Earnings per share were at 21 cents, a whopping 14 cents below the consensus view, while revenue, at $14.07 billion, was above the forecast by about a half-billion dollars.

During a conference call with analysts that wrapped up just a little while ago, Dell management struck a tone of sticking to its strategic guns. With the PC market contracting fast, it has gotten selectively aggressive on pricing in order to try and take share away from rivals like Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo. At the same time, the results show growth in expenses like research and development spending that aren’t exactly helping gross margins.

In short, Dell is starting to act a lot more like the privately held company it expects to be before the summer is over, accountable only to its owners.

In their questions, analysts sought to tease out what details they could about the effect of the proposed go-private transaction on things like employee retention and relationships with key customers. CFO Brian Gladden and head of investor relations Rob Williams shot those questions down.

Here’s a summary of the substance of the conference call (all times are Pacific):

1:46 pm: On hold waiting for the conference call to begin with what sounds like some Vivaldi playing in the background.

And now things are getting under way.

Standard conference call boilerplate from head of investor relations Rob Williams.

Brian Gladden is speaking. “We continue to invest in strategic capabilities.” He’s talking about the acquisition of Entratius, which closed last week.

Gross margin was down 40 basis points sequentially.

“We continue to face a competitive pricing environment … and this has affected our profitability.”

Selling and general costs were up 4 percent.

R&D spending is up 33 percent.

Gladden: There were almost $90 million worth of expenses related to the go-private transaction that were excluded from the non-GAAP figures.

1:54 pm: Tom Sweet is talking about business segments. Here comes the news on server sales that Michael Dell said was going so well.

Servers, Networking and Peripherals saw sales grow by about 10 percent, but sales of storage fell about 10 percent.

Sweet: “Dell powers four out of the top five search engines and 75 percent of the top social media sites worldwide.”

Sweet is covering a few customer wins. And now he’s on to software. Revenue was $295 million and had an operating loss of $85 million. “We remain confident that the Quest acquisition (which was $2.4 billion) will be accretive by FY 2015.

Sweet is talking about End User Computing, a.k.a. the PC segment, and says the environment continues to be competitive. The plan is to try and cut $1 billion out of operating costs by 2015. But customers are “diverting spending to alternative mobile solutions.” Does he mean iPads? Yup.

2:01 pm: Sweet is talking about a big PC win with Marsh and McClennan that has 55,000 seats. “We won despite a key competitor that was a longtime incumbent.” Who? HP maybe?

Question and Answer session is getting underway. First is Katy Huberty from Morgan Stanley. “Can you step back and say if the margin decline is what you expected when you rolled out the more aggressive pricing strategy?”

Gladden: We’ve been talking about this for a few quarters, the need to adjust pricing. There are parts of the business where we are beginning to see some elasticity. Demand has been weaker than expected. These are accounts that we’re gaining that we feel good about their profitability. We feel for the long term we think it’s the right thing to do. If you look at the share dynamics, we did improve our share position in a market that is pretty tough.

A question from Tony Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein: Is there a minimum level of profitability that you are willing to sustain in an effort to hold or gain share? Also a question about cost-cutting.

Gladden: Without providing details of specific initiatives, we have continued to take cost out of the business. We are choosing to reinvest those dollars in sales and R&D. I think those things are going on concurrently. (Essentially what he’s saying is that Dell is acting like it’s a private company already.)

As Gladden is speaking I’m looking at the slide presentation. The worst geographically was Asia-Pacific, where sales fell 12 percent year on year. Ouch. Sales in the Americas were up slightly. The BRIC countries fell 17 percent, led by China which fell 24 percent. Super ouch.

Maynard Um: Are customers holding out given the go-private transaction?

Gladden: The customer base has been very supportive of the company. For the conversations I have been a part of they have resulted in many opportunities for the company.

FYI Dell share price update: In after-hours, Dell is trading at $13.37, which is 28 cents below the $13.65 that Michael Dell and Silver Lake have offered shareholders to take it private.

2:11 pm: Question from Steve Milunovich from UBS. He’s asking about changes in sales model on PCs that’s expected as Dell goes private.

Gladden: I wouldn’t say our strategy has changed at all. We’ve adjusted our pricing accordingly and expanded our offerings across the portfolio. This is not a new strategy or business model for us. It’s adjusting tactics given where the market is going.

Question from Credit Suisse: In terms of pursuit of new PC customers, have you put the investments in that you need to or is there more effort to come through?

Gladden: Basically says the strategy hasn’t changed.

Question from Deutsche Bank, asking about servers and the storage business. Servers are good but he says storage doesn’t seem to be getting good attach rates.

Gladden: With servers, we’re winning in the marketing. And when you look at density-optimized servers, we’re winning. We feel good about the server business. You don’t see us trading price for growth there.

About storage. We feel like that business is growing with the market. It’s shrinking with the market. That is not what we’d like to see, obviously. We’re working on it. We’ve added commercial resources over the the last 18 months. We feel positioned to out perform the market.

Question from Keith Bachmann at BMO: How might the M&A strategy differ if the go-private transaction happens? Also about employee retention during the transaction.

Rob Williams: No answer to the first question.

Gladden: Attrition has been about normal for us.

