Profile of Bob Evans
News & Commentary Posts: 1070
Bob Evans is senior VP, communications, for Oracle Corp. He is a former InformationWeek editor.
Articles by Bob Evans
posted in October 2009
10/30/2009
IBM and Hewlett-Packard are among the finalists for a $700 million outsourcing contract from Microsoft to manage huge portions of its global IT infrastructure, according to a media report from India.
10/29/2009
IBM says its Migration Factory service had a busy third quarter as it displaced Sun and Hewlett-Packard Unix servers and storage systems for 235 separate customers, accounting for $150 million in revenue for IBM. For the first nine months of the year, IBM said, the corresponding revenue total is $400 million.
10/28/2009
Trying to apply some sort of favorable spin to SAP's disappointing quarterly results, CEO Leo Apotheker implied that while things at SAP aren't exactly booming, the situation at Oracle is even worse.
10/27/2009
Five weeks ago, EMC said it would add 400 jobs in Research Triangle Park over five years. Three weeks ago, it announced its new Atmos Online Compute Service. And yesterday it bought a 450,000 square-foot warehouse in RTP to serve as a data center and R&D facility. If we triangulate in the Triangle, could that mean that mean EMC will base its new Atmos cloud business there?
10/26/2009
Mark Hurd, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer have all recently taken some fairly empty shots at IBM. But if Big Blue is such a loser, why do those three CEOs keep talking about it?
10/26/2009
A search for "chief wireless officer" shows it's a very exclusive club. One name that'll come up is Fidelity Investments' chief wireless officer Joseph Ferra, whose 10-year advocacy for mobile IT has driven huge growth for Fidelity Anywhere, particularly among Gen X and Gen Y clients.
10/26/2009
Calling the personal use of social media by businesspeople during the workday "a productivity black hole," a British IT services company said more than half of the 1,460 surveyed employees said they spend up to 40 minutes per week on such sites. I'd say that while those numbers might be accurate, the conclusion is astoundingly shallow.
10/25/2009
Promising that HP can combine massive scale and innovation, CEO Hurd says it will separate itself from IBM and others by having a complete end-to-end line of hardware, software, and services.
10/22/2009
Which countries around the world are the best choices for your offshoring projects? This study by respected outsourcing/offshoring consultancy Tholons includes some nations that are obvious (India) but also some that are unexpected: will the neighbors of the U.S. to the north and the south both make the list?
10/22/2009
Informatica CEO Sohaib Abbasi says cloud computing presents an enormous opportunity for the data-integration specialist, whose latest financial results topped all analysts' predictions.
10/22/2009
Two offshore-services execs and a prominent American CIO plan to open IT-services centers across the U.S. as low-risk and and price-competitive alternatives to offshore providers.
10/21/2009
While there's been a lot of talk recently about fundamental upheavals in the global outsourcing industry, this year's list of the top 8 outsourcing cities in the world remains the same as last year's, according to a joint study by experts Tholons and Global Services.
10/20/2009
Want to know the real cost of the drawn-out dithering of the EU and its fawning groupies? Sun has to lay off 3,000 employees because its acquisition by Oracle is still under review.
10/19/2009
One of Australia's largest hosting providers has bypassed incumbent storage provider IBM and instead picked EMC to deliver 261 terabytes of of storage. The customer's CTO said big factors were EMC's tight three-way alliance with Cisco and VMware and its willingness to extend service coverage from three years to four.
10/19/2009
SAP's enhanced research alliance with Intel will accelerate its move into cloud computing and SaaS and strengthens the set of SAP partners trying to shape the future of enterprise software.
10/18/2009
The big IT players are realigning and while Oracle's love-fest with Salesforce.com is nice, Oracle will need a whole lot more friends than that to compete against not just SAP but also IBM.
10/16/2009
CFO Mark Loughridge noted big improvements in IBM's Q3 business, but declined to comment on the outlook for corporate IT spending--probably because he thinks it's still lousy.
10/15/2009
Continuing to use its massive Oracle World stage as a platform from which to jab at its competitors, Oracle has been touting benchmark results that show the superiority of its middleware over IBM's. But IBM has shot back, claiming Oracle unfairly rigged the results, used antiquated figures, and generally pumped out a lot of BS to mislead customers.
