Dell is in buyout talks with “at least” two private equity firms that would take the PC company-in-transition private, according to a story in Bloomberg Monday afternoon that sent Dell’s stock up close to 14% to over $12 a share, roughly what Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein thinks Dell’s worth.
The report cites two unidentified people with “knowledge of the matter.”
Dell refused to comment on rumor and speculation.
Bloomberg called the talks “preliminary” and said they “could fall apart” if the financing can’t be arranged or the potential investors can’t figure out how to ultimately exit the investment.
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A Hybrid Computing Model for SharePoint
For many companies, the business benefits that cloud computing promises are too compelling too ignore: improved agility, lower costs, better resource allocation, and fewer operational issues. As a result, organizations have been moving commodity infrastructure and services to cloud-based services managed by some of the world’s leading technology companies — including Office 365, Microsoft’s primary offering for business productivity in the cloud.
Given these gains, no company should ignore a move to the cloud. However, a full jump to the public cloud without careful consideration is ill advised. Some companies can’t move everything to the cloud because they have compliance, regulatory, or government restrictions that limit where data can be stored and who can have access to it. But many companies shouldn’t move everything to the cloud, because there is simply not parity between online and on-premise versions of SharePoint. What makes SharePoint compelling for many enterprises is the ability to extend, customize, and integrate with other enterprise systems, much of which is impossible with the Office 365 platform. Until there is parity, certain workstreams should stay in their current environments.
The Impact of Big Data and Cloud on Data Connectivity
How can we regain control of our data and get a complete view of critical information, while still reaping the many benefits that SaaS has to offer? The explosion in Software as a Service has changed the world of data access dramatically. Business critical information that was once within the four walls of the organization is now locked in a variety of SaaS applications deployed on the public Internet. This presents a serious challenge to business decision makers who are driven to make the right choices for their organizations based on a now incomplete picture of the world.
In this General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Jesse Davis, Director, DataDirect Research and Development at Progress Software, looks at how you overcome these challenges and regain full visibility to your business data wherever it may live.
How Can I Avoid Cloud Vendor Lock-In?
“Despite the lock-in…it’s really not about the money but about the features and the product offering.” So states a blogpost I just read from a company that is dissatisfied with one major cloud vendor and is moving to another.
Yet cloud vendor lock-in — what I like to call Vendor Lock-In 2.0 — seems to me to be a major issue facing our industry.
I say this as I experience my own cloud build-out. I’ll be spending a lot of my time this year implementing a number of cloud-based solutions at a small enterprise near by current base in northern Illinois. We are already hosted by one of the major cloud vendors, and upping the number and size of our instances with this company.
Then, last week, I met with the company’s matriarch, to discuss the company existing, ancient workflow and how we could use PaaS and then other -aaS within the cloud to bring the company from the 19th to the 21st century. This is a family-owned business, started a couple of generations ago. The matriarch alleged she knew very little about technology, and listened to me patiently for a few minutes.
She then pounced: «can I move all this to another vendor if I’m not happy?»
«Well, not really.»
«Why? Is this a technical issue?»
«Yes, sort of.»
«But the vendors could make this easy for me if they wanted to, right? I can plug everything in this building into the same socket. But your cloud vendors won’t let me do this with their cloud services, right?»
And there you have it. We’re moving forward, albeit more slowly and cautiously than I’d like. My clients wasn’t worried about security – she assumes a massive cloud infrastructure vendor will do a better job than we could ever do locally. She wasn’t worried about the price per se – she knows it’s prohibitive to buy our own iron. She wasn’t even worried about downtime – she’ll make that stuff roll downhill to her titular CIO.
But for this company, it is about the money if she has to, in essence, develop everything twice. It’s also about not being trapped, anymore than having a single option for any other part of this business. The local Chinese restaurant is great, but not a place we go to every day.
I’ve written a little bit about the «metadata» problem, and it looks like I should write some more about it.
But as a customer — not a writer — I must ask: «what are the major cloud vendors doing to fix this? Why do you think Vendor Lockin 2.0 is any more appealing than the original version?»