Another question: Does the PC market get softer or better over the next four to six quarters?

Gladden: There are multiple dynamics playing out. There’s a lot driving a refresh cycle. We see improvements in corporate and SMB segments. But we see consumer and government, not so good. Windows 8 has not been the catalyst to growth that we hoped it would be. (That’s a big admission.) You look at recent external data, and we would expect to see over the next few quarters declines in PC demand. We’re trying to run the business based on that.

2:22 pm: Can you update us on the peformance of Quest in the quarter?

Gladden: It’s progressing as expected. We expect it to be accretive in the first fiscal quarter of next year. (Or a year from now.)

Question from Bill Shope of Goldman Sachs, about the PC pricing reductions: Which accounts are the ones that get the discounts? Where do you draw the line on profit vs. market share?

Gladden: We know where long-term strategic accounts are. In many cases those are accounts we’ve had before and have walked away from. I think we’ve been selective. There are clearly some unit volume opportunities where we can sell a lot of units, but they don’t create any profit benefits.

2:29 pm: One last question, this one on support and deployment revenue, which was up.

Tom Sweet: We’re happy with the attach rate there. The team has seen some good things with support products. We’ve been able to keep the attach rate relatively high. Despite downward pressure, it will be a good business.

Gladden: We think that’s a good business on the enterprise side, too.

And that ends the call. Thanks for tuning in!

The company said today that it has closed a $17.1 million round of funding from its existing syndicate of investors, plus a new lead investor, Triangle Peak Partners. The round brings its total capital to $116 million raised since 2005.

It’s Vidyo’s fifth round of funding, the last being a $22 million series D led by QuestMark Partners. Networking company Juniper Networks later joined that with an undisclosed amount at the time, though a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests it was between $12 million and $14 million.

Previous investors include Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds, Saints and Four Rivers Group.

In a statement announcing the funding, Vidyo said it saw billings increase by 68 percent year over year. This included a 77 percent surge in its health care business, and 67 percent growth in large enterprises. Since it’s private, it doesn’t disclose revenue.

Vidyo’s secret sauce is a technology called Adaptive Video Layering. Its hardware sits in a rack in the customer’s data center and constantly watches the underlying network conditions, and then adapts to meet them while video calls are under way. If there’s a lot of interference, the Vidyo system throttles up and down on the picture and sound it’s trying to deliver, based on the condition of the network. But it also adapts dynamically to the device that’s being used: It supports Apple’s iOS devices and also Google Android devices. It’s also the technology behind Google Hangout.

In an announcement set to be made later today, Somaini, whose title will be VP and chief trust officer, is one of three high-profile hires at Box that will be announced later today. The other two are Niall Wall, who will be SVP and head of business development, and Jeff Mannie, who will be VP, controller and chief accounting officer. Wall will take over for Karen Appleton, who has been promoted to senior VP in charge of global alliances.

What does the new title — chief trust officer — mean? “Two things,” Somaini told me in a brief conversation yesterday. “Really driving a trust strategy for the company around the products and services we provide and how that relates to internal functions of how we perform. Second, we have to make sure there’s a tight integration with our customer to base to really understand their needs. And it’s not only that we’re able to respond to their pain points, but that we’re able to predict them.”

He should have a pretty good appreciation for their pain points. Before creating the CISO job at Yahoo, he held the same title at security software giant Symantec. Before that, he was director of information security at VeriSign and an adviser to Palo Alto Networks. He also writes a widely read blog on computer security.

Wall is also a Symantec alum. Most recently, he was VP and general manager of the Norton Data Services business unit. Before Symantec, he worked at Oracle and Digital Equipment Corp., now a part of Hewlett-Packard. At Box, he’ll be overseeing the company’s efforts to create partnerships and strategic alliances.

Mannie hails from PayPal, the payments unit at online sales giant eBay. He’ll be in charge of external financial reporting, policies and controls. He’s probably going to be busy as Box heads toward its long-talked-about initial public offering next year.

Box has been aggressively raising money, and in January quietly increased its funding to $150 million from a previous $125 million in a round led by private equity firm General Atlantic, at a valuation of about $1.2 billion. CEO Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old wunderkind who started the company in a dorm room at the University of Southern California in 2005, has said on the record that Box will likely go public in 2014, and it has started hiring more execs with time at publicly held companies on their resumes.

The expanded round brought Box’s total capital raised to $312 million. Other investors include Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The closing share price was $17.81, after pricing yesterday at $14 a share. Deutsche Bank and Piper Jaffray acted as lead book-running managers for the offering. Needham & Co., JMP Securities and William Blair & Co. are acting as co-managers.

Rally’s venture capital investors include Meritech Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Mobius Venture Capital, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

I think this constitutes the first tech IPO launch of the second quarter of the year. Others that have filed offerings recently include Marketo, the cloud-based marketing software company, and Tableau, the data visualization company. Violin Memory is also said to be readying an offering in May, though the date keeps inexplicably slipping. It raised some extra capital in February.

And speaking of IPOs, I saw some data from Silicon Valley law firm Fenwick and West showing that the pace of tech IPOs has been slowing down since a recent peak in the first quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, IPOs in the Life Sciences industry were on a slow rise as of the end of 2012. (You can get the full survey here.)

