How Much Does a Cloud Cost: Corporate Welfare Edition
Apple will spend $1 billion building a major data center in North Carolina, the state’s governor announced yesterday after signing a bill that will give Apple an estimated $46 million in tax breaks over the next 10 years.
The company could save more than $300 million in state income taxes if the data center is in place for 30 years…. Opponents of the bill have blasted the preferential treatment during a time when the state faces a $4.5 billion budget shortfall.
The Long Slog to Gank Office Market Share
Eighty percent of enterprise customers are still using some version of Microsoft Office for worker productivity and collaboration, with only 8 percent using alternatives, which include Sun StarOffice, Google Premier Apps, Lotus Symphony and Zoho, according to the report by Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish. The report polled 152 IT decision makers.
People & Process in New York Are Expensive
“Using DocPort, if my boss comes to me and says how much does it cost to process an equity in New York, with the detailed information we have, we can easily figure out that it’s costing us $72 to process an equity, while in Madrid they can do it for $42,” Cardenas says. “We tend to be expensive in New York.” Subsequently, the U.S. office has insourced its operations to the Madrid office — 22 employees in Spain now work remotely for the New York office — and saved $2 million.
Smart Cash
Apple’s share of [cell phone] industry operating profits went from 3 percent in 2007 to 20 percent in 2008 and will grow again to an estimated 31 percent in 2009. RIM, maker of the Blackberry, is doing even better, increasing its estimated share of industry profits from 8 percent (2007) to 19 percent (2008) to 35 percent (2009). So adding those two together, Apple and RIM are expected to account for an incredible 66 percent of industry profits this year.
Java, Coast-to-Coast
- RS(D)C: “More than 3100 attendees will attend IBM Rational Software Conference 2009.” I recall IBM folks mentioning a turn-out of around 3,300.
- JavaOne: JavaOne is expected to draw approximately 15,000 attendees this year.
See also me in this short video on RSC.
Lotus vs. Redmond
In the press release, IBM says 200+ Microsoft partners per month are “flocking to sell” the IBM Lotus Foundations Appliance. More than 1,000 Microsoft partners embraced Lotus Foundations in the first five months of 2009, IBM says.
And, as the VAR Guy points out, there’s some unusually tough talk from IBM in the press release:
In addition, some Microsoft partners have expressed disenchantment with Microsoft’s new strategy of battling Linux encroachment in the SMB market by offering a skeletal version of Windows Server. Named “Microsoft Foundation Windows Server,” it can be positioned as a loss leader to up-sell customers a variety of other Microsoft products. Seeing rising customer demand for lower cost, more secure, and open source alternatives, many Microsoft partners are looking to sell Linux-based solutions.
Ovi
Nokia has opened the Ovi Store, where owners of around 50 different Nokia devices can download applications, games, videos and podcasts.
The store consolidates existing services, including Download!, MOSH and WidSets into a one-stop-shop for free and paid content. The store offers 20,000 different items, and can be accessed by around 50 million Nokia device owners, the company said.
COBOL Finally Can Pay Senior Prices for Movies
The news comes from Cobol specialists Micro Focus, which tells us that there are two hundred times as many Cobol transactions as there are Google searches every day, and that in the UK we all use Cobol-powered applications ten times daily on average.
Those figures come largely from mobile phone use, with Cobol still lurking inside the systems of most network operators. Anyone using a cashpoint or booking a holiday is probably also touching some of the two hundred billion lines of code in use (and counting).
Also, Unix is pushing 40.
Billions in the XBox Market
Microsoft just announced sales of Xbox 360 consoles have passed the 30 million mark globally…. And these users spend money, too. In a press release touting the sales numbers, Microsoft claims U.S. consumers alone have spent $14.5 billion.
IDC’s Hardware Gloom
- Server Spend Down: IDC said server sales for the quarter totaled $9.9 billion, down 24.5 percent from the first quarter of last year. It was the third straight quarter of declining server sales and the lowest revenue total since IDC began tracking server sales on a quarterly basis 12 years ago.
- Storage: for the first quarter of 2009, shows an 18.2 per cent decline in total disk storage systems revenue to $5.6bn from a year ago. Within that the external disk storage systems portion declined 13.6 per cent to $4.2bn…. Even though revenues declined the total capacity shipped rose 14.8 percent to 2.146PB.
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