Technology

Nov 10

Global Access Corp to Acquire Tejas Video

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Acquisition represents an opportunity for GAXC to substantially grow kiosk business at United States military facilities

Transaction Brings Total Number of Deployed DVD Kiosks to Over 600

Global Axcess Corp (OTC Bulletin Board: GAXC; the “Company”), an independent provider of self-service kiosk solutions, today announced that it has signed a Definitive Agreement to acquire Tejas Video Partners (“Tejas”), a privately held firm operating in the unattended DVD rental kiosk business.  Tejas currently has over 260 kiosk locations in operation across the United States, primarily at over 70 military facilities.

Global Axcess expects to close the acquisition by the end of November, which will result in an increase the Company’s number of deployed DVD rental kiosks to over 600.  Upon close of the acquisition, the Company’s total DVD kiosk portfolio will be located at a combination of highly attractive grocery store chains and highly sought after locations on U.S. military bases.  The Company believes the acquisition will be immediately accretive, adding over $1.0 million of EBITDA in 2011 and increasing revenues by over $4.0 million.

Tejas Video’s primary contract is with The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (“AAFES”) for DVD rental kiosks, which currently includes 250 kiosks deployed at 220 locations on over 70 bases. Tejas also has a contract with a small Texas-based convenience store chain for 10 additional DVD rental kiosks.  AAFES currently operates facilities at over 100 domestic and 400 military bases abroad. AAFES operates facilities worldwide in more than 30 countries, five U.S. territories and 50 states. It operates approximately 181 main stores and more than 1,000 fast-food restaurants.

Mr. George McQuain, Chief Executive Officer of Global Axcess, indicated, “We are very excited about this combination – the addition of Tejas to our core business is substantial in not only the financial impact on day one, but also in helping us leverage what they have learned from being in the kiosk business for the past 6 years.  Tejas is a stable business with an experienced management team that is generating positive EBITDA annually and has generated revenues of approximately $4.1 million in 2009. They have also demonstrated an ability to keep customers satisfied and committed to long term relationships.  A clear indication of this was shown in Tejas recently defeating a major competitor for the renewal of the AAFES contract; AAFES elected to renew its initial five year contract with Tejas for another five years.”

Nov 10

Cloud Survey Results show Buy-In from Business & IT Execs

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Nov 09

Dell Plans to Expand Global Services

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In a recent news from the good folks over at Dell, the company plans on focusing its mergers and acquisitions strategy on buying IT services firms, according to a senior Dell executive. Dell’s Global President for Large Enterprise Business Steve Schuckenbrock reported to a news conference that Dell’s mergers and acquisitions plans will drive am expansion of its services globally.

However, Schuckenbrock said that the PC marker would may not necessarily focus on large acquisitions. According to Schuckenbrock, “Services expansion on a geographic basis is a priority. China is high on that list.” These comments from Schuckenbrock follow the acquisition of software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration company Boomi that occurred last week.

The terms of the purchase were not disclosed, however Dell sad the deal would “help businesses reap the full value of cloud computing.” A spokesman from Dell stated that the company has continued to identify potential acquisitions but ere unable to comment on future plans.

“We’re always looking at acquiring potential intellectual property that will help build out the future of computing, whether software, cloud or services. Our acquisitions are based on identifying companies to support our key business initiatives, and acquisitions are a key business initiatives, and acquisitions are a key component of our strategy to transform Dell into a provider of complete solutions for our customers,” said the spokesman.

Despite a tiny decline in shipments in Dell’s Q3, HP retained the top worldwide position for PC sales with 18% marketshare. Acer followed with 13% with Dell having 12%. Lenovo had the strongest growth rate which displaced Toshiba in the top five of Europe, Middle East and Africa with marketshare growing 33%.

Dell unfortunately lost a bidding war against HP for 3Par, a specialist storage supplier. HP closed the deal with a $1.6 billion.

Nov 09

NIIT Tech looking to acquire U.S. co. for Healthcare Services

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NIIT Technologies Ltd. may buy a company or a software product to help it get outsourcing contracts from the global healthcare industry, its chief financial officer, Pratibha Advani, said.

The plan comes as Indian technology companies eye opportunities from increased U.S. spending to digitize healthcare records, a potential investment spree that would help offset the impact of the global economic downturn, when clients cut spending and sought lower rates.

New Delhi-based NIIT Technologies–which currently gets business from the banking, financial services, insurance, travel and transportation, and retail industries–will unveil its strategy for the healthcare segment in early 2011, Ms. Advani said in a recent interview with Dow Jones Newswires.

