Posts Tagged ‘Q4’
Surprise! This IBM Product Is So Hot, IBM Ran Out Of It (IBM)
IBM ran into an interesting problem last quarter. It had a product so popular, that it literally ran out of stock. But that won’t stop it from releasing the umpteenth new version of it tomorrow.
The product goes by the tongue-twisting name of the Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance and IBM’s strategy has been to release about 100 individual versions of the product, geared for specific industries. Tomorrow, IBM will release a version for the retail industry and trot out an early user, Bass Pro Shops, the company told Business Insider.
IBM’s Netezza business grew 70 percent in the fourth quarter and on last week’s Q4 analyst call, IBM’s CFO Mark Loughridge was forced to admit that its success took the company by surprise. IBM “ran out of boxes” in the quarter he said.
Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance is one of those “big data” products that helps enterprises analyze massive amounts of data on the fly. As an in-memory analytics appliance, it competes with SAP’s HANA and Oracle’s Oracle Exadata.
Its claim to fame is that it can sift through petabytes of data in data in minutes. A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes. Just to give some context, the appliance can analyze in minutes almost half of what the average human brain will store in a lifetime.
It’s a good thing IBM is killing it with Netezza, too. The company forked out $1.78 billion for the company in 2010.
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Why You Should Stay At Your Corporate Job Instead Of Jumping To A Startup
These days startups are popping up everywhere.
In Q4 of 2009, less than 10% of state VC deals were devoted to seed funding in New York and California. By mid-2011, that figure jumped to 25% in Silicon Alley (NYC) and 13% in Silicon Valley (via Mashable).
But just because things are trending in that direction does not mean launching a company is a smart move for everyone.
Eric Jackson, who’s the founder and managing member of Ironfire Capital, offered up 10 tips to Forbes about why you shouldn’t be so quick to leave your corporate gig. We’ve highlighted the top 5:
1. It’s really tough to figure out who’s going to be the next Facebook or Twitter.
2. There’s more money to be made, and invested in new technologies, at large companies.
3. Sometimes it’s best to try and crush the competition after they come up with the good idea.
4. If you don’t like your boss, you can switch teams. At a startup, you’re stuck with him or her.
5. Most successful people have long tenures at established companies.
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of launching a startup. Keep in mind that lots of successful entrepreneurs worked at their desk jobs until their startups really took off.
Read all of Jackson’s tips and more of his advice at Forbes >
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Apple Had Its ‘Strongest December Ever,’ Says Ticonderoga (AAPL)
Ticonderoga analyst Brian White says Apple had its strongest December ever according to his analysis of the Asian supply chain.
White has an “Apple Barometer” which tracks monthly sales in the Taiwan tech supply chain. The suppliers in the barometer get 50%-60% of their sales from Apple. It’s not a perfect model, but it does provide some directional analysis.
For December, the Apple Barometer was up 9% on a month over month bases, the “strongest December ever,” according to White. Over the last six years, sales for December have been down 15% month over month on average.
This follows a November that was the best ever for Apple. The Apple Barometer was up 17%.
Reinforcing the supply chain data, Verizon announced yesterday iPhone sales had doubled on a quarter over quarter basis. White believes AT&T also double sales on a quarter over quarter basis, and says it’s “plausible” Apple sold 32-33 million iPhones in the December quarter.
White’s official estimate for the quarter is 30 million iPhones, so it looks like Apple is set to beat expectations handily, once again.
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Apple Had Its ‘Strongest December Ever,’ Says Ticonderoga (AAPL)
Ticonderoga analyst Brian White says Apple had its strongest December ever according to his analysis of the Asian supply chain.
White has an “Apple Barometer” which tracks monthly sales in the Taiwan tech supply chain. The suppliers in the barometer get 50%-60% of their sales from Apple. It’s not a perfect model, but it does provide some directional analysis.
For December, the Apple Barometer was up 9% on a month over month bases, the “strongest December ever,” according to White. Over the last six years, sales for December have been down 15% month over month on average.
This follows a November that was the best ever for Apple. The Apple Barometer was up 17%.
