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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio candidates - Moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (2645)	11/8/2009 11:49:06 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 2955

uf: thanks for conducting that market research and I hope Motorola and Verizon execute well with the Droid phone - lot's of potential with this new smart phone...;-)

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (2645)	11/9/2009 1:08:30 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 2955

The Motorola Droid on Verizon Review the-gadgeteer.com

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (2645)	11/9/2009 2:57:48 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 2955

Cisco, EMC, VMware: A Deal That Matters _______________________________________________________________ By Ed Sperling 11.09.09, 6:00 AM ET Forbes.com The deal between Cisco, EMC and VMware announced last week may look familiar enough on paper. Technology companies join forces all the time, and in the vast majority of cases it never amounts to anything except a press release and a "free" lunch for anyone brave enough to sit through the initial presentation. This one may be different, though, and it's not just because of the players involved. It's the technology itself--the maturity of enough pieces to make everything work together--coupled with a real business need for change within data centers. Timing is everything, and this one looks like a bulls-eye. Good timing is what made the deal between Intel and Microsoft so significant for the PC. It's also what made the combination of AT&T and Apple work so well for the iPhone. The business case is simple enough. Many IT departments have been stockpiling technology for decades. Some of it is incompatible, some of it is unnecessary, and rarely does any CIO know exactly what everything does or how it interacts. Even worse, most of it is incredibly inefficient, which has raised the operating expenses to the point where even the CFO has to take notice. This is why almost every CIO on the planet is looking at virtualization, cloud computing (private or public) and anything else that will simplify the internal mess, reduce redundancy and improve security. And after nearly a decade, all of these technologies have been banged around enough to attain a reasonable level of confidence. What's new in this whole scheme is flexible utilization, and it's been a piece that has been sorely lacking. Amazon's cloud approach is a great example of this. A customer can provision servers or turn them off within minutes, rather than the usual weeks or months it takes for an internal IT department. Cisco's approach is to do just that with its Vblock technology, which can add virtual machines as needed and lop them off when they're not needed. "Storage is underutilized 40% to 60%," said Gary Moore, senior vice president for services at Cisco. "And when you go to provision new applications, it takes four to six months. We can do 250 applications in a weekend." For Cisco, this is a particularly interesting marketing pitch and point of entry. For years it was the server or software vendors that dominated this market and determined what got bought on the network. The network was secondary. It's what connected them all together. In this scheme it's the network that is the determining factor in what gets processed, where it gets processed, where it gets stored, how much gets stored and how many resources are used in the processing. The best analogy to this approach is a flexible grid, where processor cores and storage resources are dynamically assigned as needed. This concept hasn't gone unnoticed by other big companies, either. The ecosystem now includes Accenture, WiPro and Tata, which all are on board as providers and integrators of this technology, as well as SAP and Oracle. This could even be Oracle's entry point into the packaged server market, if the deal to buy Sun ever gets approved. (In a supreme bit of irony, it was former Sun CEO Scott McNealy who said in the early 1990s that the network is the computer.) In fact, it looks as if the only thing that can really mess this up are the players themselves. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened in the tech world. Even the best-laid plans of pre-sales and post-sales support can go awry. Road maps have been known to fall apart and ecosystems can dissolve from infighting and mistrust. But if all works as planned, the next couple years certainly should be worth watching in the enterprise.

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (2645)	11/10/2009 7:39:10 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 2955

Motorola Probably Sold 100,000 Droids in Challenge to IPhone / By Hugo Miller and Amy Thomson Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Motorola Inc. probably sold 100,000 Droid phones in their first weekend on the market, a sign that the handset maker is recovering even though it still trails Apple Inc., an analyst said. Verizon Wireless, the carrier for the device, had 200,000 Droid phones on hand, and most stores sold at least half of their stock, Mark McKechnie at Broadpoint AmTech Inc. said yesterday. Including other models, Motorola will sell 1 million phones based on Google Inc.’s Android software in the fourth quarter and 10 million in 2010, he said. Motorola and Verizon are competing against a new version of Apple’s iPhone, offered in the U.S. through AT&T Inc. Apple sold more than 1 million of the latest model in its weekend debut in June. Motorola’s share of the phone market dropped to 5.6 percent in the second quarter, from 10 percent a year earlier, according to researcher Gartner Inc. “I see the first few days as encouraging,” McKechnie said. “There seems to be pretty good demand -- they’ve taken the right steps and picked a good partner with Google on the Android side.” Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Illinois, rose 9 cents to $8.98 yesterday in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The stock has more than doubled this year. The Droid, which uses Google’s Android operating system, went on sale Nov. 6 on Verizon’s Web site and in retail stores. It costs $199.99 with a two-year agreement after a $100 mail-in rebate. Apple’s basic iPhone costs $99 with AT&T, while its newer 3GS model costs $199. ‘Much Anticipated’ Verizon and Motorola ads demonstrate Droid features that aren’t available on the iPhone, including running more than one application at a time and allowing users to swap batteries on the go. The debut of the Droid was “exciting given its much anticipated arrival,” said Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson, who declined to comment on sales numbers. Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment. The Droid’s release is a step in the right direction for Motorola, said Jim Suva, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. in San Francisco. “It wasn’t as good as the iPhone, but anybody that was expecting that had their expectations too high,” said Suva, who recommends buying Motorola shares. Traffic in Verizon stores through the first three days was “continually good,” he said. Motorola may sell 1.3 million Android phones in the fourth quarter and 9 million next year, Suva said. Apple will sell 8 million iPhones this quarter and 28.5 million next year, he predicts. Smartphone Demand Shipments of so-called smart phones, which allow users to surf the Web and compose e-mail messages, climbed 4.2 percent to 43.3 million in the third quarter from a year earlier, according to market researcher IDC. Still, as unemployment climbs to the highest level since 1983, carriers may have a tougher time persuading customers to sign up for the pricier data plans that come with smart phones, MKM Partners analyst Tero Kuittinen said in an interview. “I have this nagging suspicion that Android is being overestimated by technology enthusiasts,” said Kuittinen, who is based in Greenwich, Connecticut. He advises investors to sell Motorola shares, which he doesn’t own. “They haven’t really resonated with average consumers.” To contact the reporter on this story: Hugo Miller in Toronto at hugomiller@bloomberg.net Last Updated: November 10, 2009 00:01 EST