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It may not be a marriage made in heaven, but the cloud is pretty close. Just hours after IBM and Apple announced their strategic partnership, speculation began to spread about two of their most well-known products: What if Siri and Watson were to hook up? Siri is Apple's voice-enabled digital person...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said last week that his main rivals were the new generation of cloud companies, and that IBM and SAP were no longer in his gun sights. Oracle is focusing on cloud infrastructure companies such as Amazon and SaaS providers such as former ally Salesforce.com. "Oracle may have ...

If you look back at what Steve Jobs did, he took a hard look at Porsche and Sony, and then he effectively built a better Sony. As Apple's star rose, Sony's star crashed, but Jobs never targeted Sony directly. He just figured out what Sony wasn't doing right, and he did that extremely well while Sony...

Microsoft is ready to make its enterprise and cloud head, Satya Nadella, the company's new chief executive officer, and it may replace Bill Gates as chairman, according to reports. Nadella appeared to stand out as one of the stronger options to replace retiring CEO Steve Ballmer several weeks ago, b...

Lenovo Group's $2.3 billion deal to purchase IBM's low-end, commodity x86 Server portfolios, related resources and operations is an all-around win for everyone involved. The sale of the IBM x86 servers has been rumored for well over a year, as Big Blue grappled with continuing pressure on its low-ma...

Less than two years after Google's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility was finalized, Google on Wednesday announced that Lenovo would be purchasing Motorola Mobility in a $2.91 billion deal. Google will be retaining the vast majority of Motorola's patent portfolio, including current patent a...

In case you missed last week's announcement that Lenovo would be acquiring IBM's System x x86 server business, here are some of the details: Lenovo is acquiring IBM's x86 server hardware business for $2.3 billion. The assets covered by the deal include the System x rack servers, BladeCenter and Flex...

News that Google is purchasing artificial intelligence company DeepMind for between $500 million and $650 million surfaced Monday. Google spokesperson Tim Drinan confirmed the deal but declined to provide further details. The first commercial applications of DeepMind, which was founded in 2011, are ...

The new deal IBM and Lenovo announced last week showcases that the companies are on very different paths toward two widely divergent but equally powerful goals in what is a rapidly changing market. Lenovo is on a path to dominate the hardware side's second technology wave, while IBM is jumping to wh...

Lenovo has struck a deal to acquire IBM's x86 server business. The deal, jointly announced Thursday, covers System x; BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches; x86-based Flex integrated systems; NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and related software; blade networking; and maintenance ope...

VMware on Wednesday announced it is acquiring enterprise mobile management and security solutions provider AirWatch. The deal, which is expected to close later this quarter subject to the usual regulatory approvals and closing conditions, will expand VMware's reach into the mobile space. AirWatch ha...

IBM is putting a massive amount of resources into Watson, which has the capability to dramatically improve the quality of our decisions. I thought it would be interesting to emulate how it might think when tied to a topical subject. As the U.S. approaches its next election circus, two candidates hav...

Pardon the pun, but there's nothing elementary about IBM's Watson Business Unit. IBM's Watson initiative takes cognitive computing to the head of the class. IBM last week announced it was committing $1 billion and 2,000 employees -- as well as its considerable research and development talents and ma...

The past couple of years have seen rising interest in and considerable promotion of servers and appliances based on the ARM microprocessor architecture. At first glance, the narrative makes some sense. ARM's native performance and energy efficiency, when multiplied across hundreds or thousands of sy...

After my Belize retirement update appeared last week, a number of things happened. Most initially were rather painful, but eventually I was placed on the phone with Rod Kazazi, the project CFO who is based in the United States. Since we both had a financial background, he was able to address most of...