eSP - IT Solution Providers in Europe

The Donald Trump presidency flexes its muscle as it blocks the proposed $140 billion acquisition of Qualcomm by Singapore-based Broadcom following concerns will give China the edge in 5G technology development.

The presidential order cites "credible evidence" the acquisition "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the US." Thus, as the US government orders "the Purchaser and Qualcomm shall immediately and permanently abandon the proposed takeover."

Should it have gone through, the Broadcomm-Qualcomm merger would have been the largest technology deal in history, and created the 3rd biggest chipmaker in the world, following Intel and Samsung. A united Broadcomm-Qualcomm would also control around 65% of the bill-of-materials going into smartphones. The acquisition was technically not wanted by the Qualcomm board, but Broadcom could have simply bought up the shareholders, leading to what on knows as a "hostile takeover."

Robin Systems announces Robin Cloud Platform 4.0-- an update of the open source container-based software solution featuring support for Microsoft Azure, as well as Amazon Web Services and on-premise installations.

The update also adds SAP HANA, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL and packaged enterprise apps to all existing big data, NoSQL and Oracle workload support. As a result, the company says, customers can share resources across multiple applications with guaranteed performance isolation, all while slashing deployment and management times "from days to minutes."

“Our customers tell us that what excites them most about Robin is the app-store experience that lets them easily deploy, manage and consolidate all Big Data, NoSQL and databases," Robin adds. "While there are solutions in the market that can orchestrate application clusters, Robin is the only solution that also lets them simplify application lifecycle management and consolidate with predictable QOS. With our latest release we now also let them migrate any enterprise data app, modern or legacy, from on-premise to cloud or between clouds.”

Gartner reports EMEA shows "strong" server revenue growth in Q4 2017 reaching 19.9% Y-o-Y-- even as shipments are down by -7.9% Y-o-Y, making for something of a mixed server bag for the region.

On a global basis, the analyst says the Q4 2017 server market is driven by strong economies, with "a variety of positive server shipment and revenue mixes in almost all geographies." As such, WW Q4 2017 server revenues are up by 25.7% Y-o-Y, while shipments show 8.8% Y-o-Y growth. For overall 2017, revenue growth reaches 10.4% and shipments growth totals 3.1%.

The fragmented nature of WAN makes it one of IT's biggest blind spots, Cisco says-- and company promises to bring make it more visible through a pair of solutions, SD-WAN vAnalytics and Meraki Insight.

“We have set an ambitious goal for ourselves of transforming the entire network, from campus to branch, data center to edge,” Cisco says. “The WAN is a vital part of the network and is one of the toughest to manage. As we bring insight into the WAN with these new innovations, we get closer to delivering end-to-end intent-based networking to help our customers eliminate downtime and save money.”