10/15/2009
At Oracle Open World, Ellison got called out by Netezza's CEO who told him to start focusing on the priorities of the people whose purchases fuel Oracles' $25 billion in annual revenue: CIOs.
10/14/2009
Looking to become more of a player in the highly strategic enterprise ERP space, Microsoft is teaming with global IT-services provider Capgemini to help customers wring more value out of the interactions between SAP's structured-process applications and Microsoft's products aimed at unstructured processes. As part of the deal, Capgemini will establish a Microsoft/SAP interoperability Center of Excellence.
10/13/2009
The bureaucrats at the Justice Dept., the European Commission, and a trade group called CCIA are looking to take from IBM what their supposed "victim" could not earn in the free market.
10/13/2009
I've been to several Oracle Open World events, and I've experienced more than 50 Thanksgivings and New Year's Eves. But it took a cab driver from a tiny country on the other side of the world-Nepal, to be exact-to draw the connection between the three.
10/12/2009
CIOs won't survive if they accept the back-bencher status that "align IT with the business" mandates. It's time to bury such CIO stereotypes and start connecting deeply with customers.
10/12/2009
He's never run a hardware business but he's calling out the company that invented it. He voted for HP hardware to run his Exadata software before he voted against it, picking Sun instead. And he's betting $10 million that his Exadata package will double the speed of a comparable one from IBM. Larry Ellison surely makes this business more interesting, but more importantly he makes it a whole lot more valuable.
10/11/2009
Several top Indian IT-services companies want to step up into the world of broad-based, run-it-all outsourcing. Will the White House penalize them in an attempt to protect "our jobs"?
10/10/2009
They've spent the last year ripping each other's strategies, belittling each other's approaches, and gloating over competitive wins. So why in the heck are they now trying to make nice?
10/8/2009
Just last week, a federal district court tossed out the flimsy claim of a would-be competitor whose basic demand is for IBM to be forced to give up its hard-earned IP. So why is Justice butting in?
10/8/2009
A few months ago, we created a list of 50 of the world's top CIOs for our Global CIO 50 project. Our list included 10 CIOs from India, and their achievements were celebrated by 300 members of the Indian IT community at a special event at this week's Interop Mumbai. The gathering also celebrated the extraordinary progress of India's IT industry in the past decade.
10/8/2009
While the details are still unclear, flat-rate pricing is expected to allow large enterprises to have access to as much SAP software as they want for one fixed price, leading to more focus on value.
10/8/2009
If SAP can deliver on the vision of its Chief Value Officer, it will make available to CIOs best practices, benchmark metrics, and breakthrough thinking and innovation.
10/7/2009
Forget all that unimaginative stuff about slashing power consumption by consolidating data centers and turning off PCs overnight: All Nippon Airways wants to save the planet by badgering passengers into hitting the restrooms pre-flight so that less carry-on waste means lower airplane weight. And I swear I'm not making this up.
10/6/2009
Startup Teza Technologies is battling for its legal life after one of its programmers was arrested for stealing secrets from Goldman Sachs, its three founders were sued by their former employer for violating non-competes, and, in the latest development, another employee was reprimanded for uploading code that might have come from former employee UBS. As CIO William Sterling says, "A lot has changed."
10/5/2009
Mark Hurd has cranked up HP's operational excellence but HP has yet to reveal an equally compelling external strategy to the world: what is HP's core strength? What does HP do best?
10/4/2009
Salesforce.com's new joint venture to create financial apps on its Force.com platform will provide great comfort to C-level prospects evaluating the SaaS model. But for partners already creating financial apps on Force.com, Marc Benioff's company now presents itself as a competitor as much as a collaborator. Insightful analyst Jeffrey Kaplan breaks down this mixed blessing.
10/2/2009
As a new investment report and an article in Barron's question the sustainability of the inflexible annual fees, we offer three scenarios for how this extremely important situation will play out.
10/1/2009
Twenty-five percent of today's top business-process outsourcers will disappear in the next three years due to economic pressures, poorly conceived contracts, and the inability to adapt to standardized delivery models, says Gartner. Ever the team player, Gartner also offers six suggestions that could indicate your outsourcing partner is not long for this world.
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