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 September 2009
9/30/2009
Where is it written that IT services companies have to sit back and wait to be acquired by IT product companies? Accenture has the power to reverse that trend and offer new value to CIOs.
9/29/2009
Days before launching Microsoft's "New Efficiency" strategy, Steve Ballmer took some swipes at IBM and its strategy, which is bizarre because Ballmer's taking Microsoft down a path IBM's already on.
9/28/2009
Oracle customers hear a lot from you about your competitors, but rarely do they hear how you feel about them and what your vision and strategy for them is. You're missing a huge opportunity.
9/25/2009
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that with the worst of the recession behind us, his company will resume making acquisitions and hopes to complete one deal per month. While Schmidt didn't rule out large acquisitions, he did note, in an equivocation worthy of the Oracle at Delphi (as opposed to the equally acquisitive one at Redwood Shores), that such larger deals are "unpredictable."
9/24/2009
Gates blasted Chinese companies for using software they don't pay for and described how profits from companies that DO pay for software have allowed him to help millions of children around the world.
9/24/2009
In a Q&A session at Carnegie Mellon University this week, Bill Gates said two of the five most-profitable businesses in China don't pay for the software they use. And he said those are only two examples of a massive trend in that country.
9/23/2009
Indian companies were much less likely to slash IT budgets during the recession than other firms, and an IBM exec says that makes those Indian firms "more forward-looking." Is that the case?
9/23/2009
In a rare public interview, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison pledged to give IBM the same sort of beatdown in the hardware business that Oracle's given IBM in the software business. Short-term, though, he said Sun-his not-so-secret anti-IBM weapon-is losing $100 million a month.
9/23/2009
Wipro Technologies has opened a new UK headquarters in London and expanded its suburban Reading facility to add centers of excellence and support customer projects. With 26% of its revenue coming from Europe, Wipro needed to enhance its regional capabilities and decided to focus on the UK since it is home to several major Wipro customers.
9/22/2009
As SAP and Oracle rush to court mid-market customers, are they missing the real contest: the traditional on-premises model versus hard-charging SaaS? Meanwhile, don't count out Microsoft.
9/22/2009
While there are lots of conferences featuring CIOs exchanging innovative ideas and strategic insights, a January event featuring 10 top retailer CIOs will be raising money and awareness for 400 million at-risk children around the world as part of a truly strategic ROI effort: the Retail Orphan Initiative.
9/21/2009
Ross Perot started Perot Systems 21 years ago with his own name, his own money, and his own ambition. So why are media ninnies calling his take from the Dell deal a "windfall"?
9/21/2009
Three months ago, Global CIO asked, "Dell Needs To Make An Acquisition-But Which One?" We listed 15 prospects from financial analysts, and from those we picked Perot Systems as the best fit for Dell. This morning Dell bid $3.9 billion for Perot, and we hope all you sharpies who followed our advice will enjoy the 68% premium Dell's paying for your Perot shares.
9/20/2009
A proposed giant new telescope will stream incomprehensibly large volumes of data to a computer IBM has agreed to build. The trick is how to handle the data torrent captured by the kilometer-square lens, which is expected to generate more data in a single hour than currently exists on the entire World Wide Web.
9/20/2009
Apple has a massive opportunity--and unique qualifications--to connect hundreds of millions of mobile workers with enterprise data and information through Apple's Next Big Thing: the iCloud.
9/17/2009
Oracle's quarterly numbers show all of its profits came from "software license updates and product support"--aka 22% maintenance fees--and only 20% of its revenue came from actual software sales.
9/17/2009
Oracle president Safra Catz said Oracle's database revenue grew more slowly than normal in Q1 in large part because of slumping sales via some Oracle resellers, "most notably SAP, who is selling less database because its applications business is down 40%." Yikes-you don't often see Oracle spank its own customers, but then again SAP is no doubt a very special case.
9/16/2009
Unhappy with the value it was getting in return for its 17% annual fees, and looking to innovate with SaaS, Siemens has bypassed strategic customer/partner SAP twice in the past few months.
9/16/2009
IBM is hiring manufacturing and maintenance workers at its Vermont chip-making plant in response to strong consumer demand for cell phones and DVDs using IBM electronic components. The new hires will push total employment at the Essex Junction plant to about 5,000.
9/16/2009
Oracle president Charles Phillips said a new product co-created with HP had generated the biggest new-product pipeline he had ever seen. Despite that, HP is out and Sun in on Exadata 2.
