Posts by El Limerino

Investors resist Larry Ellison's $9.3bn NetSuite deal

Appearance in court is in Larry's future

T Rowe Price is laying the groundwork for a Breach of Fiduciary Duty lawsuit. That's going to take the shine off the deal.

Not seeking other bids is extraordinary behavior by NetSuite -- I hope their Directors & Officers insurance policy is up to date. The first thing any sane negotiator does is seek other interested parties so they have more options and leverage. Which suggests that this was a cram-down by Larry? If I were a Netsuite customer I'd be very worried.

Hacker, Bromium donate $30,000 in bug bounty cash to charity

A good PR save by messers Crosby et al. Bromium had no bug bounty (which is common practice at start-ups, especially those in security) prior to this marketing BS exercise of daring anyone to break their product. Then someone promptly broke it. Twice. As they admit, they didn't expect that. Ooops. Red faces all round. Better start a bug bounty program and pay up, then launch marketing BS in the form of Crosby saying how someone quickly deflating Bromium's hubris by doing what they expected nobody to do was a great and noble thing. Well it was, just not in the way Mr Crosby spins it.

As US$12bn is wiped off Apple's value in one day, iOS 9, OS X 10.11 and Watch OS 2 dates set

New rule...

New rule: whenever doing a piece about a stock price change, you must also state how the market overall moved the same day. That way we can tell if a fall or rise is merely average, or something actually news-worthy.

So today, for example, NASDAQ was down 1.15%, making Apple's slide slightly worse than average, but not nearly as bad as -1.93% or "$12 Beeeelion dollars!"

Sorry if this was entirely too serious a comment, but you Register guys and gals didn't have a slow news day, so there's really no excuse for this sort of not-news article.

'I don't recognise Amazon as a bullying workplace' says Bezos

We have hired several people from AWS and Amazon.com, and Amazon has tried very hard to prevent them from leaving by threatening them with lawsuits because they were forced to sign non-compete agreements when they joined. The non-competes say they cannot work at any company Amazon deems a competitor for 6 months after they leave, which of course would make them unemployable anywhere else if enforceable.

Now these Draconian non-competes are not enforceable in California, but they still make the lives of these people a living hell by threatening them with crippling legal costs. They are, regrettably, enforceable in Washington state. So, as an employee wanting to leave, who do you believe -- the new employer who says you won't get sued, or the crazy guy from Amazon legal foaming at the mouth threatening to sue you for everything you have?

What's particularly chilling is that they even do this for the people Amazon fired. Yes, the folks they culled for whatever reason, Darwinian or otherwise. They fire them and then still want to enforce the non-compete, ensuring the poor fired people have no income for another 6 months for daring to want to work somewhere else and earn a salary. Do not work there -- you will regret it, even after you leave.

So what exactly sits behind Google’s Nearline storage service?

Glacier is tapeless...

What makes you think Glacier is tape-based? Former AWS employees confirmed it's high capacity, low RPM hard drives that are spun down when not in use back in 2012.

Similarly, GOOG says it's storage is disk-based, and not a different disk hardware stack.

Citrix CEO retires as activist investor Elliott snatches the wheel

Elliott has a point...

Oh come on, Templeton and Citrix management did make this very easy for Elliott. Spending $1Bn on XenSource and Cloud.com and having next to nothing to show for it (except for a cool domain name) is just one example. And there is no convincing answer to explain why NetScaler and GoToMeeting need to be part of the same company. Or, in fact, why NetScaler and VDI need to be in the same company. The two products don't have the same buyer, despite the hand-wavy synergy argument. And VMware has started to eat Citrix's lunch in VDI and has a better mobile business thanks to the AirWatch buy. So you have to admit that Elliott has a point.

OpenStack private clouds are SCIENCE PROJECTS says Gartner

Re: Yet again Gartner miss the point!