NIIT Technologies had about 1.56 billion rupees ($35.2 million) in cash at the end of September and may use some of that for an acquisition, Ms. Advani said, adding that the company’s experience in the insurance sector will help it in healthcare as both are closely linked.

She didn’t elaborate on the company’s strategy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635704575603892440310852.html

Nov 09

IBM Giving away 50 million in Services to Municipalities

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IBM today announced a plan to give away $50 million of its services and technology over the next three years to 100 municipalities through a program the company is calling the Smarter Cities Challenge.

Funded via IBM’s philanthropic division, according to an IBM press statement, the Smarter Cities program aims to help municipalities around the world— with populations of 100,000 to 700,000 ideally— solve local problems in any of the following areas: healthcare, education, safety, social services, transportation, communications, sustainability, budget management, energy, and utilities.

The approximate value of each Smarter Cities Challenge grant will be equivalent to US$400,000. The company has alrady completed or is currently conducting a series of pilot grants in Baltimore, Maryland; Austin, Texas; and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Other municipalities can apply online via SmarterCitiesChallenge.org, and will be selected based on a number of criteria including their track record of problem solving, commitment to the use of technology and open data, and willingness to provide IBM with access to and time with city leaders.

Teams of IBM experts will provide chosen cities with recommendations for better delivery of municipal services, more citizen engagement, and improved efficiency and access to proprietary IBM technology like the company’s CityForward, a kind of social network for city leaders, academics, and citizens that is also a city data analysis and data visualization platform.

The grant giving entity IBM stands to prime their sales pipeline by increasing their experience in Gov 2.0, Healthcare and Smart Grid verticals, with their generous, charitable effort.

https://smartercitieschallenge.org/

Nov 08

Debate over Cloud killing IT Services Continues

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The recent CIO magazine article with A.T. Kearney’s Arjun Sethi stating that cloud computing will ultimately end traditional IT outsourcing has continued over at the CIO magazine site.

“In Arjun’s opinion, the likes of Xerox (XRX), HP and Accenture, as well as Indian outsourcing vendors like Infosys (INFY) and TCS, are potentially in peril.

At the same time, Arjun believes that Google (GOOG) and Amazon will eat away a significant share of the IT outsourcing market.”

While there is likely to be a transition it is probably not going to be quite as dramatic as Arjun believes.  The magazine did highlight several areas that are likely to change but the one I personally find most important is

Outsourcers Continue To Get Specialized

“At the pure infrastructure level, IT outsourcing vendors make money on hardware maintenance and support, which is estimated by industry analysts to generate more than $95 billion per year. These service offerings compete with on-demand infrastructure/cloud computing providers—Amazon, Rackspace, Terremark, and the like. But, traditional outsourcing vendors are not giving up; instead they are differentiating themselves with specialized infrastructure offerings like IBM’s (IBM) Smart Business Development and Test Cloud. Even if that market tips towards innovative, pure play IaaS vendors, public infrastructure clouds are estimated to account for only $15-$20 billion in 2014. So, it is unlikely that this $95 billion infrastructure services market would collapse by 80% in just a few years.

Moving up the cloud stack, from pure infrastructure to platform offerings, we see Google, Force.com and Microsoft (MSFT) Azure battling for dominance. In this segment, there is only a marginal overlap in offerings of the traditional outsourcing vendors and platform players.

Perhaps the emergence of cloud platforms will intrude upon the bread and butter of traditional outsourcing—development and integration. However, it is hard to imagine Google building a professional services practice focused on development and integration on top of their platform. On the other hand, arguing that the emergence of cloud platforms will eliminate the need for development and integration is like saying that that outsourcing to India will eliminate all IT jobs in US. ”

CIO article


Nov 08

Siemens IT Solutions Prepping for Sale?

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It would appear that this may be a  possibility with the hiring of Jean Hughes. The lack of comment by the company is also interesting.

http://bit.ly/bVsvO5

Nov 06

German Baking Kiosks frustrating traditional Bakers

Kiosk, Outsourced Services, Technology Comments Off

As the Kiosk revolution continues to roll along the WSJ has a story this morning of “Baking Automats.” Increasingly popular in German supermarkets these baking kiosks are frustrating traditional bakers.

The third-generation baker lobs 15 cents into the massive, beige-colored automat before him, presses a button and cocks his ear to the machine for any clues to what’s transpiring inside. Almost instantly, a warm wheat roll plunks into the bin below.

“Not even two seconds,” says the 55-year-old Mr. Schäfer, who had switched out of a white shirt embroidered with his family bakery’s insignia into a less conspicuous checkered button-down for the stealth fact-finding mission. “Whatever goes on in there, it’s certainly not baking.”

