International Business Machines Corp

Earlier in this series, we discussed Salesforce’s (CRM) recently announced fiscal 1Q17 earnings. Now, let’s look at the company’s value proposition.

The Fed’s cautious approach and global growth concerns are weighing heavily on the US dollar, whose decline has impacted SAP’s fiscal 1Q16 performance.

Resilient Systems, a heavy hitter in the cybersecurity space, is best known for its “incident response” platform and is IBM’s most recent acquisition.

On February 18, 2016, IBM announced the acquisition of Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion. Truven provides cloud-based healthcare data and analytics.

Last month, Apple (AAPL) declared its fiscal 1Q16 results, reporting revenues of $75.9 billion. Revenues rose 2% YoY (year-over-year) and 8% on a constant currency basis.

Cognizant’s (CTSH) revenues in 2015 rose by an impressive 21% to $12.4 billion from $10.3 billion in 2014.

Apart from acquisitions to further push the chances of Watson Health’s success in the healthcare space, IBM has partnered with Apple (AAPL), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and Medtronic (MDT).

Amazon is the largest e-commerce player in the world. It could beat its own guidance for the December quarter. It will announce its earnings next month.

In 3Q15, the selling, general, and administrative expenses for Accenture rose to $1.41 billion from $1.38 billion in 3Q14 and $1.36 billion in 3Q13.

Signet Jewelers’ well-known, exclusive brands aim to influence consumers in their buying decisions. Sterling Jewelers thus provides 32% branded assortments.

Hewlett-Packard split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. On the first day of trading, the companies’ shares moved in opposite directions.

Competition in the technology sector Microsoft (MSFT) faces competition from a number of companies in the tech (technology) sector due to low barriers of entry and continuous evolution of the tech space. As seen in the above chart, Amazon (AMZN), IBM (IBM), and Google (GOOG) are Microsoft’s major competitors in the cloud business segment. Microsoft focuses on […]

The revenue synergies of the Dell-EMC merger are likely to be the result of EMC’s converged infrastructure making use of Dell servers and networking products.

We live in the “Information Age,” where a huge amount of data is generated every second and storage systems are needed to store this data.

After memory chips, LEDs comprise the second most produced semiconductor products in South Korea. The country accounts for ~13% of the global LED market.

Rackspace leads the hosted private cloud space with a 20% market share. This market is a “highly fragmented market.”

The growing preference for open-source technologies and databases plays a crucial role in Oracle’s recent struggles.

Through the sale of H3C, HP became one of the first prominent US technology companies to give control to native Chinese owners.

Oracle’s strategy of transitioning to cloud seems to be yielding results. The revenue from overall software continues to dominate its top-line revenue.

The majority of investors believe bonds are safer than stocks. The main reason is that bonds pay regular interest.

IBM (IBM) intends to fuel its growth in the cloud space through the investment of billions of dollars, as well as strategic acquisitions.

In November 2013, Cisco responded to the SDN trend by introducing its application-centric infrastructure (or ACI).

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

Renaissance Technologies is an investment management firm. The fund’s portfolio decreased to $36.52 billion in the third quarter—compared to $42.89 billion in the second quarter.

Technology and content costs include expenses incurred on new product development, data centers, and licensing costs associated with music and videos.

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

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.

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