IBM

Vblock done, Cisco to launch new unified collaboration attack

Cisco and its best friends forever EMC and VMware finally came clean about their Vblock plans on Tuesday.

Now watch for Cisco next week to shift gears–a tad–and unveil a slew of unified collaboration gear from phones to new unified communications servers–or is it now collaboration servers?  Big news on deck on that front for Nov. 9 when Cisco CEO John Chambers will talk up the products. They will probably also include additional new ISR G2 routers on the infrastructure front.

But back to vBlock: Don’t expect HP and IBM to lay down. In fact, you won’t have to wait long for them to up their  competitive responses to Cisco’s aggressive data center push. HP will talk up it’s “converged infrastructure” approach and will say–truthfully–that it, unlike Cisco or EMC–has all the pieces for a converged data center system. Servers? Check. Networking hardware? Check, check. Storage? Check check check.  It’s already down the road with some converged products and probably put pedal to the medal after Cisco’s first unveiled its Unified Computing Systems news last spring. 

Cisco is now opening up its UCS servers to channel partners which is bound to further incite HP .

Check out more IT channel news on SearchITChannel.com.

OOW highlights: The governator and Ellison’s $10M challenge

Larry Ellison’s milking his latest anti-IBM jihad for all it’s worth. Now he’s challenged anyone to make IBM hardware run Oracle database as fast as it runs on Oracle’s Exadata database machine. If they can do it, they can take $10 million of Larry’s (or Oracle’s) money. He welcomed IBM itself to participate. Continued »

The Oracle conspiracy

For those who attribute Machiavellian motivations to everything Larry Ellison does, here’s a doozy of a theory.

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Rivals eye Sun partners, customers

To say that competitors are circling Sun Microsystems’ customers and partners like vultures is probably overstating the case. But not by much.

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IBM restarts M&A engine, snaps up SPSS

IBM started up its acquisition push and analytics landgrab this week with a planned $1.2 billion buyout of SPSS.

SPSS, out of Chicago, does statistical and predictive analytics software. IBM launched its business intelligence/analytics push a few years back when it grabbed up Cognos for $5 billion. Cognos had been a close applications partner of IBM Software.

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Mohamad Ali leaves IBM for Avaya

Mohamad Ali, a veteran IBM exec, is leaving the company after more than 13 years, to join Avaya as SVP of corporate development, according to an email sent out over the weekend.

The mail arrived just two days before Avaya disclosed it has a deal to buy Nortel’s enterprise solutions business for an estimated $475 million.

He also joined the board of Ember Corp. a Boston-based zigbee wireless company.

Ingram Micro gets first dibs on IBM Smart Cube

Ingram Micro can now sell IBM’s Smart Cubes, making it the first broadline distributor to lay claim to these appliance-like devices for SMBs. Continued »

IBM to business partners: Why don’t you mingle a little?

As if Facebook or LinkedIn or Plaxo or any of the other places where I’ve been personally congregating with VARs and IT solution providers for months weren’t enough, some of the biggest high-tech vendors in the channel are jumping with both feet into the world of social networks. The latest to announce a new community infrastructure (at least with a certain amount of fanfare) is IBM, which has launched something called PartnerWorld Communities.

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Top five questions about Sun-Oracle

Here’s a completely non-scientific list of my top five questions arising from Oracle’s $7.4 billion buy out of Sun Microsystems.

5: How could it have been surprising that Oracle was the white knight here? Larry Ellison is the go-to guy for distressed tech companies who don’t want or cannot be acquired by IBM or Microsoft (hell, better throw Google into the mix for the new millenium. ) This goes way, way back. Back in the paleozoic era, Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi tried like all get out to get Oracle to buy Lotus so it wouldn’t end up in IBM’s clutches. That didn’t work out so well.

4: What happens to Oracle’s ardent courtship of Dell and Hewlett-Packard? One can only guess that the HP-Oracle Exadata “Database machine” is a goner now. Not that it was setting any sales records.

3: Which virtualization play will survive the inevitable putsch?

2: How soon will a big hunk of Oracle’s revenue be going by way of hardware bundles with Sun servers? This is very much a page ripped right out of IBM’s DB2 playbook. And Ellison could barely contain himself when talking about that “shelfware.”

1: What was deal with Scott McNealy on the call?  He sounded ummmm, medicated.  Even though this signals the end of the McNealy era in tech (hell, Jonathan Schwartz and the open source pony tail epic already rang the bell on that one.) Still for $7.4 billion, couldn’t Scooter have mustered a little enthusiasm for three minutes? Listen to the playback. It’s shocking

Oracle buys Sun

Well that didn’t take long.

Oracle is buying Sun, in a deal worth about $7.4 billion, the company said in a statement released early Monday. Oracle is offering $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at about $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. 

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