As recent tech IPOs go, a 27 percent pop is relatively small. The biggest opening day rise in the last two years was that of LinkedIn, which rose more than 109 percent on its first day of trading, followed closely by Splunk, which rose 108 percent. Workday, the cloud-based human resources software company, rounded out the top five companies in the study, rising 74 percent.

Some tech companies decline on their first day. Among those during 2011 and 2012 were Lifelock, which fell 7 percent, E2open which fell 9 percent and the adult site FriendFinder Networks, which fell more than 21 percent.

Come June, BlackBerry will ship Secure Work Space for iOS and Android, a security solution that allows enterprise customers to separate and secure both work and personal data on employee smartphones. Similar to the company’s BlackBerry Balance technology, Secure Work Space essentially containerizes devices, securely separating work email and apps from personal ones. Not only does it remove the need for employees to carry individual devices for work and personal needs, it frees up companies from managing the virtual private networks needed to provide secure access to workers in the field. And it can all be managed through BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES).

That last bit may be the most important of all, because Secure Work Space will almost certainly make BES that much more appealing to the enterprise market that has long been BlackBerry’s stronghold. And, crucially, it allows the company to sell high-margin services to enterprise customers, even if some of their employees are using devices built on Android or iOS.

BlackBerry’s service revenue had been expected to drop this year. Perhaps, BES 10 and Secure Work Space can temper that decline.

BYOD is pervasive whether enterprise decision-makers have embraced it or not. In fact, research by Harris Interactive reveals that 81 percent of employees already use personal devices at work. BYOD is an affordable way for connected, data-driven employees to work around the usual hassle of IT, and next-generation smartphones and tablets offer them invaluable productivity and file-collaboration applications. So, for all of its advantages, why does BYOD cause more and more anxiety within organizations, particularly since using mobile devices in the enterprise became standard decades ago?

The big IT dilemma with tablets and other personal devices is data protection, plain and simple. The days of company-issued BlackBerries are long gone. Now, as privately owned tablets and other personal devices log on to corporate networks and exchange company files, it becomes harder and harder for IT departments to guarantee the accessibility, availability and protection of data stored outside the “four walls” of their own infrastructures.

Data is moving between secure corporate servers and unregistered personal devices, and even into third-party storage services like DropBox, which makes it difficult to protect sensitive information and leaves it vulnerable to corruption — or worse, leakage to malicious hackers or fraudsters. Corporate data obtained through tablets and smartphones — including employee information, text messages, emails and confidential documents — is incredibly valuable for cyber criminals, and incredibly damaging to organizations and their customers. The threat of mobile data leakage is very real, and a recent Forrester survey found that nearly 40 percent of professionals were concerned about security on their devices.

Despite these risks of personal device use, the enterprise shouldn’t push back, but instead should plan and adapt by instituting new policies that make BYOD not only a productivity driver but a seamless and secure way to create more interconnected workplaces. That means the role of IT must change. IT must become an enabler, and ensure data is secure and available, regardless of where and how it is stored and accessed.

Shockingly, research by technology advocacy group ITIC found that 71 percent of businesses that permitted BYOD had no specific BYOD security or support policies. However, there are immediate steps enterprise decision-makers can take to create businesses that are primed for accommodating personal tablets and other devices without sacrificing business continuity and security. The first measure is to put in place policies and procedures that account for personal devices accessing the company network. These should include regular security audits to ensure mobile-related vulnerabilities are addressed and up to date. Additionally, business continuity plans should be updated to reflect BYOD realities. For example, employees should have an easy way to report when their devices are lost, so that IT can block access to company networks and wipe sensitive data clean.

However, policies and procedures aren’t enough to resolve data protection concerns in the BYOD era. It’s also important for enterprise decision-makers to seek out simple and comprehensive data solutions that help integrate personal device use and traditional IT, without complicating workflows for their employees. These include mobile device management (MDM) systems, which help IT regulate devices accessing corporate data, and central management tools that monitor all devices connected to the network. Additionally, employees need access to enterprise-friendly file-sharing, storage and collaboration tools, so they aren’t motivated to seek insecure, third-party alternatives like DropBox. Storage, backup and business continuity solutions should all be aligned with BYOD to create a seamless IT environment.

The advantages of BYOD are undeniable. For example, a recent CDW poll found that 84 percent of professionals experienced improved multitasking using tablets, and gained more than an hour in productivity benefits. If tablet and personal device use in general is such an asset to the workforce, enterprises must focus on making BYOD secure. The implication for IT and all enterprise decision-makers is clear: Data must be available, accessible and protected, regardless of where, when and how it is accessed. With that in mind, IT can keep calm and carry on as the tablets come marching in.

Scott Crenshaw is Senior Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Acronis, a Woburn, Mass., company specializing in data availability, accessibility and protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) this week approved a deal under which the country’s government will purchase 5,000 BlackBerry Z10s for employee use. The devices are all to be outfitted with Secusmart technology, which will bring to them additional security measures like data encryption and secure voice and text messaging.

The deal is a nice win for BlackBerry, which over the past few years has lost its footing in the enterprise market it long dominated. Now, with its new BlackBerry 10 operating system and devices like the Z10, the company is doing all it can to retain those bread-and-butter enterprise customers. This contract with the German government is an encouraging sign that some of those efforts are paying off.

