2013年9月23日 星期一
Globes, Tel Aviv, Israel, Shlomi Cohen column
Source: Globes, Tel Aviv, IsraelSept.mini storage 23--Apple's (AAPL) big Friday, on which it launched two different iPhone models simultaneously, was also black Friday for BlackBerry (BBRY), which released a very severe profit warning. Whatever Apple's sales figures for the first week after the launches, it is clear that its brand is stronger than ever, and it's no coincidence that in one month, two formerly glittering brands, BlackBerry and Nokia (NOK), both raised the white flag.Apple is superbly synchronized with its hundreds of millions of customers, who waited patiently for a whole year for the next generation iPhone. Where it has to compete is for new customers, chiefly people who are buying a smartphone for the first time, and mostly in developing countries, particularly China. In this respect, Apple is not synchronized with the analysts, who wanted to see a very cheap iPhone, were disappointed, and cut their recommendations, while the company for its part made clear that it will never compete on the playing field of cheap handsets.One of the biggest technology events this week is undoubtedly Oracle OpenWorld 2013, Oracle's (ORCL) major annual conference, which started yesterday in San Francisco, and ends on Thursday. This will be the week in which the world "cloud" will be heard thousands of times, even if the weather is wonderful, because just about everything there will be about cloud computing.By now, no-one doubts that the IT world is undergoing, and will undergo, huge changes. As with mobile telephones, we will find out in a few years' time that new, unknown players have taken the lead, while old warhorses will wane, or could even reach the end of the road, unless they come to their senses in time.The first signs are that the old horses are indeed pulling themselves together, with Nokia and BlackBerry serving as awful warnings. For example, there are those who say that Steve Ballmer's resignation from the management of Microsoft (MSFT) is connected to, among other things, the big shake up that this veteran player needs as it faces the new age of cloud computing and smart handling of Big Data.Another old warhorse, Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, took these changes in IT on board long ago. He recently signed agreements for collaboration in cloud computing with two of his toughest competitors, companies that, in the past, he vilified: Microsoft, and Salesforce.com (CRM). On Tuesday, Ellison will speak about cloud computing at OpenWorld 2013, alongside a senior manager from Microsoself storaget, who will explain the collaboration.Among the companies in my portfolio, I expect announcements at the conference from SanDisk Corporation (Nasdaq:SNDK), Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq:MLNX), and the litle Attunity Inc. (Nasdaq: ATTU). NAND flash memories are increasingly being used in cloud computing -- as the fastest and most energy-efficient storage solution -- and SanDisk is strongly targeting this market, partly by small acquisitions made in recent years.Mellanox feels at home at this conference, because Oracle owns about 10 percent of the company. The shares were bought three years ago on the market at $21 per share, and were classified as a "strategic investment", after Oracle's offer to acquire Mellanox was turned down. Several Oracle cloud and Big Data solutions are based on Mellanox's InfiniBand technology, and Oracle forecasts very strong growth for them in the coming years.When it acquired the shares, Oracle said that strong and friendly ties between the two companies were critical, and although three years have passed, I believe that these ties have tightened since then. If Mellanox founder and CEO Eyal Waldman is despondent these days about the share price, which has fallen to an 18-month low, he can undoubtedly call Ellison and dictate the size of the check for the sale of the company.In contrast to Mellanox, the share price of Attunity, which is run by chairman and CEO Shimon Alon, broke through a more than 12-month high, and it seems that its crisis of early this year has passed. If Mellanox's technology moves data quickly -- and with the lowest latency -- in systems like Oracle's Exadata, the Attunity solutions are the "funnel" which brings the data from the various databases to these cloud systems, and not only those of Oracle.Ahead of the Oracle conference, Attunity launched its Replicate 3.0, a 3G file replication platform, which it has developed over the past few years. In the era of cloud computing and Big Data, the need for tools that can transfer different kinds of files between databases -- "which do not talk to each other" -- has become critical. Attunity has agreements with giant companies, which should generate substantial revenue over time, such as Amazon.com (AMZN), EMC (EMC), Teradata (TDC), SAP (SAP), IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ), Microsoft, and, as mentioned, Oracle.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) Visit the Globes (Tel Aviv, Israel) at .globes.co.il/serveen/globes/nodeview.asp?fid=942 Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉
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