SiliconBeat

Cisco launched a new media advertising campaign this week, and this one doesn’t feature the quirky, indie actress Ellen Page.

Instead, the networking giant is using stories about some of its customers, in business and industry, and how they’re using Cisco technology to boost their operations.

That’s in keeping with Cisco’s s new focus, after CEO John Chambers took the company through a much-publicized reorganization last year. He pulled the plug on some ill-fated forays into consumer tech, including Cisco’s attempts to sell handheld Flip cameras and a home video-conferencing system that Page had demonstrated in some jokey television spots last year.

After acknowledging that Cisco had spread itself too thin with those efforts, among other things, Chambers is now vowing to stay focused on a shorter list of commercial tech priorities - where his company is competing with the likes of IBM, HP and Oracle.

The new ads don’t specifically mention Cisco’s internal overhaul, but the campaign “is a reflection of what we’re doing from a corporate strategy perspective,” Cisco Chief Marketing Officer Blair Christie told me last week. She added, “We’re a B to B company.”

The ads still use the “human network” catch-phrase that Cisco first began promoting in 2006. The company won’t say how much the campaign will cost, but Christie said the effort will extend to US and overseas markets and will include a sizeable online component - including “homepage takeovers” on several news sites and a LinkedIn blast to 140,000 C-level executives at companies with which Cisco hopes to do business.

The ads will appear in places where business leaders are likely to be tuning in, which means a heavy roster of televised sports events and finance-oriented sites like CNBC or the Wall Street Journal.

Last last year, in my annual prediction column, I included one far-out, wacky suggestion: Cisco Systems would buy Dell.

Though admittedly a long shot, my rationale was that Hewlett-Packard was moving into networking with its purchase of 3Com. That made it a direct competitor with Cisco. Both companies want to fight for big corporate customers, but HP has an advantage by simply being bigger. Though PCs are a dicey business, the best way for Cisco to level the playing field would be to buy Dell.

I’ve put that out of mind until the last few weeks when a series of events got me thinking that it could make sense. And now there’s a twist: Could Oracle be interested in Dell? I posted a short thought about this on Facebook yesterday after Oracle officially announced it was hiring Mark Hurd, the ousted CEO of HP. They now have a co-president with extensive experience running the largest PC maker in the world. Imagine what Hurd could do with Dell? And what delicious revenge it might be for him to take on HP in the PC business?

A year ago, I would have never thought about Oracle buying a PC company. But now that they’ve done the unthinkable and plunged headlong into hardware by buying Sun Microsystems, how much crazier would it be to see them buy Dell? In fact, yesterday, Quentin Hardy of Forbes also mused about the possibility of Oracle buying Dell:

“The last big Oracle buy was Sun Microsystems. At the time, people liked the software Oracle got from that deal, but wondered what to do with the hardware. Sure, it could sell high-performing Sun servers loaded with Oracle database and application software, but at what acquisition cost?

That deal makes more sense if Oracle adds to its hardware offerings with a comprehensive desktop and laptop offering. Dell has that, along with servers, storage, and a little network switching. More important, it has extensive corporate relations in selling to different parts of a corporate base than Oracle now touches.”

The company in the middle now is Dell. Following their loss in the 3PAR bidding, they are a wounded duck. They have a market cap of $24.4 billion, and annual revenue that fell last year to $52.9 billion.

By comparison:

• Cisco has a market cap of $117.4 billion and annual revenue of $36.1 billion.
• HP has  a market cap of $82.9 billion and annual revenue of $114.b5 billion in 2009.
• Oracle has a market cap of $120.4 billion and annual revenue of $26.8 billion.
• Microsoft has a market cap of $206.23 billion and annual revenue of $62.5 billion.
• IBM has a market cap of $158.5 billion and annual revenue of $95.8 billion.

I mention Microsoft only because of something Oracle founder Larry Ellison said a few years ago when he predicted the IT industry would consolidate. Ellison said there would be a handful of giants left at the end of the day, including Microsoft, HP, IBM, and a couple others. (I don’t remember the exact list, but I think there were five).