But it’s a tough battle. As I’ve written here before, BlackBerry’s fight for the enterprise space is beginning to look a lot like the one already lost in the consumer space.

With the consumerization of IT in full swing, and more companies offering “Bring Your Own Device” plans to their employees, BlackBerry is losing its grip on enterprise. By losing the smartphone battle in the consumer market, the company has put its position in the enterprise market at risk. Now it must struggle for relevance in a broader market in which the lines between consumer and enterprise are blurring. And that’s a tough place to be for a company that has only recently fielded a competitive smartphone OS.

New research from mobile device management company Good Technology, which serves about half of the Fortune 100, shows that iPads accounted for 93.2 percent of tablet activations across its customer base in the fourth quarter of 2012. Meanwhile, Android tablets accounted for just 6.8 percent.

For Android, that’s a piddling share of this particular market segment, but it is improving. In January of 2012, Android’s share of tablet activations at Good’s clients was only 2.7 percent. So the OS did gain momentum over the course of the year. But clearly it has been slow going.

Why is Good seeing such a big disparity between iPad and Android tablet activations? A combination of the so-called “consumerization of IT” and some major iPad deployments, most likely. The iPad’s installed base is quite large, so it makes sense that the “Bring Your Own Device” programs that companies are offering to their employees these days might result in a disproportionate influx of the devices into enterprise. Add to that some strong iOS productivity apps and some large deployments of company-owned iPads — recall how often Apple likes to drop that “almost every company in the Fortune 500 is testing or deploying iPad” sound bite — and the reasons for Apple’s lead becomes self-evident.

It’s worth noting here as well that Apple’s dominance in Good’s particular slice of the enterprise space doesn’t end with tablets. It includes smartphones, too. According to Good, the iPad and iPhone accounted for 77 percent of new device activations across its customer base in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 71 percent in 2011.

That in turn triggered speculation that HP might be planning something special. Persistent rumors that HP is reconsidering the breakup option refuse to die, fanned in no small part by a sketchier-than-an-art-class report from Quartz. Word that Faber was on the scene as the earnings report crossed the wires led some traders to wonder if a breakup announcement was imminent.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The interview with Whitman happened early this morning, and she batted those rumors away once again: “I am convinced that we should not break up this company.” In the end, though, it’s going to come down to the turnaround strategy in place and the financial results that it yields. If it doesn’t work out, then naturally all options are on the table.

It’s also worth noting that HP shares are up by more than 15 percent today, and rose above the $19 mark for the first time since August. If nothing else, yesterday’s results have given shareholders hope that there is a light, however faint, far, far at the end of HP’s tunnel.

Anyway, it’s worth watching the interview, which lasts about 11 minutes:

Basically it shows that every line of business at Dell continues to be in decline — except one, and that’s the combined server and networking businesses.

Here’s the slide, and it may constitute something of a last look at the state of Dell before it completes its leveraged buyout.

As you can see, servers and networking grew 18 percent, versus everything else, which declined year over year. Separate them out and server revenue grew 5 percent, while networking grew 42 percent. While the growth seems healthy, it’s not enough to offset everything else. Servers and networking combined amounted to less than 19 percent of sales. Dell’s business shrank in the remaining 81 percent.

It’s hard to make shareholders happy when the trend lines look like that. So now you see, in one place, why Dell is going private.

Cisco reported earnings of 51 cents per share on revenue of $12.1 billion. The results beat the consensus expectation of Wall Street analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial of 48 cents on sales of $12.06 billion.

I’ll have more as I get a closer look at the numbers.

Here’s Cisco’s original announcement:

Cisco Reports Second Quarter Earnings
SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwire – February 12, 2013) – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO)

Q2 Net Sales: $12.1 billion (increase of 5% year over year)
Q2 Earnings per Share: $0.59 GAAP (includes tax benefits of $0.17); $0.51 non-GAAP (includes a tax benefit of $0.01)
Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, today reported its second quarter results for the period ended January 26, 2013. Cisco reported second quarter net sales of $12.1 billion, net income on a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) basis of $3.1 billion or $0.59 per share, and non-GAAP net income of $2.7 billion or $0.51 per share.

GAAP net income and GAAP earnings per share for the second quarter of fiscal 2013 included total tax benefits of approximately $926 million or $0.17 per share, related to a tax settlement with the Internal Revenue Service and related to the reinstatement of the U.S. federal research and development (R&D) tax credit on January 2, 2013. Non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP earnings per share for the second quarter of fiscal 2013 included a tax benefit of approximately $60 million or $0.01 per share as a result of the reinstatement of the U.S. federal R&D tax credit on January 2, 2013.

“Cisco delivered record earnings per share this quarter and record revenue for the 8th quarter in a row in a challenging economic environment. We continue to drive the innovation, quality and leadership our customers expect, and we remain focused on consistent returns to our shareholders,” said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and chief executive officer.

“In terms of the future, we are making solid progress towards our goal of becoming the #1 IT company in the world. As new markets grow and are created, such as the Internet of Everything, it’s very easy to see how the intelligent network is at the center of that future. Our customers already understand that Cisco has the architectures, solutions and services to best help them deliver the business results they need and we are honored to work with them and serve them each and every day.”

