On a more positive note, this year IBM was focused on making things work better or cost less. What struck Janelle Hill, VP, business process management research, Gartner, as most significant at the kickoff to Impact 2011 was IBM's emphasis on helping business transformations, to position companies for growth and optimization of performance results with a much lower amount of emphasis on IBM technologies and product brands. "There is a significant amount of emphasis on the need for leadership and cultural change, not just technology," she says.
Microsoft tossed a curve ball in May when it pledged wider support for open source software. "Microsoft continues to work on becoming more open in how we develop solutions and work with the open source communities," wrote Sandy Gupta, general manager of the open solutions group at Microsoft in a blog post prior to his keynote address at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2011.
While Microsoft was talking about changing its spots, Dell was actually doing so. At its inaugural Dell Storage Forum in June, the company that originally started off as a storage vendor in Michael Dell's college dorm highlighted its evolution from a storage reseller--mainly EMC--to a storage OEM. Dell is becoming a technology leader, at least as far as storage goes, says Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.
In October, Dell and EMC ended their 10-year multibillion-dollar OEM relationship, during which Dell accounted for 8% to 9% of EMC's annual revenue, while EMC contributed approximately half of Dell's storage revenue. At the time of the split, Dell's own storage platforms grew revenue 15% year over year and represented nearly 80% of its storage revenues and more than 90% of its storage profits.
Like HP, Cisco also stumbled this year, announcing a major restructuring and reporting disappointing financial results. At the start of May, the networking giant announced it would streamline its sales, services and engineering organizations, and would focus on five areas: core routing, switching and services; collaboration; data center virtualization and cloud; video; and architectures for business transformation. A week later it announced income of $1.8 billion on net sales of $10.9 billion.