In any case, he wanted to make sure Oracle was one of the few giants left. And so he said Oracle needed to acquire large numbers of companies to boost its revenues and size to keep pace with companies like Microsoft. Being bigger would allow the company to spread costs such as R&D over a wider base, Ellison said.

That rationale remains as true today as it was then. Dell, first and foremost, needs to get much larger to remain competitive with HP. The fastest way to get there is acquisitions. But we’ve seen that Dell doesn’t have the resources to go toe-to-toe with HP. In fact, HP could simply starve Dell by outbidding them time and time again.

No, the best option for Dell at this point is to be acquired. But by which company?

HP probably couldn’t buy Dell without getting hung up on anti-trust issues. But if Cisco bought Dell, you would have a company with close to $90 billion in annual revenue, a number that significantly closes the gap with HP. And if Oracle bought Dell, you’d have a company with more than $60 billion in annual revenue, still only about half HP’s revenue, but closer.

Over at Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski wondered whether Oracle might buy HP:

“Yes, it is a big pill to swallow however, it would enable Larry Ellison, CEO and co-founder of Oracle to perform an end run in the massive global IT market and also leave a substantial legacy on his upcoming retirement.

If there is one thing we know about Larry Ellison is that he is motivated by big goals. Is this one too large for him?”

While I see Tom’s logic, I still find this scenario to be unlikely. Oracle has a lot of money, but it would probably need to make a hostile, all-cash bid for HP, which would be way too expensive. It would have to borrow massive amounts and take on big debt. Oracle’s stock wouldn’t be that attractive to HP shareholders, given that until the last couple months, Oracle and HP stock prices have tracked pretty close together:

However this plays out, expect lots of drama over the next few months. There’s no love lost between these companies. And with the economy stagnant, big players have clearly decided that acquisitions are the way to grow.

What is it with those demonic sheep?

IBM rolled out a new line of Unix server systems under the Power 7 nameplate on Monday. Analysts said IBM appears to be positioning the new machines as a counter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s ambitious plans for selling high-end Sparc servers from newly acquired Sun Microsystems.

Both companies are angling to sell powerful (and expensive) systems that combine hardware and software, engineered and optimized for specific uses such as running complex financial operations. IBM’s press release lays out all their technical specs in detail.

But IBM didn’t stop there. Ellison has been trash-talking IBM for months now, and Big Blue answered back today with a feisty Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ServersForTruth) and a YouTube video that digs at Oracle on several points, including an episode last fall when an industry standards group fined Oracle $10,000 for using the group’s name in ads that didn’t meet its rules.

The video, which IBM says it produced in-house, is a fun spoof of a typically over-heated political campaign spot. Borrowing from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and her much-discussed ad attacking rival Senate candidate Tom Campbell,  IBM even threw in a cameo appearance by a sheep with glowing red eyes.

You don’t usually think of Hewlett-Packard as a food business. But with food contamination growing as a public concern, HP this week announced a new cloud-based recall service that it’s hoping the food industry will adopt as it searches for ways to address the issue.

HP said Canada’s GS1, a non-profit trade group that works to improve supply chain efficiency, will use HP software, services and infrastructure to operate a system that tracks food products as they are manufactured and distributed to retailers.

The system is intended to let different companies use consistent technical standards to share information — which safety advocates say is often lacking during contamination scares — and to distribute specific recall instructions as needed.

IBM rolled out its own cloud-based approach to food “traceability” earlier this year, built around software developed at its South San Jose research lab. HP reportedly competed with IBM for the Canadian contract.

HP’s announcement didn’t draw as many headlines as some of the other food-safety news that broke this month, including reports that authorities had linked another salmonella outbreak to beef from a Fresno packing plant, and that Congress was debating a bill to give the U.S. Food & Drug Administration more inspection and enforcement power. But HP and IBM both see a big market for technology aimed at this issue.