Net sales for the first six months of fiscal 2013 were $24.0 billion, compared with $22.8 billion for the first six months of fiscal 2012. Net income for the first six months of fiscal 2013, on a GAAP basis, was $5.2 billion or $0.98 per share, compared with $4.0 billion or $0.73 per share for the first six months of fiscal 2012. Non-GAAP net income for the first six months of fiscal 2013 was $5.3 billion or $0.99 per share, compared with $4.9 billion or $0.90 per share for the first six months of fiscal 2012.

A reconciliation between net income on a GAAP basis and non-GAAP net income is provided in the table on page 6.

Cisco will discuss second quarter results and business outlook on a conference call and webcast at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time today. Call information and related charts are available at http://investor.cisco.com.

Cash and Cash Equivalents and Investments

Cash flows from operations were $3.3 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2013, compared with $2.5 billion for the first quarter of fiscal 2013, and compared with $3.1 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2012.
Cash and cash equivalents and investments were $46.4 billion at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2013, compared with $45.0 billion at the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2013, and compared with $48.7 billion at the end of fiscal 2012.
Dividends and Stock Repurchase Program

During the second quarter of fiscal 2013:

The combination of cash used for dividends and common stock repurchases under the stock repurchase program totaled approximately $1.2 billion.
Cisco paid a cash dividend of $0.14 per common share, or $743 million.
Cisco repurchased approximately 25 million shares of common stock under the stock repurchase program at an average price of $20.15 per share for an aggregate purchase price of $500 million. As of January 26, 2013, Cisco had repurchased and retired 3.8 billion shares of Cisco common stock at an average price of $20.34 per share for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $76.9 billion since the inception of the stock repurchase program. The remaining authorized amount for stock repurchases under this program is approximately $5.1 billion with no termination date.
“We delivered another solid quarter achieving profitable growth which contributes to increasing shareholder value over the long term,” stated Frank Calderoni, Cisco executive vice president and chief financial officer. “We are executing consistently, and we remain confident with our financial strategy while capitalizing on strategic investment opportunities to help drive our continued leadership in the industry.”

Select Global Business Highlights

Cisco announced and completed the acquisition of privately held Cloupia, Inc., a software company that automates converged data center infrastructure, allowing enterprises and service providers to simplify the deployment and configuration of physical and virtual resources from a single management console.
Cisco announced and completed the acquisition of privately held Meraki, Inc., a leader in cloud networking offering midmarket customers easy-to-deploy, on-premise networking solutions that can be centrally managed from the cloud.
Cisco announced and completed the acquisition of privately held Cariden Technologies, Inc., a supplier of network planning, design and traffic management solutions for telecommunications service providers.
Cisco announced and completed the acquisition of BroadHop, Inc., a provider of next-generation policy control and service management technology for carrier networks worldwide.
Cisco announced the investment of $6 million in the venture capital fund Monashees Capital, a leading Brazilian VC focused on Internet companies and online education.
Belkin announced its intent to acquire Cisco’s Linksys product line.
Cisco unveiled its new “Internet of Everything” global integrated marketing campaign, with a message that connecting people, process, data and things will make the network more valuable than ever.
Cisco Innovation

Cisco unveiled Videoscape Unity™, its new and expanded Videoscape™ video services delivery platform, empowering service providers and media companies to deliver new intuitive and synchronized multiscreen video experiences.
Cisco announced new solutions under the Cisco Unified Access™ umbrella that simplify network design by converging wired and wireless networks.
Cisco introduced Cisco StadiumVision® Mobile, a solution that delivers live video to mobile devices to create an entirely new fan experience in sports and entertainment venues.
Cisco introduced its advanced Wi-Fi location data analytics platform to help businesses enhance customer experiences and create new monetization opportunities to meet the needs of the growing number of connected consumers.
Cisco announced two new connected health offerings, Connected Health solutions and HealthPresence® 2.5, designed to meet the increasing need in healthcare for software and services that help enable efficient, convenient, high-quality patient care, and more collaboration across the healthcare continuum.
Select Customer Announcements

Cisco announced that Turkiye Is Bankasi (Isbank), the largest bank of Turkey, deployed a Cisco® Borderless Networks and Collaboration infrastructure to enhance business agility, speed product and service development, and better serve its customers.
ME Bank in Australia selected a Cisco and NetApp FlexPod® for VMware solution to help transform its information technology and operational excellence functions and to accelerate the speed with which it can introduce new business applications and services to customers.
SingTel announced that it is the first service provider in the Asia-Pacific region to globally deploy Multiprotocol Label Switching-Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) technology for its ConnectPlus E-Line service, providing its multinational corporation customers with scalable high-speed connections worldwide.
Xerox selected Cisco Unified Computing System™ to deliver its cloud-based global managed print services.
Cisco announced that Eastlink, a leading telecommunications service provider in Canada, is using Cisco Videoscape™ to power its new mobile video platform, Eastlink To Go, designed to deliver new consumer experiences anytime, anywhere.
Cisco announced that Telefonica Global Solutions, part of the Telefonica Group, a leading global provider of telecommunication services for fixed and mobile carriers, ISPs and content providers, selected Cisco for its enhanced Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network.