Reinforcing the supply chain data, Verizon announced yesterday iPhone sales had doubled on a quarter over quarter basis. White believes AT&T also double sales on a quarter over quarter basis, and says it’s “plausible” Apple sold 32-33 million iPhones in the December quarter.
White’s official estimate for the quarter is 30 million iPhones, so it looks like Apple is set to beat expectations handily, once again.
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See Also:
- THE APPLE INVESTOR: 2011 Is The Year That Changed Everything
- THE APPLE INVESTOR: Here Are The Next Four Industries Apple Will Disrupt
- Verizon iPhone Sales Doubled From Q3 To Q4
ATTENTION APPLE FANS: Samsung Blowing Past Apple To Become The Biggest Smartphone Vendor Is Not Good News
For the past couple of years, Apple fans have responded to the Android threat with an evolving series of arguments about why Android isn’t a threat:
- Initially, the argument was that Android phones sucked compared to the iPhone, which was at least a year or more ahead
- Then, when Android phones improved and the gap closed, Apple fans pointed out that that the iOS platform was was still much bigger than Android and therefore much better for developers
- Then, when Android became the smartphone market-share leader, Apple fans pointed out that Android phones were made by several different manufacturers and that Apple was still the biggest smartphone maker and that the App Store was still the best platform for developers
- And so on…
But now Android isn’t just the operating system market share leader. Now, a single Android manufacturer, Samsung, has blown past Apple in global handset sales, shipping a 28 million units in Q3 while Apple only sold 17 million iPhones.
Yes, there were some mitigating factors. Q3 was a disappointing quarter for Apple iPhone sales, because consumers were waiting for the iPhone 5. Samsung’s shipments were sales into the channel, not end-user sales. Samsung’s smartphone sales include some Windows phones. And, yes, Apple will likely have a monster Q4 on the back of the iPhone 4S.
But still…
Android has now blasted past iOS in the smartphone platform market. Samsung has now blasted past Apple in the global handset market. Samsung and Motorola phones have now come very close to the iPhone in terms of design and performance, so much so that even some former Apple fanatics are defecting to Android. And Android has become an increasingly viable and important platform for developers (and, if past is prologue, is on its way to becoming the most important).
No matter how you look at it, in a race for global smartphone platform domination, this is a worrisome trend for Apple.
As the history of the tech industry has demonstrated again and again, technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform. Although several different platforms can co-exist while a market is developing, eventually a clear leader emerges. And as it does, the leader’s power and “network effects” grow, while the leverage of the smaller platforms diminishes.
In the case of Android, this growing power will not lead to enormous profits for Google, because, right now anyway, Google is not selling Android. (Instead, Google is building a “moat” around its wildly profitable search business and making it easier for people to use Google search from their phones. This may change when Google acquires Motorola and starts selling integrated handsets itself.)
But the better Android phones get, and the more market share Android gains, the more Android’s network effects will increase, and the more Apple’s leverage over the iPhone ecosystem will diminish. And that can only be bad news for Apple’s ability to continue to command exploding profits from iPhones, app developers, musicians, media companies, and others who now must pay it big distribution fees because they have no other choice.
Similarly, the bigger other global handset manufacturers get relative to Apple, the less (relative) leverage Apple will have over partners in the global parts-and-manufacturing supply chains.
As we’ve noted frequently, Apple learned some key lessons after getting clobbered in the PC platform market in the 1990s. And it has three key advantages that it didn’t have then:
- Its products are priced the same as, or below, the competition (In the 1980s and 1990s, Apple’s Macs were always “premium” priced)
- The “platform” aspect of smartphones is not as all-powerful as the platform aspect of PCs, because so many apps are built into all phones and/or are cloud-based or otherwise platform agnostic, and
- Android is still a fragmented platform, with several different versions that aren’t cross-compatible, reducing the advantages of a common platform
All these advantages have helped Apple continue to thrive over the past couple of years. But Apple’s decision to move the launch of the latest iPhone back three months, as well as its decision not release a revolutionary new phone until next year, have helped Android close the gap. And the ongoing Android share gains, as well as Samsung’s blowout quarter and the disappointing Q3 iPhone sales, should be wake-up calls.
SEE ALSO: Samsung Rockets Past Apple To Take The Lead In Global Smartphone Sales
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