Apple and Samsung Slug it Out in the Smartphone Wars

No one else comes close as the two heavyweights for tech gadgets blow the field away with their latest figures. Apple reported its third-quarter iPhone 5 launch profits, but Samsung is way ahead in overall sales. 

Sales Apocalypse Incoming!

Next quarter, Apple will report its figures for the recently announced iPad 4, iPad mini, new iPods and new Macs. It threatens to be the biggest thing since The Beatles, which for some men in suits talking numbers is pretty scary.  This quarter, Apple merely reported the 5 million iPhone 5 sales and a few other bits and pieces (get the detailed numbers here). 

The company reported $36 billion in revenue, $8.2 billion in net profit, based on sales of 26.9 million iPhones, 14 million iPads, 4.9 million Macs and 5.3 million iPods. iPod sales were down almost 20% from this period last year but could well ping back up as the new models launch, Mac sales sneaked up 1%, but will all those new models may well go ballistic while iPad sales are up 25%.

That lot represents a record September quarter for Apple, and it is expecting $52 billion in the next quarter (and Apple usually underestimates these numbers)! Shareholders get a dividend of $2.65 per share. 

Enter Samsung's Powerhouse

Samsung, with its far wider product range (including the new mini Galaxy SIII) and the fact that it makes stuff for a lot of other companies (including Apple, as well as Google's new 10-inch tablet), manages to make Apple's figures look pretty small. The company sold 56.3 million smartphones, which accounts for over 31% of the global market, double Apple's 15% figure. However, Samsung's stock value is just a third of Apple's.

However, its financial figures are pretty comparable with net profit for the South Korean firm doubled to a record 6.6 trillion Korean Won, around $6 billion in 3Q, powered by smartphone sales and huge demand for its processors, display panels and use of its manufacturing base.

The figure isn't higher than Apple's as Samsung struggles with the lumbering HDTV market (although its large TV panel sales are back in profit), and making all these things is expensive, with continuous rising costs in Asia. There is no breakdown yet on how the Samsung Galaxy SIII is selling (Samsung say it has shipped 20 million). That will be the key point of comparison for many, and while Apple is expected to surge next quarter, Samsung is looking at reduced profits. 

Anyone Else?

The other smartphone makers are so far down the scale it seems rude to compare them. The analyst firms will produce their next comparisons in the coming weeks, but it doesn't look like good news for anyone outside the top two. 

On the tablet front, Amazon also reported its figures with a $274 million net loss, but only stated that the Kindle FIre HD (which it sells at a loss) was the No. 1 product across Amazon stores worldwide. With the product just hitting Europe and Japan expect it to continue to dominate in the run up to Christmas and the company to benefit from content sales.

Despite their legal battles, both must be pretty happy at the top of the pile, and it is hard to see how even almighty Windows Phone 8 and Surface or Lumia and Asha sales could propel Microsoft or Nokia anywhere close, that is a battle that will take years to win. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Microsoft Makes a Marketing Automation Play With MarketingPilot Acquisition

Anybody that had doubts about Microsoft’s commitment to service got more proof this week. Only days before its second quarter earnings announcement, the company announced plans to acquire cloud storage vendor StorSimple and that it closed on a deal to buy marketing automation provider MarketingPilot. Should Salesforce be concerned?

Head in the Clouds

Microsoft is using every opportunity it gets to let us know it is no longer just a software company. Microsoft’s most recent annual report, released earlier this month, included a letter from CEO, Steve Ballmer, reiterating to shareholders that it has evolved into a “devices and services company.” This week the software giant has been busy putting its money where its mouth is.

On Tuesday, October 16, Microsoft announced its intent to purchase StorSimple, which provides an appliance for Windows and VMware that integrates cloud and on-premises storage. Microsoft plans to leverage the technology in its hybrid cloud offerings.

The next day, the company announced the closing of a deal to acquire MarketingPilot, a marketing automation software provider.

