Lotus Notes is IBM’s equivalent of Microsoft Outlook/Entourage and Google’s GMail. Aside from being installed on corporate machines, we did not see much of a web-based presence of the service until now.
IBM has launched a new service called LotusLive iNotes. This service has e-mail, calendar, and contact management services. The price of the service is $3 per user per month. This beats the cost of using Google Apps as they charge $50 per user per year.
IBM launched this service in order to win approval from companies that are seeking a more mobile way for employees to perform business duties away from the desk. The technology used for LotusLive iNotes is based on technology developed by Outblaze, a Hong Kong based company that IBM bought out in January 2009.
Shan Sadiq | July 28, 2009 | 254 views | Comments Categorized under IBM, SPSS
IBM announced its plans to acquire SPSS for $1.2 billion in cash. IBM is paying a 42 percent premium to SPSS’ Monday closing price of $35.09 a share.
Chicago based SPSS is a worldwide provider of predictive analytics software and solutions. The company provides solutions to help businesses stay competitive.
SPSS was founded in 1968. It has over 1,200 employees.
“With this acquisition, we are extending our capabilities around a new level of analytics that not only provides clients with greater insight — but true foresight,” said Ambuj Goyal, IBM’s general manager of information management.
The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
Earlier this week IBM launched WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, software that revolves around private cloud computing. IBM is the first major company to create a cloud appliance for their customers.
What are private clouds? They are resources that enables businesses to run applications and sources using virtualized workloads. The servers that run the applications are generally configured by IT departments across various data centers.
IBM’s WebSphere Appliance stores virtualized images of applications in their xSeries servers. When the customers are ready, the applications can be plugged into private clouds and can be called upon on demand.
As of right now, the virtualized images will be store in VMware ESX Server file formats. Other formats will follow in the near future according to Tom Rosamilia, GM of apps and integration middleware at IBM.
The WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition will also be stored as a virtualized image that can be called on demand. The Hypervisor Edition is part of IBM’s WebSphere Application Server line of products and will be running on the x86 server series. The appliance and server will cost roughly $45,000.
Capgemini and IBM have both announced a restructuring of their consulting divisions today. Capgemini is merging their consulting division into a unit called Capgemini Consulting. Capgemini Consulting will be led by Pierre Yves-Cros. IBM created a new organization called the IBM Business Analytics and Optimization Services.
The new IBM unit will include a team of about 200 researchers that has specialization in math and analytics in IBM research. Capgemini’s Consulting division will place about 4,000 of the company’s 90,000 staff members into the newly formed division.
“When times are tough, clients change the way they operate. A lot of decisions would be taken at regional or national level in normal times,” he said, but now those decisions to seek outside help are being taken at a global level. “It’s important for Capgemini not to get in on the tail end of the decision-making process,” stated Cros.
IBM has withdrawn their offer from Sun Microsystems. The whole event was pretty similar to what happened with Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo! IBM made an offer to Sun, Sun held out for more, and eventually both companies walked away from the table.
Currently Sun’s market cap is about $5 billion.
If the deal did go through, IBM would have become the biggest supplier of Unix-based servers. IBM would have also became a bigger competitor against HP and Oracle.
About 100 of IBM’s lawyers worked on putting the offer together and putting together the due diligence. After finding out about some of the antitrust concerns and contracts that are already put in place with Sun, IBM reduced the acquisition price.
After Sun refused the lower price, the talks ended. When IBM made the offer, Sun had to exclusively deal with only them. Now that the offer is off the table, Sun may shop around with rivals such as HP and Cisco.
Shan Sadiq | April 5, 2009 | 377 views | Comments Categorized under IBM, Sun
The NYT reports that IBM’s acquisition talks with Sun may collapse. Sun’s board rejected IBM’s offer because it was too low. Sun sent IBM a notice terminating an agreement for exclusive negotiations. The letter breaks off the acquisition talks.
IBM’s $7 billion offer was above Sun’s market cap. After due diligence, IBM lowered its offer from $9.55 a share to $9.40 a share.
Sun has been looking to sell for over a year. Now that its exclusive contract with IBM has ended, the company is free to pursue other buyers.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini was on a Webcast earlier this week to discuss the company’s stock options program. The subject of IBM’s interest in Sun came up during the Webcast and Otellini gave his two cents about the Java-producing company. One employee asked Otellini whether Cisco’s entrance to the storage market drove Sun to seek a buyer.
Oh, I don’t know if the Cisco entry spurred IBM. I think (a) cheap Sun price–a low price–spurred a lot of interest. I can tell you that Sun was shopped around the valley and around the world in the last few months. A lot of companies got calls or visits on buying some or all the assets of the company. It looks like IBM is in the hunt now. And at a hundred and some odd percent premium, I suspect they’ll get it.
I don’t think it had anything to do with Cisco. I think IBM is trying to consolidate architectures. IBM has the strongest Java license in the industry. By picking up Sun–which is the creator of Java–they really consolidate their position not just in Linux, but also in Java.
I think the stuff on Solaris and SPARC is likely to see EOLs over time through the IBM acquisition. But no strategic reason for IBM to maintain that except to attempt to convert the very large Sun SPARC Solaris base to power. I think that would be their most likely strategy as part of this.
Is it good or bad for us? I don’t know. I’d rather have Sun be independent, I guess.
Those statements were published on an SEC filing on Wednesday.
It will be interesting to see who does end up buying Sun or if are forced to compete directly against Cisco. Whoever ends up buying Sun will end up owning MySQL too. MySQL is an integral part of today’s web technologies.
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), the $126 billion company (worth less than Microsoft, but slightly higher than Google) that is known for consulting both domestic and overseas announced earlier this week that they are laying off roughly 5,000 people (1.3% of total employees).
The layoffs started on Wednesday and continued through Thursday. But here’s the interesting part. They are moving a large number of jobs to India. In India, you could basically pay about $220 per month in salary to an employee and they would live as good as an $80,000 per year salary employee.
The job cuts will not affect the 3,400 IBM employees that work in Washington, also known as those that work in IT for the federal government. The federal government division of the company is actually growing.
“My understanding is that it isn’t targeting the people who have skills leaning toward federal or local governments,” stated Ben Pring of the Gartner market research firm. “Outsourcing those jobs doesn’t fly in the government context.” IBM made offers to employees to work in different countries, but would be given equivalent wages.
At one point, IBM was rumored to be acquiring Satyam, the IT company in India that is sometimes considered to be the “Enron” of the subcontinent. Later it was declared that IBM wasn’t planning to bid on Satyam. That comes to no surprise because they offered to move their own talent overseas. IBM didn’t become as rich as they are by writing checks.