I'm no analyst fanboy, but of all the analyst firms, Gartner actually has the best grasp of cloud and what is real IMHO. For one, they actually use the different products in addition to talking to clients about their experiences. Try asking an IDC analyst about the last time they actually used a product they "analyze" and see them splutter.

OpenStack has some unique problems that are *not* shared by other cloud software due to the structure of the project and the intensely competitive vendors and many competing agendas. Proprietary software has the benefit of vision, focus and a coherent agenda that is utterly lacking in OpenStack, and software companies collecting money from customers actually care about and spend engineering time on things like the install and upgrade experience. With the open source model, this is the stuff that no-one wants to work on, so they don't, and you get the crappy OpenStack deployment and upgrade experience.

Your comment about how easy it is to set up shows that you haven't done it beyond a trivial case (just one server, perhaps?) Sure, there are good single node OpenStack installers. But how about a 100 node deployment? With virtual networking? And identity integration? With Swift? And some useful services? That's hard. Just ask anyone who has tried it or done it. You actually know less than the Gartner analyst you're trashing.

Cisco's Chambers: white box is dead and WE KILLED IT

Nothing will get a Cisco sales rep to drop their price faster than a lab test demonstrating that a white box with a Broadcom switch in it can do the job of a Cisco <insert product here> for 1/10th the price.

Oh, and the white box will have an REST API, which is something the rep can't spell, and the config managed and version controlled by mere mortals using something like Puppet or Chef, or heck, even bash for you old school types.

Xen accelerates ARM server race with version 4.5

Erm... who else is in this race for ARM virtualization? Can't have a race without other competitors.

ARM Yawn -- it's all about the spooks

Wait -- let me battle through the masses lined up to buy ARM-based server CPUs systems... oh. Please wake me up when ARM server CPU usage is large enough to actually show up on a market share report as anything larger than a rounding error.

The NSA contributions to Xen would be more interesting... what are those?

Can Marten Mickos make 'Linux for the cloud' work for HP?

I think HP bought it almost entirely for Marten -- let's face it, Eucalyptus has been a bust in terms of deployments. Even Marten couldn't rescue it.

Amazon Reveals One Weird Trick: A Loss On Almost $20bn In Sales

Headcount growth reduces revenue?

I don't get it. How can headcount growth in AWS account for the decline in AWS revenue? Revenue is revenue, regardless of headcount.

I suspect that AWS has felt, for the first time, the impact of strong competition.

Amazon veep: We tweak our cloud code every 16 seconds – and you?

Re: To make it even simpler.

Any company that has even the slightest connection to the US is also subject to US laws, as European online gambling companies found out then their executives in transit via the US (not even entering the country) were arrested and jailed there for violating US gambling laws.

Any company who wishes to sell in the US is subject to those same laws. Which is just about anyone of any size and scale, because the US market is so valuable.

The net: you're kidding yourselves that EU-based companies are somehow magically immune from US laws if they sell there.

VMware cuts price of hybrid cloud management tool to $0

You don't even need vCloud Director as it also works vSphere to vSphere. But I'm pretty sure this is all about vCloud Hybrid Service -- vSphere to VMware's cloud and back.

Ding-dong! Bye bye Sunday lie-in, your Amazon package is HERE

Psst! USPS already delivers on Sunday!

USPS already has a service that delivers on Sundays -- Express Mail. Since they already have the infrastructure in place for Sunday delivery, this is a good way to boost volume and make some more moolah. Which the USPS needs, due to declining mail volume overall.

I have some (OK, a little) sympathy for USPS because congress never seems to tire of interfering in how they run the business. Who needs that bunch of electards telling you exactly what to do?

Watch out EMC and vendor pals, Cisco's set to flog you with Whiptail

You're not crazy, Chris. if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

Similarly, Cisco is not building a cloud. It's just a UCS for rent with an API.

Reply-all email lightning storm STRIKES TWICE at Cisco

The good old days

When I worked at Cisco in the 90s and the same thing happened, Don Listwin replied and said he'd catapult the next person to reply over the light rail track on Tasman Drive. The replies stopped.

