Lenovo to finish $2.1bn IBM x86 server gobble in October Lenovo will finally get to close the deal on IBM’s x86 server division on 1 October – after slicing a few hundred million off the price tag. The Chinese tech firm will finish the acquisition with a closing purchase price of $2.1bn, which is a little lower than the original $2.3bn price tag because of a change in the valuation …
While Lenovo may have come to dominate the quickly shrinking Desktop PC market, the company faces formidable challenges - as a Chinese company -attempting to provide critical Server data processing and data stores for US Enterprise, organizations and municipalities competing with US based HP and Dell.
Furthermore, the modern infrastructure technologies of Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Cocial Media and Mobile, Web presence are overwhelmingly Linux or BSD UNIX-like based and growing exponentially, which leave the Microsoft controlled and obedient Lenovo at a distinct disadvantage.
Cheap hardware and 20th Century software won't benefit Lenovo one iota in this new sphere.
Are you concerned that the money would end-up overseas? Well, you have all major companies making sure money stays over there one-way or the other. So, why does it matter where the money actually goes when the money is staying where it is most profitable and that is not in the US. HP could sell themselves the machines; so they are "sold" from a low tax area to the US. The majority of the profits are made at that transaction. The computers are then sold to the consumer or business with hardly any mark-up and thus low profits.
Lenovo employs foreign workers as well as American.
HP employs foreign workers as well as American.
Dell employs foreign workers as well as American.
I think the biggest threat for all server vendors comes from the Original Device Manufacturers, who are producing throw-away servers for the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Rackspace, under the banner of the Open Compute Project.
If the Hyperscale data centres do not contain kit from IBM, Lenovo, HP or Dell, then how long is it before others catch on to doing the same thing or merely relying on the cloud services of some of these internet/cloud giants (Google, Amazon, Rackspace), to do their IT?
Don't think it will happen? Just look at Linux merely 10 years ago - no one even thought of using it in their data centres and now, it's so popular and in production that any major bugs (such as the recent Heartbleed and Shellshock) are headline news!
I don't know about you but I was running linux in a mission critical role (RHEL AS 2.1 if I recall right and before that it was "Red Hat 7" I want to say, before RHEL existed RHEL 2.1 was a simple migration basically the same software if I remember right) back in 2003 in a datacenter for mobile e-commerce transactions(easily a half million $/day I think in sales in the early days). Wasn't native linux code but rather a combination of Tomcat, BEA Weblogic on Linux, and Oracle back end on HPUX (PA-RISC then Itanium) with EMC then HDS storage at the time.
I don't miss having to hack kickstart install discs to get compatible network drivers inserted into them so we could install our systems, stupid broadcom. Though a few years later intel e1000 went down the tubes(drivers changing constantly in incompatible ways) too.
I remember deploying my first VMware in production (GSX 3.0 if I recall right) I want to say in 2004, same application stack. Was an interesting weekend, last minute deployment to try to save the company's reputation because of bugs in their software. After working 50 hours over 3 days (most of that configuring the in house application stack) it worked, and everyone loved it.
ODMs do well for cloud folks I suppose but the lack of support/poor quality makes them a poor choice for most folks out there. Not everyone has the time to babysit the systems and write custom code to keep the HW running. I did one fairly decent scale white box deployment back in 2005(cost was the main driving factor), and well I was glad when I got to use HP Proliant again. You certainly do pay more, but you get a lot more too. I love ILO4 (even more than ILO3) - the KVM remote console is SO FAST now, email alerting for system events/failures/etc.
Firmware updates are painless too. My personal supermicro server's remote KVM management card has been offline for months because the last update required I wipe it's configuration and I haven't gone back on site to re-configure it yet. Yeah - not for serious business use. OK for personal use.
>Just look at Linux merely 10 years ago - no one even thought of using it in their data centres
AIX 5L was released in 2001...
IBM's adoption of Linux effectively rubber stamped RedHat's new business model (enterprise Linux), it is also another example that seems to indicate that IBM do seem to have a good grasp of where the market is going.
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