Over the weekend Barron’s put out a piece touting AMD’s chances of taking share in the mainstream server market that belongs to Intel with its SeaMicro microserver acquisition, a development that would tickle its tiny stock price, if it ever happened. But even the thought of it, although the possibility is a ways off, tickled the shares Monday.
“SeaMicro’s technology looks good; its management team, astute; and the market opportunities, promising,” the story said.
It was the opening salvo for myriad articles sketching out AMD’s already tipped plans to make its first ARM chip, a 64-bit processor that it expects to have sampling in the first quarter of 2014 with production following sometime in the second half.

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“To be or not to be” is the famous opening phrase of Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet.” In the soliloquy, Hamlet questions the meaning of life, and whether or not it is worthwhile to stay alive when life contains so many risks and hardships. He concludes that the primary reason people stay alive is due to a fear of death and the uncertainty of what lies beyond. Now what does this passage in Hamlet have to do with future proofing a business or monetization? Many organizations grapple with unknowns as well. “Do I just focus on the now and not worry about the future? Change is scary; risk is even scarier, so I can’t be bothered thinking about the future.” For many, the future never comes as the decisions made in the present impact their ability to define their future. Instead their business is defined very precisely for them by what a billing system can deliver in the present. What seemed like a non-risk suddenly becomes life or death for the business.

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The notion that PaaS exists solely “in the cloud” as a discrete environment of developer services is hampering the maturation of enterprise PaaS.
The three most common answers to “give me an example of PaaS” are: Force.com, Azure, Google. I didn’t even need to do an unscientific Internet survey to nail that one down.
These are certainly fine examples of PaaS, but they are not necessarily examples of enterprise PaaS solutions. While off-premise PaaS offerings do address many of the same challenges being faced by enterprise operations today, they do so in a way that makes integration and control – not to mention the measurement and monitoring required by developers – nearly impossible.

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The business value of analytics has never been greater. But enterprises are flooded with a deluge of data spread across analyst desktops, big data stores, data warehouses and marts, transaction systems and the cloud. How do analysts overcome these data challenges?
Data is the lifeblood of analytics-the more diverse the better. In their best-selling book, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier describe the synergy that occurs when previously unrelated and disparate data is brought together to uncover hidden insights. But these advanced analytics data requirements are a double-edged sword as these more diverse sources complicate data integration and constrain progress.

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One of the key aspects of cloud’s value to an organization is the way in which its implementation and processes can impact the bottom line of a business. Automation, in particular, is an issue in the cloud that can have a major effect on cost, and there are two major ways to think about what generates the automation ethos that informs a company’s cloud strategy.
From the engineering perspective, if something needs to be done more than once, it should be automated. This saves times and effort, becomes a repeatable task, and since it was automated, everything comes out uniform. All of these
Business considerations are the other main drivers for automation. Is it cheaper to implement a human solution to a problem, or is it cheaper to install a piece of software? Regardless of the engineering ethos, when a business gets to the level of asking these questions, there are cases where it’s cheaper to utilize human power or where it’s cheaper to rely on a machine powered solution or a combo thereof.

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Interview with CEO Brad Bostic – hc1.com is committed to improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. We believe a critical ingredient to averting the current healthcare crisis faced by the US can only occur by improving the way healthcare professionals across the continuum of care manage and coordinate the relationships between each other and with the patients they serve.
Brad Bostic: hc1.com is committed to improving the quality of healthcare while reducing costs. We believe a critical ingredient to averting the current healthcare crisis faced by the US can only occur by improving the way healthcare professionals across the continuum of care manage and coordinate the relationships between each other and with the patients they serve. When an individual encounters a healthcare setting – whether to proactively have a physical or to be diagnosed and subsequently treated for a given health issue – there are multiple entities and individuals who are involved with the provision of care whether the patient knows it or not. For example, what is the first thing your primary care physician does when you pay them a visit? They almost always take a blood draw. This draw initiates the process of laboratory testing which often occurs within a lab business that is external to your physician’s office. This simple example illustrates the fact that healthcare is comprised of many entities and individuals who must be coordinated in order to provide high quality care, in a timely manner, at a reasonable cost.

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“The cloud opportunity is helping C-suite leaders reshape customer experience,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader Smarter Commerce, IBM Global Business Services, as IBM today unveiled an extensive array of cloud solutions designed for the C-suite.

“As part of IBM’s digital front office strategy, we see these 100 cloud applications as a way for business leaders to improve customer experience, reach new customers, generate new revenue streams and become more competitive in their industry,” Papas continued.

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The latest enterprise software forecast from Gartner shows Customer Relationship Management (CRM) increasing to a $36.5B worldwide market by 2017, a significant increase from the $20.6B forecasted in Q1 of this year.  CRM also leads all enterprise software categories in projected growth, showing a 15.1% CAGR from 2012 to 2017, also revised up from 9.7% in the Q1 forecast.

The latest round of forecasts published in the report,  Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012-2017, 2Q13 Update shows CRM eclipsing ERP in worldwide market size in 2017. 

The following graph compares the relative growth of CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence (BI), Supply Chain Management and Web Conferencing, Collaboration/Social Software Suites.  Source: Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012-2017, 2Q13 Update.  Please click on the image to increase its size for easier reading.

Key Take-Aways

• Comparing Gartner’s Q1 and Q2 CRM forecasts shows just how fast …

“The cloud opportunity is helping C-suite leaders reshape customer experience,” said Paul Papas, Global Leader Smarter Commerce, IBM Global Business Services. “As part of IBM’s digital front office strategy, we see these 100 cloud applications as a way for business leaders to improve customer experience, reach new customers, generate new revenue streams and become more competitive in their industry.”

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Last Friday calm seemed to be descending on Round Rock, Texas.

Reports were circulating that activist shareholder Carl Icahn was losing the stomach for scuttling the Michael Dell-Silver Lake Management plan to buy the company for $24.4 billion and take it private.

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