Anne Shields

Bioware, an operating division of Electronic Arts (EA), made Disney’s (DIS) Star Wars: The Old Republic, the fastest-growing subscription MMORPG in history.

Electronic Arts’ (EA) EA Studios encompasses studios and development teams that create games and related content, franchises, and services.

In the past, Microsoft (MSFT) has shown reluctance to support the open source software movement. However, it seems the company has changed its strategy.

In December 2014, Adobe announced that it had been recognized by Gartner as a leader in the 2014 “Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs” research report.

Applied Materials’s management is hopeful that the Wafer Fab Equipment spending is expected to increase to 20% in fiscal 2014, with much higher spending in 2015.

Integrated device manufacturers and foundries use Applies Materials’s semiconductor manufacturing systems to build and package memory, logic, and chips.

The transition from planar to 3D devices creates new challenges for equipment and materials. Planar NAND architecture struggles with density limits.

According to Gartner, Applied Materials is the world’s largest maker of semiconductor equipment by revenues.

Oracle has been growing its CRM segment rapidly by making strategic acquisitions to expand its position in the CRM market.

Oracle’s expanded cloud platform includes new functionality for big data analytics, integration, process management, Java Platform Standard Edition, and Node.js for server-side JavaScript.

Salesforce1 is a cloud-based platform that serves as a foundation for building connected apps that link to mobile devices, wearables, and big data.

Salesforce.com is focusing on expanding its presence and operations across Europe by opening data centers.

A loss of technology leadership means that NVIDIA will lose its competitive advantage. This will lead to lower margins through lower revenues and increased R&D spending.

Consumer demand for the latest features and applications is huge. Endless technological innovation addresses that demand to a point, but has led to consistently shorter product life cycles.

In accordance with its mobile strategy in 2010, Intel acquired McAfee for ~ $7.7 billion. Intel acquired McAfee with the intent of integrating its security solutions into Intel-manufactured chips.

Salesforce.com (CRM) has a subscription business. It collects revenue for many of its offerings and applications before services. The company reports that the “deferred revenue” is rendered from its customers. In 2011, deferred revenue formed 65% of its liquid assets. It grew to 95% in 2014.

Salesforce.com (CRM) got ~94% of its fiscal 2014 and six months ending FY15 revenue from subscription and support fees. The fees are associated with cloud services. This implies that it has a huge investment in cloud-based application services. Salesforce.com offered solutions as a system for customer relationship management (or CRM) through cloud.

EMC, Pivotal, and VMware’s (VMW) virtual infrastructure collectively forms the “federated” business model of EMC Corp. The business model is unique because although all three businesses focus on their core functions separately, they all play a vital role in the delivery of IT as a service (or ITaaS).

Microsoft Azure might not be a leader, but it is expanding very fast in terms of applications and geography. Its hybrid cloud approach offers some hope regarding its future in the cloud space.

“Big data” analysis requires large data set analysis and the creation of advanced analytic algorithms that are designed to identify insights, patterns, and trends that aren’t understood yet.

Google and Yahoo broke large databases and distributed them across multiple servers, that led to distributed databases—which then founded advanced databases like NoSQL and new processing platforms like Hadoop.

The volume and velocity of business data has changed dramatically in the last couple of years—it’s skyrocketing every day.

Big data is high volume, high velocity, and high variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight, discovery, and process optimization.

IBM’s Global Technology and Global Business Services combined form Global Services. Jointly, they contribute 57% of IBM Corp.’s (IBM) consolidated revenues.

Major contributors to the operating expenditure are marketing costs and research and development (R&D) expenses that leads to value added products and services development.

The “Internet of Things” is the network of physical objects, that connects them to the internet.

R&D costs typically form 10%–20% of the revenues for software companies.

Systems software includes operating system and the associated programs, which enable systems and computers to work.

Software and hardware are integrally linked, which makes it confusing to distinguish one from the other.

“Software” refers to computer program or data (bits and bytes stored), that can be stored electronically.