Profile of Bob Evans
News & Commentary Posts: 1070
Bob Evans is senior VP, communications, for Oracle Corp. He is a former InformationWeek editor.
Articles by Bob Evans
posted in March 2010
3/30/2010
Ellison bluntly predicted Oracle will blow past SAP in enterprise apps, but here are 10 steps SAP should take to reassert its preeminence.
3/29/2010
The two-way litigation's nominally about intellectual property but is really about Oracle's phenomenally profitable support revenue.
3/29/2010
Bank of America is installing more than 200 Cisco TelePresence units across the globe in what Cisco said will be its largest TelePresence installation. The large-scale program will be used only for internal collaboration with no plans for customer-facing applications as yet.
3/29/2010
Can a 5-minute animated video capture a technology company's global vision? IBM's "The Internet Of Things" YouTube clip is inspiring and compelling and the sort of fresh thinking more tech companies should try, although I did crack up during the final segment as some massively Deepak-Choprah-overdosed guy buzzes about what the planet is saying and the universe is hearing.
3/29/2010
Ellison admits Oracle trails SAP in enterprise applications and IBM in high-end servers, but lays out plans for becoming #1 in each sector.
3/26/2010
Hewlett-Packard's close relationship with UPS has led to two recent innovative breakthroughs that are very different in scale-data-center cooling versus handheld devices-but very similar in reducing waste and energy use while improving business results.
3/25/2010
While the smart grid industry's bubbling over with hype and hope, it lacks the insights on which broader business-technology strategies can be built.
3/25/2010
One of the world's top CIOs says the technology strategy at UPS is very simple: "It's the business strategy. There's no difference."
3/24/2010
Extending its involvement in one of the IT industry's hottest markets, Cisco has formed a cloud-computing joint venture with a large European telecom firm doing businesses in 20 countries across Europe and Asia. With the global market for cloud services quadrupling to $60 billion in 2012 from $15 billion in 2008, Cisco said, the time is now.
3/24/2010
Scouting out strategic opportunities in India, CEO Michael Dell said his company's annual revenues in that country are more than doubling and that he sees specific opportunities for continued growth in services, servers, and smartphones. "India is a great place to be in," said Dell, who's got 23,000 employees there.
3/23/2010
They're great at acquiring aggressively and generating huge cash positions—but do those translate into customer-focused innovation? We hand out report cards for each.
3/23/2010
With businesses investing heavily in video and telepresence, Polycom's eager to compete with market leader Cisco and has the goods to do so but lacks 800-pound -gorilla mass. But Hewlett-Packard offers Polycom the means (ubiquitous market presence), the motive (Cisco's HP's most-abrasive competitor), and the muscle mass ($120 billion in revenue). Can an HP-Polycom partnership cut into Cisco's lead?
3/22/2010
With third-quarter profits up almost 150%, FedEx chairman and CEO Fred Smith said late last week that a global economic recovery "is well under way" and that his company plans to boost capital spending by 10% while also reinstating some employee-compensation programs suspended last year. Is it time for your company to invest for the upturn?
3/22/2010
Smartphones and mobile apps are radically changing how business is done. Is your mobile strategy a company-saver or career-killer?
3/19/2010
Oracle is expected to report a revenue increase of more than 15% for the quarter ended Feb. 28 as some analysts are forecasting a resurgence in new software license sales. One report referred back to related comments made three months ago by Oracle president Safra Catz who said, "We're definitely seeing customers back buying . . . . We are really seeing a recovery."
3/19/2010
"The business world has always been a cauldron of personal animosity, and those animosities have been particularly intense in Silicon Valley. Few do grudges quite as well as geeks," writes a columnist in the Economist. He then attempts to peel back the id-driven layers of the psychological onions animating Jobs, Gates, Ellison, and others. It's actually a lot more interesting than it sounds.
3/19/2010
Six months ago, Hurd dubbed HP "the infrastructure company" but he now seems to be tilting toward services as HP's centerpiece.
3/18/2010
The Nasdaq's five biggest market caps belong to (listed alphabetically) Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. The market caps for the top five are, in descending order, $259.9 billion, $203.2 billion, $179.8 billion, $150.4 billion, and $127.6 billion. Try to match the each of those top five companies with its market cap--and you might well be in for a surprise.
3/17/2010
Technology is roiling short-sighted Hollywood, and the business-model implications and opportunities for CIOs in every industry are enormous.
3/17/2010
eWeek's hallucination appears to go like this: IBM has become "a model company for killing good U.S. jobs," it has "ruined" an untold number of lives, and it has made "the United States a poorer part of the planet." My oh my--and just what terrible acts did mean old IBM perpetrate to deserve such condemnation from eWeek?
3/17/2010
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison promised Sun's profitability would start last month, and here's an analysis showing why CIOs should believe him.
3/16/2010
Annual maintenance fees, the 80/20 trap, rebuilding customer trust, raising employee morale, the truth about Oracle, the truth about SAP, and much more.
3/16/2010
The joint effort also includes Merck and Battelle and intends to set up a rapid-response vaccine-development and production facility.
