Technology

Database Giant Oracle’s strategic interest is in building out its communications vertical market offering, particularly in voice over IP with upcoming demand for LTE, rather than signaling any intention to enter the software defined networking space in competition with Cisco or Juniper. Oracle already delivers database, infrastructure software and applications software to the telecom vertical. Oracle is usually opportunistic in its acquisitions, and further details on why this acquisition is taking place at this particular time may become clear with disclosures upcoming in the proxy statement.

With the acquisition announcement, Acme Packet reported 4Q numbers that beat expectations for both product and total revenues. For the full year, product revenues declined 17%, while total

One of the core value propositions of Google’s Android, because of its integration of Java, has been the “write once run everywhere” credo Java claims, but has not delivered so far. Though Java, Flash and HTML5 are trying for ubiquity as technology platforms so that applications written by a programmer can run across all devices, none has achieved complete success yet.

Google has updated its Native Client (NaCl) programming technology with the latest version 25 SDK release, enabling it to run apps on ARM-based devices such as smartphones and tablets. According to Chromium, Google has
taken a step further as the NaCl technology has been updated to allow it also run apps on ARM-based devices, which powers most of the smartphones, tablets and other devices. NaCl allows developers

Intel charges around $120-140 for each i5/i7 chipset used in Apple’s MacBook portfolio. Intel generates a gross margin of over 60% on each of these chipsets. This contrasts with ARM based chipset costs of around $15-30, with a mid 40% gross margin. It is possible, therefore, that Apple is keen to reduce the price point of its MacBook portfolio by transitioning away from Intel. It may be that Apple does not believe that Intel’s roadmap aligns with its own requirements, resulting in Apple either having to use an under-powered chipset or overpay for a more capable one. We believe this missalignment in incentives between the companies will continue to push Apple to take more
control of its own hardware.

Intel does have a line of lower priced chipsets (the Clovertrail range) that is based on the x86 platform and is priced at around $40. We expect many of

ARM chipsets are more efficient than x86 when using equal geometries, making ARM chipset less reliant on smaller geometries to sustain efficiency improvements. ARM’s main weakness has been processing power, but this should be addressed by the move to 64 bit processing in late 2013 as shown in the ARM performance roadmap in the figure below.

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TIBCO is a leading provider of infrastructure and middleware software, with its origins in providing a real-time information bus or backbone that has enabled operations such as Wall Street trading floors to integrate systems and data to provide real-time flow of stock quotes and news items.

The company has significantly expanded its market opportunities by growing its stack of software technology to broaden the number of vertical markets that are addressed by the platform as well as adding layers of technology that enable it to expand beyond the IT department as the primary market to line-of-business managers who see the benefits for operational decision making.

As its traditional market has matured, management has shown good vision in repositioning the company to enhance growth and stay relevant in the