Amidst the Developer Noise, PaaS Signals for Growth
The PaaS market is filled with noise. «Platform as a Service» is surrounded with blind men around the elephant, each with their own definition PaaS. This is further compounded by the fact that the Application Platforms landscape is changing quickly as well. We keep hearing that «Developers» want control of the code, access to the nuts and bolts of the service they intend to consume. The same «Developers» seem to be adopting PaaS because of the tremendous speed and scale advantage. And the same «Developers» seem to be clamoring over the security and architectural compliance matters. There’s even talk of developer cloud mutiny! There are use cases that are simplified to the usage of a Private PaaS, but that’s only addressing the matter from a hosting and Data Control standpoint, beyond which the concern should be how the Platform Stack is built and provided to the developers. However, there’s a context to every statement.
Hybrid Cloud Is Not Public Cloud
It is tempting to see a hybrid cloud as merely a collection of clouds, versus the seamless integration of clouds and data centers. Yet hybrid cloud is a game changer that offers tremendous new potentials for a new generation of solutions… not merely low cost IT infrastructure.
The current popular forms of cloud can be difficult to enter and even more difficult to depart. Plenty of risk-prone and frustrating manual processes are in between the promoted and real economics of public cloud. In the case of cloud and even with the occasional outage, the journey may be much riskier and costlier than the destination. That may be the major reason enterprises have been hesitant to invest in migrating their apps into public clouds.
How Walmart Uses Site Search Technology for ‘Social Commerce’
The CCN has now started a Meet Ups group to organize a regular schedule of networking sessions for entrepreneurs and corporate users to learn more about Cloud Computing.
The first of these is Efrem Habteselassie, Founder of one of Canada’s most exciting Cloud start-ups, Cloud Search Portal.
As the name suggests the venture demonstrates the fundamental value of the Cloud – A hosted version of very powerful software so that you can access it in an on demand, utility manner, harnessing the benefits without having to be troubled with the challenges of installing and managing it all yourself.
In this case the powerful software is Search technology, like that of Google, but in this case based on the Microsoft Sharepoint FAST system.
Step-by-Step: Build Linux VMs in the Cloud with Windows Azure
The Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering supports running Windows virtual machines and Linux virtual machines in the Cloud. In this article, I provide step-by-step guidance for running a new Linux virtual machine in the cloud using our Windows Azure platform.
Windows Azure runs Linux VMs as a first-class citizen on our cloud platform, with support in the Preview offering for four common Linux distributions.
If the standard Linux platform images don’t meet your exact needs, there’s several options for leveraging or customizing other images for Windows Azure VMs …
The Extended Enterprise: Taking Your App Delivery Strategy to the Cloud
The cloud is changing the way enterprises consume IT infrastructure and applications. Networks and application deployment strategies are being re-architected to manage an increasingly hybrid network where storage, utility compute and applications are being designed to move seamlessly across private and public cloud infrastructures.
In this Lunchtime Focus Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Todd Paoletti, Akamai’s Vice President of Product Management, discussed how the trends, new products and roadmaps will help increase cloud adoption and business agility.
How to Get the Security of a Private Cloud Via a Public Cloud Deployment
Recently, McKinsey & Company released an article entitled Protecting information in the cloud which discussed the increased use of cloud computing by enterprises of a variety of sizes and industries and the benefits and risks cloud usage entails. The article recognizes that many organizations are already using cloud applications and realizing the efficiency and cost benefits and, in fact, most are looking to increase their usage of the cloud in 2013 and beyond in both private and public environments. But there are issues that are inhibiting adoption, such as risks associated with data security and concerns around privacy and compliance.
The McKinsey article rightly points out that allowing perceived risks to bar further adoption of the cloud is not a realistic option for most organizations, given the many compelling benefits offered. Enterprises must determine ways to embrace the cloud while also being able to satisfy important questions concerning security, compliance and regulatory protection that are hampering aggressive movement to the cloud.