Now that the tech investment buzz cycle has pivoted in an enterprise-friendly direction, I thought it was time to check in with Levine, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

I talked to him late last year on the heels of a busy summer. In July, he led AH’s stunning $100 million investment in GitHub, then followed it up with an $11.2 million investment in Meteor, and in October, an investment in Udacity, an education startup.

Perhaps hinting that 2013 will be as busy as 2012, last week he led a $30 million investment in Data Gravity and joined its board of directors.

We had a pretty long conversation. His fundamental argument about why smart enterprise-focused startups make for good investment opportunities comes down to one simple notion: Pretty much everything that’s been running in the corporate IT environment — things on which companies will spend more than $3 trillion this year according to some educated estimates — is ripe for a significant disruption that will make it less costly to own and operatee, more efficient, less prone to failure and simpler to use. That means a lot of large companies who have a lot of skin in the game maintaining the status quo are likely to have their worlds seriously rocked in the coming years.

Sound like fun? It’s exactly what AH hired him for two years ago.

Here are some highlights from the first half of our conversation. I’ll post the second half soon.

AllThingsD: Peter, the thing I keep hearing people say these days is there’s this feeling that the venture community is sort of “waking up” to the enterprise, or that it’s suddenly cool. You, on the other hand, have been all about the enterprise from the start. What do you think about that?

Levine: Yeah, it’s a really good time to be investing in the enterprise. We see so many interesting companies in the space right now. Just for context, it’s interesting that you comment on the idea that people are just waking up to the enterprise, and that’s exactly how I have felt for awhile, that there’s this renaissance in enterprise computing. There’s an awakening up and down the stack for new products that are going to service the enterprise.

Like what?

In my mind there are three categories that are all being disrupted at once. Cloud infrastructure: All the underpinnings of it all — storage, security networking and virtualization — would all fit there. At the next layer there’s software-as-a-service, though now there’s almost anything as a service. That’s transforming all the on-premise applications. At the highest level, mobile is transforming how people are consuming information and data and applications they are using. … In the cloud infrastructure you can see someone like a Cisco as the old guard, or even server vendors to some extent, and the new folks being VMWare, which totally upended the server world. For networking, you might see Nicira and other companies in the software-defined networking space as examples. It’s early days in that. There’s a big shift in software driving new network infrastructure rather than hardware and components driving the network infrastructure. In the same way, a VMWare can turn a server into an infinite number of servers. With SDN, the hardware component, it may even be a server in this case, with software basically creating a virtual network.

I get the point on Software-Defined Networking, though lately Cisco would argue, and not entirely without merit, that it has some of its own SDN chops. But I think your point is bigger about incumbent companies in the enterprise.

Exactly. The point isn’t whether Cisco has the technical chops to go do SDN, and it’s not whether they see this trend or don’t see it. They see it as well as everyone else. The problem is that from a business model standpoint, it’s really hard to go from one side of the pillar to the other. We’re talking about the commoditzation of components that very strongly eat into revenue streams and how revenue is recognized. That may sound like a minor accounting rule. But it is huge. With software, if I have to prorate my revenue for three years over the course of a sales engagement, rather than book it all up front as you do with a hardware sale, it dramatically shifts the sales model, the revenue model, the go-to-market model. It’s not only about the technology. For someone like a Cisco, they may very well have the technology chops, but there it’s about commoditizing the very revenue stream you rely on for your existence.

So I presume there are more examples like this in other parts of the stack?

Of course. There’s software-as-a-service on one side. There’s SAP, which has a long history of running big on-premise apps. And then you go to the other side. The whole transformation began with Salesforce.com. Ten years ago, Salesforce.com was an outlier. It was heresy to even think about putting precious customer data outside your firewall. I think that Salesforce really paved the way for the entire software-as-a-service category. And now every part of that stack — from business intelligence to analytics, to performance management to CIO tools — are all moving from the on-premise equivalent to off-premise, SaaS-based equivalents. Every major on-premise vendor has an equivalent off-premise counterpart.

And yet here you have the same thing as in your first example: SAP and Oracle are buying SaaS companies and talking about how they, too, are running in the cloud.

It’s true. They can acquire their way in. They have a lot of money. However, I’ve worked at large companies, and when you’re in there, you have this revenue base, and have a history defining how you’ve done things for the past 20 years, from sales to engineering to architecture. So even at the executive level, you can have every intention to transform the business and move into the new cloud architectures and so on, as the strategy trickles down through the organization it becomes difficult to implement because of the way people are managed and it becomes very hard to swallow some of these acquisitions and have them flourish. Basically the old guard suffocates the new innovation by not letting it flourish.

So we talked about software-defined networks, and there was last year a lot of attention on new companies there. Where’s the next area of attention?

Three years ago we invested in Nicira under the assumption that this was coming. There are still opportunities there, but the nature of this business is such that when a successful outcome like that happens, there’s a flurry of activity, where the venture community tends to pile on the next 40 companies doing similar things. But there’s other areas. Storage is a really interesting area right now. If you look at computing being commoditized by VMware, and now networking being commoditized by SDN, storage is the most expensive component at that layer. And it has been dominated by the same architecture and the same companies — EMC, NetApp, Hitachi, IBM — for at least 20 years. Same architecture, same companies. So I do believe there is an opportunity for companies in that layer to be disaggregated. Now, people have been talking about that for a long time. I was one of the very early employees at a compay called Veritas in the 1990s. So it’s a space that I have an affinity for. The interesting part of that market is that people have talked about the commoditization of storage since then. That said, it’s actually pretty interesting.