VMware sucks more customers into its virtual orbit

Vmw has said it is leasing DC space, so its capex will be for gear. No idea where you get the $200m figure - can build a large single purpose DC for 10-20% of that depending on location. Then, if I was smart, I would buy gear as I needed it to fill the DC.

And it's been 6 weeks or so since the service became fully available, so clearly the fact it isn't he size of AWS by now means it is a failure.

'British Bill Gates' Lynch laments HP's Autonomy 'botch-up'

Oh please... Autonomy was a sales engine with professional services as the product. Oh, and they had some code, but nothing that was useful without a million dollars of pro services to make it work (if that was possible).

A search product that would build an index bigger than the data being searched, thereby more than doubling the storage cost -- what a genius! A company that ran baffling ads on 101 into San Francisco wibbling on about "meaning based computing", like anyone had that on their shopping list.

The only bigger fools here were HP, desperate to buy a software company and willing to ignore all the evidence from the accounts, all the people who knew Autonomy was a paper facade over a boiler-room sales operation, and "customers" who freely admitted getting payments from Autonomy that exactly matched the price they paid for "software". Heck, even Gartner issued a warning to clients to beware the huge pro services costs of making Autonomy functional.

He should move to silicon valley and start hyping social media start-ups with no revenue to speak of. He'd fit right in.

For PITY'S SAKE, DON'T BUY an iPHONE 5S, begs FSF

No-one who buys an iPhone will care, because the FSF is not suggesting a realistic alternative to buying one -- some freetard Android fork is not an iPhone substitute. Hell, I'd say most Android phones aren't an iPhone substitute either, and they run code that isn't open source until Google deigns to release it. And then there are the closed modules that every phone vendor adds... so the FSF is really saying "Just forget about a good, functional smart phone. You shouldn't buy anything unless all of its code is published... which is none of them, unless you buy a working Android phone and hope you can install this freetard fork. Which probably won't work on your phone at all, but if by some miracle it does, it certainly won't work with all of the cool features of your phone, because it won't have the right drivers." I mean, seriously?

Re: Blah blah blah -@AC 14:24

Blimey. You stood right in front of the fingerprint scanner at US customs & border protection. It's on every line. You must provide fingerprints if you are a non-citizen.

Cloud upstart ProfitBricks tries to undercut Amazon on price

Corner shop

Corner shop takes on Walmart on price, more like... these guys are a couple of racks in a couple of colos. They do have an impressive PR team, though, given the amount of coverage they get.

I did have a giggle at their launch last year, though; they claimed "first and only cloud to allow dynamic VM re-sizing while running", even though VMware vCloud Director 1.0 offered this back in September 2010. So there were thousands (or however many copies of VMware has sold) of private and public clouds that already had this "first and only" capability. Never let reality get in the way of a good PR pitch!

OpenStack 'will be derailed' if it mimics AWS, bellows Scoble

Re: AWS API needed?

Well, this is true: but Eucalyptus could simply be a proof that AWS APIs are necessary but not sufficient. As in, maybe you need AWS compatibility, and then also a reason for someone to choose you over actual AWS.

So it's entirely possible that both are right: AWS emulation is a good idea, and also you need to differentiate. But that wouldn't be nearly as entertaining, and nor would it generate as much revenue for Randy Bias' company. After all, Randy's position deliberately shifts the emphasis away from a dominant OpenStack distro as the winning formula towards APIs etc. as being the winning formula. So those OpenStack distros who stand to make Randy's company irrelevant would be less important if his narrow POV is accepted.

SolidFire snaps up $31m in funding, brandishes 3.4PB monster

Multi-tenancy

The thing that makes SolidFire popular with cloud SPs is that it allows dynamic I/O control per tenant, so they can dial up and down the I/O and pay accordingly. That's a major hole for most flash arrays, regardless of capacity etc.