3/15/2010
Oracle's "Go from IT Hero to Super Hero" contest will evaluate transformative IT efforts, with the winner going to a fancy premiere of the movie.
3/15/2010
You said Microsoft's all-in cloud commitment puts more power in individuals' hands. But your heavy-handed iPhone ban severely undercuts the credibility you crave.
3/15/2010
Even as data centers are placed in increasingly exotic locations and tied to peripheral issues ranging from tourist attractions to economic-growth strategies, this one's a real doozy: a new Helsinki data center built in a former bomb shelter under a historic cathedral will heat several hundred Helsinki homes while being cooled by frigid Baltic seawater.
3/14/2010
IBM attacks a study calling for mandatory unbundling of operating systems from hardware, especially for high-end servers and mainframes.
3/12/2010
Seventeen tech-industry executives made the new Forbes list of billionaires, led by Bill Gates in the #2 spot and Larry Ellison in the #6 spot. Can it be true that Facebook parvenu Mark Zuckerberg outranks Apple icon Steve Jobs? Here's a list of those 17 along with their ranks and estimated net worths.
3/12/2010
Layoffs, though unfortunate, helped IBM outperform most of the global marketplace as it prepares for continued growth.
3/10/2010
Cisco's Internet-acceleration plan means big opportunities for 14 key vendors. But more important, what's it mean for you?
3/10/2010
What questions are top of mind among business executives? Here's a list of 100 from management consultant Patty Azzarello.
3/10/2010
The 30-year-old CIO of a Chicago-area public school district has a salary of $96,000 and until recently earned an additional $24,000 by serving as school-board treasurer. When the district's teachers accepted pay cuts due to budget limitations, they carped about the $24,000 stipend-so the CIO gave it up, but requested the board consider increasing his salary. Here are 5 reasons why he deserves a big raise.
3/9/2010
Patty the CIO has a chat with CEO Jack about the revenue-raising virtues of cloud computing.
3/9/2010
Last month, Domino's Pizza online-orders revenue topped $1 billion since the new channel was launched. With online orders now accounting for 20% of Domino's total revenue and that, uh, slice of the revenue pie expected to grow, Domino's wants to put it all in Microsoft's cloud. But Microsoft's not ready yet, and it appears that the "all-in" strategy needs to stay in the oven a bit longer.
3/8/2010
Steve Ballmer says he's betting the company on the cloud. And in doing so, I think he's doing nothing less than saving the company.
3/5/2010
Cisco CEO John Chambers says he wants to add more than 5,500 new jobs at the Research Triangle Park, which would give Cisco 10,000 employees at what Chambers called its East Coast headquarters. Also coming to RTP: a $100 million data center/development hub for strategic technologies.
3/4/2010
TelePresence suites help Starwood Hotels innovate today and be relevant to the tech-immersed business travelers of tomorrow.
3/4/2010
Oracle, Cisco, Google, and NetApp led all Silicon Valley tech companies in giving out stock options in 2009, and the top executives of those companies were the primary beneficiaries. CEOs who hit it big in 2009 grants: Ellison, John Chambers, and not one but two NetApp execs. But go figure: Google's Eric Schmidt didn't make the top 5.
3/3/2010
CIOs are leaning on SaaS, social networks and the cloud as they ask the big new question: What business am I in today?
3/3/2010
Predicting 20% revenue growth next year, data-warehouse appliance vendor Netezza said its win rate versus Oracle and Teradata has been rising over the past year and will continue to do so throughout 2010. For a company whose revenue is about 1% of Oracle's, that's pretty impressive.
3/3/2010
Hewlett-Packard has won a highly lucrative and bitterly contested battle against Kodak as the printer supplier for photo kiosks in thousands of Wal-Mart stores, giving HP a dynamic and long-lasting revenue stream for its ink, toner, and paper. Kodak's loss inspired its CMO to tweet a message to HP saying, "Shame on your tactics."
3/3/2010
Touting its $4B hardware R&D investments, IBM says HP is stuck on commodity parts and a supply-chain model.
3/2/2010
Microsoft's increasingly aggressive stance in the cloud-computing infrastructure business now includes a joint effort with supercomputer heavyweight Cray Inc. to accelerate the development of next-generation data centers that offer not only greater performance but also reduced TCO.
3/2/2010
Hewlett-Packard does sell smartphones-just not very many of them, and the numbers are shrinking: $25 million in handheld sales for the quarter ended Jan. 31 versus $57 million in the year-earlier quarter. So now that Palm's stumbling fortunes raise doubts about its ability to survive on its own, would it make sense for HP to jumpstart its smartphone business by buying Palm?
3/2/2010
But that view's different from Chairman Plattner's, who recently said innovation's been lacking. What's the real issue for SAP?
3/1/2010
On a dark and stormy San Jose morning, a busload of eBay IT employees plus one axe set out for Sacramento to kill an 8-year-old data center. Later, the team leader shared the gory details: "I reared back and drove an axe through the final remnant of this once complex, powerful and archaic beast of a data center."
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