So what is startup vs. incumbent dynamic in storage?

In the past there was only the enterprise data center. And a startup would have to go head to head against an established startup in the data center. Whatever you’re selling, storage or networking or security, you’re going head to head with the incumbent players. And for a startup it is incredibly different. There’s questions about service and support and features, and there’s a CIO who says, well you never get fired for buying X or Y. So what’s happened now — and it just became clear when I talked with a friend about this recently — is that whole cloud architectures that are being set up in parallel to enterprise data centers, maybe inside or outside a company, or whether it’s Salesforce or Facebook, or Zynga or Amazon, those are the companies that are very sensitive to price, anti-incumbent, they’re adaptable to letting startups come in. So where a lot of new startups are starting to get traction is with these new cloud architectures, and it might be within a corporate infrastructure, and where there’s green field opportunity. What you find in these environments is a lot of commoditization at every part of the cloud infrastructure layer — whether it’s compute, networking, security or storage — they’ve all been greatly commoditized as compared to the traditional data center. That parallel universe has given startups the ability to make an inroad by gaining traction and relevance. And those companies are the lead users. The cloud infrastructure has dragged the crusty old data center to innovate in a new way.

So who are the companies you’re starting to see and invest in doing that disruptive work in storage?

We recently did an investment in a company called Convergent-io, which is building a storage networking switch that will leverage commodity disks at performance and reliability rates that are equal to if not better than current storage arrays. So that is the whole magic. You have to get equal or better performance and reliability. The whole idea of using flash is really interesting, but that’s essentially using the same architecture. What I’m sort of trying to leapfrog in the storage space, is to ask how storage can become commoditized on the back of commodity components.

You’re not a believer in the idea that flash can save the world, at least inside the data center?

Flash is expensive, but it’s still a storage array that sits there with a lot of expensive stuff around it. The flash stuff is linear and sequential versus the way storage array has tended to work in the past. My belief is that fundamentally there won’t be a storage array anymore. Now, that’s a big leap. But in the same way, things will change up where software will just define the storage layer. I’m talking commodity flash and disk as being the basis for the infrastructure.

Using a combination of shares he already owns and personal cash, Dell will, according to most reports on the deal, nudge his ownership stake north of 50 percent. Silver Lake Management and Microsoft are also said to providing some of the financing, though the role of the software giant is, as The Wall Street Journal reported, still under discussion. Reuters reports that the deal could be announced as early as Monday.

Dell has been trying mightily to transform itself from the PC maker that no one could compete with in the 1990s to an IT hardware, software and services company. Shareholders have not been forgiving, and, in their defense, as analyst Shaw Wu recently observed in a research note to clients, Dell has spent about $13 billion on enterprise-related acquisitions since 2008, a recent highlight being the $2.4 billion deal for Quest Software; still, about 70 percent of its revenue remains tied to PCs sold both to consumers and to businesses plus ancillary products that are closely tied to PCs (printers, monitors and so on). That’s down from a much higher percentage early last decade, but turning the corner has been slow, and progress has come in fits and starts.

Meanwhile, the PC market has been in a state of decline, leaving Dell in a rush to replace slowing revenue growth in that space with other things. While the idea to transform Dell into an enterprise-focused company has merit, the PC business has been contracting so quickly that the changes aren’t having the desired effect on the shares.

Michael Dell talked about the strategy in an interview with AllThingsD in July. In that conversation, I asked him whether he thought shareholders tended not to give the company credit for the transformation strategy, and thus valued the company unfairly. His answer:

“Some shareholders get it and some of them don’t. That’s how markets work. Most who have looked at it carefully say this is the right thing to be doing. They quibble about some of the smaller points, but they see the larger logic of what we’re doing and our job is to keep doing it.”

Now it looks like he’s going to do it without the bother of having to report to shareholders.

When StoryDesk CEO Jordan Stolper stopped by the office recently to show me the app, I expected some slightly tweaked version of PowerPoint presentations repurposed for the iPad, and was half expecting to drop into a nap during the meeting. I didn’t.

The deal with StoryDesk is pretty simple. Think of all the printed collateral you might hand out to clients. If you’re a fashion label, you might carry around a book of clothes you’re making for the coming season to hand out to retail buyers. The thing is, different buyers for different departments will look only at certain sections that apply to them. You end up carrying around a lot paper for nothing.

Also, once something is printed, you have to print new copies if any important information changes. If the price on a hot item of clothing comes down a bit, you’ll want those buyers to know it right away.

StoryDesk’s approach is to make what would be an otherwise dry PowerPoint deck a lot slicker and easier to navigate. Most presentations are linear — you have to page through them — making it a little tricky to jump around. You can view a StoryDesk file in order, or you can jump around as you talk.

The new feature, just announced to existing clients today, is iPad-to-iPad sharing. Rather than just show someone a presentation, send it to them via an email message, which in turn triggers a download to the iPad.