9/12/2009
A carrier pigeon thrashed a local ASDL service in transporting 4 gigabytes of data 60 miles in a South African showdown watched by several billion (well, actually, a few hundred) people around the world on Facebook and Twitter. In the two hours it took the pigeon to deliver its memory-stick payload, the ASDL service was able to transmit only 4% of the data.
9/12/2009
If 40% of your compensation were tied to customer experiences, wouldn't that tend to sharpen your focus on customer outcomes? It's an idea whose time has come.
9/11/2009
During her first half-year as Yahoo! CEO, Carol Bartz has sold more than 138,000 shares of Yahoo! stock for almost $2 million. That's all squeaky clean and above board, but shareholders deserve to know why their new CEO is selling what they're holding-and the excellent money manager Eric Jackson offers some compelling conclusions on guaranteed compensation versus performance-based compensation.
9/10/2009
In this week's Hair On A Wooden Leg: firewalls go Hollywood, broadband bumbling, striking tweeties, up from Lehman, Microsoft culture shift, and CIO town-hall-a-palooza.
9/10/2009
If Blade Network Technologies can deliver even half of what it's promising, it will give some of Cisco's Wall Street clients something to think about when they look to buy network switches. Blade's CEO says his company crushes Cisco on latency, power consumption, and TCO. (He also says one ox can outperform 1,000 chickens.)
9/10/2009
EMC Corp., which spent $500 million on its operations in India over the past five years, plans to triple that investment to $1.5 billion over the next five years to enhance its support of customers in India and to expand its R&D work and global services capabilities.
9/9/2009
An unprecedented study of CIO outlooks, objectives, and behaviors will rapidly and dramatically raise expectations for CIO performance in driving growth and business value.
9/8/2009
Now that Microsoft's massive Chicago data center has been delayed, mothballed, purchased, and finally opened, it's time for the $500 million drama queen to grow up.
9/8/2009
Looking to get in early on dynamic new businesses and technologies while also boosting its Asia/Pacific revenue, Cisco has invested $32 million in a South Korean tech-centric private-equity firm as part of a 5-year strategy to invest $2 billion in that company's tech sector.
9/8/2009
IBM chief economist Philip Swan says the U.S. recession is over and that our economy will reap a "productivity dividend" that, if sustained, could lead to "an awful lot of upswing in the economy."
9/7/2009
Wichita State University CIO Ravi Pendse has attracted $10 million in research funding from Cisco for the school's Advanced Networking Research Center in the past five years. So when a huge school from the ACC tried to woo him with an eye-popping raise of $120,000, Pendse said thanks but no thanks.
9/6/2009
The European Commission says it's investigating Oracle's acquisition of Sun to protect consumers. That's nonsense--they're doing it for one and only one reason: because they can.
9/4/2009
The law of unintended consequences strikes again: a $50 million U.K. supercomputer designed to model weather patterns and watch for climate change has turned out to be an electricity-guzzling heat sink that has the greenies seeing red. But the managers of the country's most-powerful computer say its overall impact has cut emissions by 20 million tons.
9/3/2009
Welcome to Global CIO's new Friday roundup of quirky and always-interesting news for CIOs. Today: radioactive supply-chains, NFL twits, airline pay-toilets, spinning wheels of death, throne-sniffers, Ethel Merman disco, and more.
9/3/2009
While it might not be time just yet to break out your Ethel Merman version of "Everything's Coming Up Roses," Best Buy shares were trending up on an analyst report that the retailer is seeing strong sales of mobile phones, computing devices, and flat-panel TVs.
9/2/2009
As CIOs search for ways to increase business agility and lower IT costs, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton says that "traditional enterprise computing is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity."
9/2/2009
The University of Colorado has just recruited from Harvard a new CIO described by his new boss as "one of the great IT minds in higher education." That's a nice intro-but, if you want to see something really nice, check out the raise he got over the previous CIO, plus his IT budget and staff size.
9/1/2009
HP and IBM will open heavily subsidized customer-support centers in three small towns across the U.S. that will eventually employ 4,000 workers. The jobs are wonderful--but was the price for them fair?
9/1/2009
An SAP official said today that 30,000 job openings exist worldwide for SAP consultants to support the needs of the company's 82,000 customers and their 12 million users across the globe.
9/1/2009
On the same day it created 1,500 jobs in deeply depressed Michigan by announcing seven new stores, Wal-Mart also revealed it is expanding the scope and scale of Walmart.com by offering on the site almost 1 million new items offered by other merchants. How about your company: are you innovating or standing pat?
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