to Benefit from America's Smart Grid

It looks like we are prepared to declare these projects as 'shovel ready'. That is great, so long as it is true. Standards are important, but so is the mechanism to enforce the standards. I haven't heard very much about enforcement.

I am investing in IBM, for this and other reasons. I don't understand the INTC aspect, though. INTC sells chips mostly. Standards that limit the chips can be useful, but can be unnecessarily expensive, too.

Technology Stocks Unlikely to Lead the Markets Higher

Interesting technical analysis of IBM. There is certainly a lot of documentation here. Technical analyses can focus too hard on math modeling. They can miss basic business motivations that override the technical influence. We can see how it plays from here, but I expect IBM to do better than this analysis shows. I will check back in 60 days and further down the road.

Microsoft Bares Knuckles Against Enterprise Software Competition

Interesting pep talk from the CxOs. Seems like they were trying to 'Marshal up the troops'. Targets for plans were established, presumable for subgroups to infer a requirement to establish local-focus. At least they stirred interest within their walls for battle. Time will tell if the troops respond.

51 Option Ideas for Bears

HPQ is showing up in too many bear-scenarios. There must be some kind of negative sentiment on their future success with EDS and Computer Storage. The IA-32 server business is still sound, but not much growth in CY2009. There is no clear signal with their IA-64 (Itanium) stuff.

The New Dow Jones Industrial Average: Calculations and Individual Weightings

Marco,
Nice spreadsheet. I love spreadsheets. Thanks.

Sun: Oracle Bid for Software Assets and Who Was 'Party B'?

Don't forget Fujitsu. They could have gained a lot from a Sun acquisition. They already know a lot about SPARC and the UNIX server environment. The IA32-blade stuff was the strangest part of Sun for them. This filing shows that Oracle found the hardware purchase to be the most difficult. It also shows that Sun had no other suitors for SPARC (or that deal would have worked). As it played out CSCO and DELL are unlikely because of the STK storage business.

Cisco: Order Inflows Insufficient to Arrest Steep Revenue Declines

It looks like CSCO had good reason to strike for new opportunities with its blade-server, etc. initiative. I wonder if CSCO is interested in buying someone like EMC, especially in this situation. EMC may now be ripe for an acquisition.

Data Center Survey: Cisco's Server Push Sparks Interest

UCS has promise, because CSCO could do switch-tricks that others might not anticipate. It has risk, because they don't have the background in blade-server design and lifecycle. They are hoping that VMW will bridge their obvious deficiency in storage.
They are awfully closely tethered to VMW's ability to cope with any fancy wiring that they hope to deploy, though.
CSCO stock could go up on this kind of news, but only for non-short-term investors (I think the last two or three of them still have some uninvested capital!).

Sun-Oracle Deal Remakes the IT Landscape

I don't get why ORCL wanted SPARC or the IA32 business. I don't see HP as being interested in it, at all. IBM would expect ORCL to struggle with it.
I agree on the tape/disk stuff. It just aggravates HP (a traditional ORCL ally).
Did Ellison just need to bail out Sun's board of directors?

Enterprise IT at a Crossroad

The details of 'Cloud Computing' involve higher levels of network-complexity versus local-hosting. Although this is an opportunity for CSCO and other network-intensive vendors, it is a challenge for the client.

At my company, one of the most-significant problems with adapting to 'Cloud Computing' is the ramp-up of network appliances. VPN servers, large-pipe robust internet access and network-security have had many more staff and dollars thrown at them to address this kind of workload.

Costs of this versus other models have only begun to evolve. This needs to be monitored to assure the cost-efficiency of continuing this approach.

Potential Acquirers for Sun: Oracle or Cisco?

SPARC in a post-sale mode is hard to envision for IBM or HP. DELL & CSCO is not going to jump-into this. INTC or AMD might see some value in it, though.

The Open Source mirrors the hardware. IBM & HP could use it (a little more valuable to IBM). CSCO & DELL aren't in this business, now. INTC & AMD would have little/no interest.

ORCL fugedaboudit.

Will Intel's New Processor Be a Game-Changer?

Raising the capability of the high-end is a good thing for Intel. They will create price pressure on IBM, existence-pressure on SPARC and judgment pressure on HP (for choosing Itanium in the UNIX market).

This isn't widely applicable to home-machines. Perhaps 5% of home computer users will have much use for this. Not trivial, but not a game changer.

These are still IA-32 chips. Acceptance/Understanding of x64 is a problem. Intel must make it clear that they have a long term solution and sever-off Itanium. Then the future will be clear.

Technically the Core i7 at 45 nm is still substantially slower than the Power 6 at 65 nm (core-per-core). Both are available as true quad-core setups, for several months now.

Saving electricity on a by-core basis will always be in SPARC's favor. The just run the thing at low GHz and cram 8-16 cores in each CPU. I am not sure how that translates into server-buy decisions, though.