“What exactly does happen inside the automats has become a matter of dispute between Aldi Süd, a discount supermarket chain, and most of Germany’s 15,000 traditional bakeries, since the company began installing the machines in hundreds of its German stores this year. The automats are emblazoned with the word Backofen, or “baking oven,” and pictures of bowls of whole grain and bouquets of wheat. Aldi markets the rolls and bread the machines dispense as “fresh out of the oven—direct into the bag.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304510704575562152983070566.html


Nov 04

5 Key Differences. Micrososft vs. Amazon Cloud

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1. Focus on PaaS vs. IaaS

While analysts and vendors acknowledge the endless discussion of what constitutes “cloud” computing and its various flavors can get tiring, the differences between Azure and EC2 are important, Golden says.

Azure can be classified as Platform as a Service (PaaS): a cloud model that offers hardware, operating systems and application-support, effectively offering a virtual server on which to load software, which can be accessed and managed through a Web browser.

Microsoft last week blurred the boundaries between IaaS and PaaS by adding the ability for developers to run Windows Server 2008 R2 instances on Azure, theoretically making applications portable between the customer data center and Microsoft cloud platform.

2. Application support

While both Azure and EC2 heavily market applications that ISVs make available through their services, EC2 tends to attract resource-intensive software typically classified as enterprise applications, while Azure tends to feature applications that typically serve LAN- or workgroup-sized user groups.

Both platforms are designed to be easily resizable and are being developed quickly; for now at least, that minimizes but doesn’t eliminate the difference between IaaS and PaaS, Golden says.

3. Application portability

Because it’s a Microsoft environment and supports commonly used x86-based computing technologies such as .NET and Visual Studio, Azure is more accessible to developers accustomed to those environments, according to Gary Chen, IDC server virtualization analyst.

The benefit and drawback to that is that Azure only offers Microsoft operating systems, which makes things simpler for Windows developers, but limits the applications they can build on or port to Azure, Hackett says.

The new Windows Server capability is designed to make applications even more portable between data center and cloud, but only when both are closely equivalent Windows Server environments.

Amazon offers Linux, Mac OS X or Windows support, but has some specific storage requirements and also requires developers to take into account the amount of bandwidth and computing time that the application will require.

4. Scalability

Both Azure and EC2 are designed to be scalable, but the way they achieve this is different.

On Azure users have the choice of scaling up the number of VMs on which an application runs, or by increasing the power of the virtual machine they use, according to .NET development consultant Jason Haley. It offers storage as varying blocks of Binary Large Object (BLOB) service and virtual NTFS drives.

Pay-as-you-go on Azure means defining the number of VM nodes that an application requires and the ability to change that number using a management console.

EC2 is far more flexible now than two or three years ago, Golden says. It still scales in blocks called Elastic Compute Units (ECU) that include a specific number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI) and storage volumes called Elastic Block Stores (EBS).

ECUs include varying amounts of storage, I/O, memory, performance equating to specific 32- or 64-bit processors, and a variety of networking and higher-level systems or application-management services.

5. Price

Because Amazon’s service is designed to be more comprehensive, its pricing is more complex than Microsoft’s, though neither pricing plan is simple.

Amazon’s service is reputed to cost more in general, but developers and analysts also complain about the rigidity and surprisingly high cost of Microsoft Azure, often finding EC2 cost-effective even for small projects when comparing the two. Microsoft’s analysis of price differences is much different.

Nov 04

Cloud Sherpas

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Cloud Sherpas  which is a terrific name  fwiw has a press release that claims that 3 million businesses are already on the Google Apps platform, with customers signing up in the thousands every day. Why? High ROI and low TCO thanks to the lack of a hardware investment — and the migration and functionality enhancing services of Google resellers like Cloud Sherpas themselves.

And now Cloud Sherpas is going to use the money they just raised  to enhance their presence and drive further Google Apps adoption in verticals like retail, manufacturing, high tech, healthcare, government, and real estate, according to their press release. The company already has their SherpaTools Google Apps administration tool and experience with deployments between 75 – 75,000 seats — they say that they just need to make an organized push into those new markets.

When Microsoft announced the Office 365 suite would be replacing BPOS, it became the talk of the IT channel. While no one was counting Google Apps out by any stretch of the imagination, it’s good to see that VCs still see the cloud suite as competition worth funding. It’s worth noting, however, that one of the investors leading this round was Hallett Capital, the investment vehicle of Cloud Sherpas CEO Jon Hallett.

Stay tuned for further updates from the Google vs. Microsoft transition to the cloud.