Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Qualcomm is the latest tech giant to consider splitting up. IBM just disappointed investors with its latest quarterly earnings report. SAP fared somewhat better. Your treat for later: Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo get their chance to impress after today’s market close. Enjoy your Tuesday!
TOP OF MIND
Qualcomm does some soul-searching. The world's biggest maker of chips for mobile gadgets is contemplating multiple options suggested by activist investor Jana Partners, including a potential breakup. We may hear more when the company reports its latest quarter on Wednesday, according to The Wall Street Journal. A separate story by Reuters suggests the company could also be preparing to lay off up to 10% of its workforce.
TRENDING
Toshiba's accounting scandal claims CEO. Hisao Tanaka stepped down after an independent investigation found he was aware of $1.2 billion in overstated profits. So did half the board.
IBM defends cloud and analytics investments, in face of its 13th consecutive quarterly sales decline. Those areas saw 70% and 20% respectively, according to CFO Martin Schroeter. But the company doesn't break out those numbers.
SAP's customers are moving to cloud contracts quickly. That was a drag on profits for the latest quarter. On the bright side: the software company is standing by its full-year forecast.
Is Apple charging up its electric car plans? Tongues are wagging over the company's hire of Doug Betts, a former Chrysler executive who most recently worked on the Fiat brand.
No separation anxiety here. PayPal's market capitalization climbed to nearly $49 billion on Monday, the first day of trading after the official breakup with eBay. Its former spouse ended the day worth $35 billion.
Verizon missed its latest quarter, but its customer churn rate decreased and tablet sales were a bright spot.
THE DOWNLOAD
You shouldn't entrust digital strategy to a "gifted few"
The quickest way to get fluent with social media, analytics, wearables, and mobile devices is to let cross-functional teams brainstorm what to do with them. And then experiment.
A survey of more than 4,800 business executives across diverse industries found that 80% of the companies with “maturing” digital strategies cultivate highly collaborative cultures compared with competitors. That could be as simple as encouraging people to lunch together more often, according to anecdotal evidence cited in an analysis of the results.
For the purposes of the research, conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Digital, no company was considered “mature.” That is “an organization where digital has transformed processes, talent engagement and business models.” The maturing group was more likely to have a clear digital strategy than those in the “early” or “developing” stages.
Read more about the survey findings.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
Big money for keeping your customers happy. Medallia, a specialist in customer experience management software, has raised $150 million in growth equity from Sequoia Capital.
Payments processor First Data wants to go public again. According to the IPO filing, it would still be mostly owned by private equity firm KKR, which took it private in 2007 in a $28 billion buyout.
Have little patience for used car dealers? Neither does Vroom, the New York startup that wants to help owners sell them via smartphone. It just got another $54 million in funding.
$4 billion each, in just one day. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have seen their personal fortunes grow around 24% this year. Google's stock managed a single-day increase of $93 per share last Friday alone.
ALSO WORTH SHARING
Micron to Chinese suitor: Thanks, but no thanks. The chipmaker doesn't think Tsinghua's $23 billion buyout offer has any chance of success, because of regulatory considerations.
Uber isn't standing down against European regulatory pressure any time soon. "Regulation in some countries was written decades ago before we all carried smartphones in our pockets," the company's policy head Mark MacGann told reporters Monday.
Apparently, many Apple Watch owners are pretty satisfied. Too pricey for your wallet? Word is there may be a cheaper version of the gold model in the works.
Google is latest to oppose controversial new export regulations, reports The Verge. Many security researchers believe the so-called Wassenaar Arrangement would make it more difficult to build effective cyberdefenses.
Evernote has a new CEO, the former head of Google X, Chris O'Neill. That makes an IPO more likely.
Adobe hasn't had a CTO in several years, but it just hired a former Microsoft executive to steer its cloud strategy.
Just cars, no drivers. Welcome to "M City," built for autonomous test drives.
Microsoft has scored a huge cloud contract. GE plans to buy 300,000 seats of Office 365.
MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS
Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg foresees new mobile data revolution by Kevin Fitchard
This 19-year-old founder wants to take on Texas Instruments and other chip giants by Stacey Higginbotham
Twitter's new Safety Center helps you deal with harassment by Kia Kokalitcheva
In Ashley Madison hack, copyright "solution" is worse than no solution by Jeff John Roberts
Gawker and Reddit are learning a similar lesson: Growing up is hard by Mathew Ingram
ONE MORE THING
Intel defends its name with lawsuit. Your company should think twice before using "intel" as shorthand for "intelligence." A marketing research firm just found out the hard way.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
LinuxCon North America: All about open source. (Aug. 17 - 19; Seattle)
SuccessConnect: Simplify the way the world works. (Aug. 10 - 12; Las Vegas)
VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco)
Gartner Customer 360 Summit: Strategies for digital engagement. (Sept. 9 - 11; San Diego)
Dreamforce: The Salesforce community. (Sept. 15 - 18; San Francisco)
.conf2015: Splunk's "get your data on" gathering. (Sept. 21 - 24; Las Vegas)
Cassandra Summit: Largest gathering of Cassandra database developers. (Sept. 22 - 24; San Francisco)
AppSec USA 2015: Application security principles. (Sept. 22 - 25; San Francisco)
BoxWorks 2015: Cloud collaboration solutions. (Sept. 28 - 30; San Francisco)
Workday Rising: Meet and share. (Sept. 28 - Oct. 1; Las Vegas)
HP Engage: Big data, big engagement. (Oct. 4 - 6; San Diego)
Gartner Symposium ITxpo: CIOs and senior IT executives. (Oct. 4 - 8; Orlando, Florida)
I Love APIs 2015: Apigee's annual conference. (Oct. 12 - 14; San Jose, California)
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: World's largest gather of women technologists. (Oct. 14 - 16; Houston)
DevOps Enterprise Summit: Lean principles meet technology management. (Oct. 19 - 21; San Francisco)
CX San Francisco: Forrester's forum for customer experience professionals. (Oct. 22 - 23)
Oracle OpenWorld: Customer and partner conference. (Oct. 25 - 29; San Francisco)
TBM Conference 2015: Manage IT like a business. (Oct. 26 - 29; Chicago)
eBusiness Chicago: eBusiness and channel strategy. (Oct. 29 - 30)
QuickBooks Connect: SMBs, entrepreneurs, accountants and developers. (Nov. 2 - 4; San Jose, California)
CMO+CIO: Forrester's summit on strategy collaboration. (Nov. 2 - 4; Sarasota, Florida)
Oktane15: Identity management trends. (Nov. 2 - 4; Las Vegas)