Microsoft is always buying something, but the latest round of acquisitions signal a significant shift within the company, which has made its fortune selling software. Windows and Office have long been the main contributors to Microsoft’s profitability and growth. These product families aren’t going away any time soon, but Microsoft realizes consumers and companies are increasingly choosing cloud-based solutions instead of locally deployed software. In addition, more businesses are adopting an IT-as-a-service model, which encourages delivering capabilities as discrete units of service that can be aggregated into more sophisticated offerings. This is driving Microsoft to invest heavily in the cloud and service oriented offering.

The terms of the deals have not been disclosed. Microsoft promises to release more details at the Convergence conference in March.

Other Trends

Microsoft’s acquisition of MarketingPilot is also a part of another major trend — customer engagement. Although the cloud technology and marketing automation may seem unrelated from a business perspective, they aren't. Businesses want holistic, highly integrated, flexible solutions that “just work.” They want the same thing in their interactions with customers and leads. 

Many traditional content management and customer relationship management (CRM) vendors have been adding features that allow business to manage content, marketing campaigns and customer engagement from a single platform. Microsoft may be preparing to follow their lead. The MarketingPilot purchase is being handled through Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM, which could mean customers will soon see marketing automation modules be natively integrated in the platform. There is also an opportunity for marketing automation to come to SharePoint.

Oracle, Microsoft and IBM now own all of the components to create their own Salesforce-like offering. However, none of the companies has put the components together in an easy to use, subscription-based package. If Microsoft decides to move in that direction, they could eventually provide a fair amount of competition to Salesforce in the small and medium business sector because of their will established position in the market.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Microsoft Buys StorSimple, Pursues Hybrid Cloud Storage Strategy

Coming just a day before the announcement of its financial results for the first quarter, Microsoft has announced that it has bought cloud-storage provider StorSimple for an undisclosed sum.

Cloud Storage Market

There may not be any significance in the fact that this deal comes so close to the earnings announcement — except that IBM announced its third quarter results last night, and they weren’t good.

In fact, Mark Loughbridge, IBM’s CFO, said in the earnings call after the results were released that IBM would be looking at analytics, its Smarter Planet initiative (which is closely connected to Big Data) and cloud computing to add US$ 20 billion to its books by 2015.

Microsoft has come under some fire in the past about its cloud ambitions and functionality, but it has done a lot of running in the past year. With this buy, the company will be able to increase its ability send data into the Azure cloud, not to mention Google and Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft, StorSimple

And that’s the real functionality value of this deal. StorSimple was created nearly four years ago to provide cloud-integrated storage solutions and has worked with Microsoft in the past. In 2010, it optimized its products to work with Microsoft applications. This made it a sure target for Microsoft as it clawed back ground it lost to other cloud providers because it wasn't quick enough off the mark.

Microsoft is not saying how much it paid for StorSimple, but we have found in the past that this usually means that, relatively speaking, they haven’t paid a whole lot.

But strategically, when StorSimple is added into the Microsoft mix, it should produce a really heady brew — and that’s where Microsoft is going with this. Microsoft says that the addition of cloud-integrated storage systems will “advance Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision."

It may also be important to note here that StorSimple already works with Microsoft SharePoint (cloud storage is a great way to improve the performance of SharePoint).

Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud Storage Strategy

In practical terms, what this means is that Microsoft is going into the hybrid cloud market in a big way. Combining primary storage, backup, archiving and disaster recovery with cloud integration, this will enable users decide to where their data should be stored.

Customers faced with explosive growth in data are looking to the cloud to help them store, manage and archive that data. But, to be effective, cloud storage needs to integrate with IT's current investments … StorSimple's approach helps customers seamlessly integrate on-premises storage with cloud storage through intelligent automation and management," said Michael Park, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Division for Microsoft.

StorSimple solutions combine the data management functions of primary storage, backup, archive and disaster recovery with cloud integration, enabling customers to optimize storage costs, data protection and service agility.

With it, enterprises will be able to protect and restore production data using public clouds. Using encryption, cloud providers will be able to send data over the web securely, using compression technologies and de-duplication technologies to eliminate multiple copies of data.

StorSimple appliances currently have storage capacities ranging from 2TB to 20 TBs with prices starting at around US$ 40,000.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com