VMware squeezes customers for stellar quarter

20% bookings growth on $5B biz is impressive

Dumping assets into Pivotal also seemed to help. The numbers they released that show the business without the drag of Pivotal, Zimbra and other diversitures are much better. 5% license growth vs. 3%.

The key forward indicator is bookings, because most of that figure doesn't show up on the balance sheet as revenue due to accounting rules. 20% growth in bookings is a big deal for a $5Bn software company. Very few software companies make it to that size, and almost none of them grow bookings at 20%. Just ask Larry :-)

HP's public cloud revamp to float down the road not taken

Different to everyone except VMware, Joyent...

VMware has been selling its cloud stack to service providers for years -- over 220 clouds based on it today, versus the 10 or so for OpenStack. AVMware has said it will sell all the s/w used for its vCloud Hybrid Service to SPs. Joyent also resells to a couple of SPs, e.g. Telefonica. So HP's move to sell to SPs (if they ever execute on it) is not remotely unique.

Microsoft: Our clouds don't bleed you to death

I think you have that backwards: with 480,000 customers and >50% of servers virtualized vs. Hyoer-V's, er, 5%, VMware has all the content and MS is the HD-DVD... Sure, there's no difference for the app, which is why people continue to ignore free hypervisors and spend billions on VMW...

Icahn and Southeastern try to hamstring Mike Dell's buyout bid

Re: Confused

Because that plan uses Dell's current cash pile to "buy out" current investors. Since it is Dell's cash, it is technically shareholders' money already.

Hedge fund invests $2bn in Microsoft, thinks Redmond is undervalued

Sheesh, those hedge-fund guys. Smartest guys in the room: "We talk up a stock we just invested in so that we can get out when it goes up"

Next they'll be claiming that Xbox Live is the biggest public cloud ever. What's that? Wall Street Journal Ad? Oh...

Mozilla CEO exits just as Firefox mobiles roll out

Charity basket case

Maybe that will be the end of the insufferable billboards around the Bay Area bragging about how smug Firefox is to be "independent" and saving the world from... I dunno... better software from organizations that actually make money? The only reason Mozilla can pay its engineers is because Google pays an assload to have their search engine be the home page.

As el reg would say, "Freetards"

Lynch and his Autonomy inner circle depict selves as crime kingpins

Video removed?

Have Lynch's lawyers been busy? The vid is gone from YouTube...

Amazon cloud spin-off 'inevitable,' says Oppenheimer

Re: el reg said it best

That's just awesome -- you don't believe the people who were there at the time, preferring your own narrative. That's the stuff of legend. Literally.

Citrix morphs from Windows app virtualizer to all app mobilizer

CloudStack maths not looking good

The "more production clouds" claim seems to be fuzzy maths. If CloudStack has about 100 customers, how can it possibly have more production clouds than VMware, which has nearly 200 production public clouds on vCloud Director alone (if the list at vcloud.vmware.com is accurate). That isn't counting any production private clouds VMware has sold. Or maybe every CloudStack customer has 10 production clouds?

In the cloud division, if revenue is $156m up 51%, that meant roughly $55m in growth on just over $100m base. $20m growth came from new acquisition Bytemobile (by definition new revenue). The other $35m? Well, that could have come from the 38% growth in Netscaler. That would mean Netscaler revenue had been the entirety of the $100m cloud division revenue, which means CloudStack contributed pretty much $0.

Autonomy founder attacks HP fraud charges with new website

They can both be right

Lynch's logic seems to be that if HP messed up, he couldn't possibly have been cooking the books. It is entirely possible that Lynch and co were misrepresenting / over-inflating revenues *and* HP overpaid for Autonomy and then found they couldn't scale what was actually a pro services business and not a software company.

There are plenty of red flags to suggest all was not squeaky-clean with Autonomy's accounting practices:

1) As reported here at El Reg, Autonomy sold a $6m deal while simultaneously agreeing to buy from the same customer $8m of software, and then booked that $8m as a marketing charge. You just boosted revenue by $6m for the quarter, and the customer didn't pay a dime. To anyone reading the accounts, it just looks like you over-spent on marketing rather than bought yourself a deal.