That $7.4 billion deal for Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems will take a little longer to win Department of Justice approval. It seems anti-trust regulators are still scrutinizing how the sale would affect Sun’s Java software platform, which is widely used by IBM and many other companies.

 Oracle, however, is doing its best to downplay any concerns. The company got out in front of the news with a press release late Friday that quoted one of its attorneys, Dan Wall:

“We’ve had a very good dialogue with the Department of Justice and we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline,” Wall said. “All that’s left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed …”

In slightly more neutral terms, Sun filed a report with the SEC this morning that said the DOJ had issued on Friday a “second request,” or a request for additional information on the deal. The effect of that request is to extend the DOJ review period, Sun explained, adding that it is gathering information to respond to the request.

The Obama administration has been giving a little closer scrutiny to some anti-trust issues, compared with its predecessor, according to some experts. Still, that doesn’t mean the Oracle-Sun deal won’t go through.

Wall said in his statement that the Java issue “is never going to get in the way of the deal. I fully expect that the investigation will end soon and not delay the closing of the deal this summer.”

It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley, and still we can’t help thinking about clouds. Maybe it’s because in recent days, some big tech companies have been talking up their efforts in the business of cloud computing.

Cloud computing, in which software and services are accessed from a remote data center “cloud,” has been the focus of much industry hype. But all that talk has left many businesses uncertain about how to use the technology, as IDC analyst Frank Gens said in a recent statement. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard clearly see this as an opportunity.

HP, which already sells hardware and software for data centers, rolled out a new package of consulting services earlier this week, including workshops and “road maps” of recommendations on design, testing and security for businesses considering the use of cloud-based services or building their own clouds for internal use.

IBM, meanwhile, announced its own portfolio of new cloud products and services just last week — including software and services that customers can access from IBM’s data centers, services based on internal clouds that IBM can build and run for its clients, and systems of hardware and software designed to work together.

Even Larry Ellison got into the discussion during Oracle’s quarterly earnings call this week, as he told analysts that Oracle is preparing to make more of its business software available on a subscription basis, to compete with companies like Salesforce.com. Ellison said Oracle will host the software on its own data centers or install it on a client’s data center, with Oracle operating it as a service.

One analyst said that sounded like Ellison was talking about cloud computing, which the Oracle CEO has famously derided in the past. Ellison did not disagree.

And if that’s not enough cloud news, some top execs from HP, Amazon, Sun and other companies were trading ideas at the GigaOM Network’s Structure 09 conference in San Francisco this week. The Register had an interesting account .

The New York Times is reporting on its tech blog that Sun Microsystems has cancelled a long-running, but star-crossed, effort to develop a high-performance computer chip that the company once considered a key element of its turnaround strategy.

The report comes just weeks before Sun’s stockholders are scheduled to vote on a deal for the company to be acquired by Oracle, the business software giant, for $7.4 billion. A Sun spokeswoman declined comment on the report, which the Times attributed to unnamed sources.

Sun has been working on the chip, code-named “Rock,” for more than five years. The company is better known for making servers and software, although it’s had some success in recent years with other high-performance chips of its own design.

But much of the computer server industry, meanwhile, has shifted to machines built with lower-cost commodity chips from companies like Intel and AMD. Sun was hoping the Rock would help it move ahead at the high-performance end of the market, where it competes with bigger rivals such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

The Rock had 16 processor cores and was designed for high-end servers that would be used to crunch huge amounts of data quickly. But it reportedly suffered from development glitches that forced Sun to postpone its debut from 2008 to later this year.

Let’s see. An  historic presidential election is coming to a climax with a surge of voters causing long lines at polling places. The nation, even the world, shivers with anticipation over the results. Good time to release significant pieces of personnel news?

That’s what Apple did this morning by posting a press release announcing the hiring of an ex-IBM vice president, Mark Papermaster, to head up its devices hardware engineering division. The news had actually been reported last week by CNet, via a court filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in which IBM claimed that Papermaster would be working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in what IBM believes is Read the rest of this entry »