2) Recognizing deals as revenue that have not been delivered in the same quarter (probably because of large amounts of pro services required) is against all accounting rules. Lynch maintains that's a difference between US and International accounting. It isn't -- it's misrepresenting revenue under both sets of rules. Deals not delivered go into the deferred revenue bucket and are not counted as revenue yet because they can go bad during implementation.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

'Brit Bill Gates' defends his honour in open letter to HP board

Re: Unimaginable corruption

They absolutely can be blamed if they deliberately mis-stated their financial position. Even if the auditors missed it.

Re: Unimaginable corruption

"in order for HP's claim of fraud to hold weight, the corruption would have encompassed thousands of vendors, customers and partners, or the auditors themselves"

No, it doesn't. All it takes is for one or two people to record a regular sale while also having a side agreement with the customer that you will let them do a return or refund, or will buy an equivalent amount of the customer's product, etc. Repeat this enough times to make the number for the quarter, and you're there.

This has happened enough times (3COM, Sunbeam, etc. etc.), especially when you have a domineering, aggressive CEO with a big ego who is willing to do anything to be seen as "the next Bill Gates" and maintain his or her ego.

Sure, HP grossly over-valued Autonomy too, but that doesn't mean their charges of fraud are automatically wrong. Both things can be true at once.

Amazon to all data centers: Keep up, if you can

Methinks thou doth protest too much, Werner

Every Werner pitch I've seen in the past year has been about how Amazon can run real Enterprise workloads, really, please believe us, goddamn we can't maintain our growth rate with start-ups, don't you see?

Then they show a bunch of big company logos while failing to mention that they're running a small dev/test effort, some monte carlo simulations (with no customer data), maybe a web front end or two... because the crushing truth is that without a re-write, your app is not going to do well at AWS. Just ask SAP, who gave up on trying to get their core app to ever run well with good performance (thanks EBS!)

AWS bids for cloudy SharePoint

Also -- EBS does 100IOPS, and even Amazon.com's own IT department doesn't recommend running more than 100GB of SharePoint on EBS... just check out their white paper on it.

Amid iPad frenzy, Apple staff say 'Remember the workers'

Self-serving tosh

What a lot of self-serving tosh from Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman at the end of this piece. Labeling Apple's product as unethical unless Apple "proves" to some self-appointed guardian of "illegal overtime" that it isn't? Sound like someone irrelevant desperately seeking attention they don't deserve.

Assange shocker: 'Of course I'm a goddamn journalist'

Have they not heard of Dropbox? :-)

Flood-hit WD takes half-billion kidney punch from Seagate

It's just a negotiation

Having worked as an expert on a trade secret case in the US, a couple of thoughts:

1) Arbitration in cases like this is mandatory in some US states, with trial a last resort (seems like this case is under state vs. Federal law).

2) Chris Mellor seems to be over-playing the shock and awe somewhat. This will not have been a surprise to anyone working the case, and it isn't over until both sides agree to a settlement or the trial (and any appeals) conclude. This is merely the latest stage of the negotiation that is a lawsuit

Pure Storage attacks EMC heartland

That would be Matt Kimoeller, not Max.

Still a great product :-)

Hits keep on coming: HP buys Autonomy for $11bn cash

Autonomy - a SAP play all over again?

I wouldn't listen to the Beeb on Autonomy -- Mike Lynch is a BBC Director. Shortly after that, the Beeb cut Autonomy a nice big check for their search technology. He also started appearing regularly on BBC Radio 4 business programs, where he rambled on somewhat incoherently and got a bit abrupt with Evan Davies.

Autonomy basically owns Enterprise Search, after their most capable competitor, FAST, was consumed by Microsoft and basically disappeared (I suspect that team got re-directed to work on Bing). The core search technology is basically a Bayesian inference engine, and it can do some very clever things, so long as you have enough money to keep paying consults to make it work, and enough cash to buy it disk space -- some of the indexes it generates can be 2-3x the size of the original dataset.

Autonomy has mercilessly applied this technology to legal discovery, by ramming the search engine into the Zantaz email archiving product it acquired. Although this combo is not cheap, it is way cheaper than employing hundreds of lawyers to do document review, so this has proven quite lucrative.

What is amazing about this deal is the valuation. Autonomy's core business can only scale by adding people -- it's a pro services company in disguise. You basically have to double the number of people to double the revenue. To make back $11Bn, you'd need to grow the company 10x. The chances of being able to scale the company that way are almost zero.

On the other hand, high complexity, highly expensive software that requires millions to integrate? Sounds like SAP...

Xen virt-wizards jump ship from Citrix to start 'Bromium'

"Doesn't compete" my arse

Hmm. At a start-up, cycles spent maintaining open source projects better return big-time or else you're doomed to be yet another smart, passionate bunch of people with a great idea who can't execute.

So, this sounds like some sort of competitor to VMware vShield. Let's face it: AWS and all the Xen clouds have almost no virtual layer 2 and stateful firewall story, neither does OpenStack. Vmware, meanwhile, despite incurring the wrath of CCIEs everywhere by daring to reconfigure a virtual L2 network automatically without asking, has really moved the discussion on cloud networking forward. So, for Citrix et al, some sort of distributed switch / openflow hybrid thing with virtualization smarts would seem like a large hole. A version that runs on VMware would be necessary, for on premise deployment and at vCloud public providers.

Mickos: Amazon and Eucalyptus still rule the cloud

Meh

Quick -- name a cloud based on Eucalyptus. Right. 4 pages on a total "meh" in the cloud stack fight?

Nintendo 3DS contains £60 in bits

IP costs? Marketing?

You also need to factor in intellectual property (IP) licensing costs, which can be significant per unit cost, and marketing costs. Typically console vendors make little if anything on the console -- games licensing is where it's at. MS has lost money for years on XBOX -- price to retailers is less than what it costs to make.

Microsoft: 'No one cares about Google's dev cloud'

It's all about the jackets

Seriously, all y'all are missing the main competitive point here -- it's all about who wears a jacket. I mean, Werner had just been up there in his famous blue jacket, Randy Bias was wearing a nice pinstripe, and even Alastair, the event host, was wearing a jacket... it all adds up. Clearly, MS dude was the only one not wearing a jacket and that's what's important to be credible to cloud developers.

Google Apps boss says cloud computing is your destiny

Google "safe harbor"

I suggest you Google "safe harbor" (or "safe harbour", if you like) to learn how that data can be stored outside the UK and the EU without breaching the DPA. Millions of companies do it every day.

Cheers!

Bunch o techno-luddites

Wow, I can smell the fear from across teh internets. What CEO needs opinionated techno-weenies who are always quite clear on what cannot be done, if someone else takes care of operating the businesses apps?

There is nothing inherently secure about keeping your data on your own premises. Just ask all the folks who have been hacked and/or had a massive data breach from their down data centers. I've had folks sit in front of me without a red face and say customer and employee data are too sensitive to put in the cloud. These are folks who use Salesforce for CRM and ADP for payroll processing. So, both are already in the cloud then? World has not ended yet? How 'bout that.

Not that I am a Google apps fan, as they can't tell you how your stuff is secured, which tends to make auditors very unhappy. And god forbid you got sued and needed to do electronic discovery of email using Google's "most relevant" search algorithm... when what you need is "exact match".

Sun man and 'Bond nemesis' celebrate 25 years of dotcom

No-one from Cisco or BBN?

No-one from Cisco? Or at least BBN, who pieced together the first ARPANet routers? Not that I have anything against Shawn Fanning et al, but they were way late to the party.