Once they have it, since the file is managed centrally via StoryDesk’s CloudEditor, any changes you make get pushed to everyone who has the app, so corrections or price changes go live to everyone who has it.

StoryDesk got started in 2010, and has proven pretty popular with fashion companies like Ralph Lauren and Hugo Boss (a page of a recent Boss StoryDesk presentation is pictured). Prior to StoryDesk, Stolper ran Gliider, an online travel search outfit that was acquired by Travel Ad Network in 2010.

Then there’s Google Apps, the suite of Web-based office applications that compete directly with Microsoft’s Office. More companies have embraced Google’s approach, and Microsoft earlier this year launched a competitive response called SkyDrive. All this made the end of the year seem a good time to check in with Amit Singh, a Google VP and head of its Enterprise unit. My first question was one I’ve asked repeatedly about Google Apps in one way or another for the last few years.

AllThingsD: So, was 2012 the year that Google Apps went mainstream in the Enterprise?

Singh: I’ll give you an update on customers and the product. This was the year where we broke the barrier and got large-scale customer adoption. There are others we haven’t announced, and you’ll be surprised by some of them. But Roche and BBVA — you wouldn’t consider pharma or banking customers to be early adopters. We also announced some large retailer customers, like Dillards, Kohl’s and Office Depot, and in the quarter before we announced them, we announced Costco. So these are big customers.

What’s making them cross the Rubicon and switch?

Its a combination of things. In this industry, once you see others going for it, you do it. However, there have been some confidence-building measures. People ask if you can deliver cloud applications at scale better than they can internally. The answer is yes. Is your security comparable to theirs? Yes. Can you comply with the regulatory environment they face? Last year, the answer was no. Now we’re able to do that at scale. It’s a combination of things. People are seeing others switch. We’re adding features. We’re building confidence. The more our customers get out there, the better people feel about it. People don’t listen to us. They listen to our customers. … Then we started Drive. Then we launched Google’s Cloud Platform, which was a big inititiative to open up our infrastructure for developers everywhere. The largest companies in the world are seeing what they can build using Google’s scale. And we launched the next generation of Chromebooks. Each of the things we’ve done, the investments we’ve made have given people reasons to take a serious look at us in a ways they might not have done before.

How do you view the competitive landscape now? Microsoft certainly responded with SkyDrive and a new version of Office. What threat do these represent to your plans?

Whether we like it or not, there’s massive change going on in the Enterprise. We started doing Gmail and Chat for your domain in 2005, when it really wasn’t very sexy. We extended and wrapped it with enterprise controls. We’ve since built up a lot of enterprise processes and support. Microsoft bought Yammer, and it’s a total consumerization type of play. Users adopt technology and then they bring it to the Enterprise, whether it’s welcome or not. A lot more things wil be built on things like Amazon Web Services, or hopefully more on Google, because it’s a lot faster and cheaper and better than what they can get internally from their own data centers. And that’s only going to accelerate. Regarding competitors, Microsoft has seen its market share decline somewhat. Enterprise is the place where they are holding on. People are showing up at the office and bringing their own devices and expecting their employers to support them. And with Windows RT, there is no backward compatibility with all the apps. That’s the first time that has happened in Windows. The Windows 8 move, they have done what they need to do, but it’s fairly disruptive. SkyDrive is coming. SharePoint needs to integrate with Yammer. So, change is coming whether you like it or not. We think we offer an alternative that is pure and proven.

What do you have that they don’t?

We used to compete on just cost. But that’s changed. On the cloud, over time you shouldn’t have to charge more money to get cloud services. Overall, your costs should go down. We’ve been at the $50 price point for apps for some time, while increasing the depth and breadth of our solution. On the other hand, the way they are incenting their customers to move is by charging them more. That is their strategy, and they are entitled to do what they want. Devices are going to proliferate, and Web services are now being delivered at scale. Then the question becomes whether you want to build around the desktop, or whether you want to build around Web services and devices being connected together. And, frankly, they don’t have the credibility to deliver Web services at scale. That’s just not what they do. They learn, hopefully, over time.

And yet you have to coexist with the desktop Office Client when the time comes, right? How is that now?

In the last year, if you look at the depth of where we’ve gone with Docs, both in the core features and in the desktop fidelity, we’ve made tremendous progress. Our goal is to get to the 90 percent of users who don’t need to have the most advanced features of Office. Sheets does tables graphing, etc., out of the box. In Q3, if you import from Excel into Sheets, you won’t be able to tell the difference in Sheets. We know the gaps between our features and theirs. We’re improving them week by week. We’re going to get to the the 90 percent. If you need the last 10 percent, you’ll want to use the desktop. The next thing is the import from PowerPoint to Slides. That’s where QuickOffice is going to help us a lot.

Talk a bit about the state of the ecosystem. We saw, for example, Backupify embracing a role as the backup for Google Apps users recently. I imagine there must be many secondary and ancillary services that operate within and around Google Apps. How is that evolving?

The way you look at a successful business is its ecosystem. For us at Google, it’s all about the ecosystem and developers. We have Android developers working on Enterprise applications now. The Android ecosystem for Enterprise is getting better, now that we’ve added things like encryption, and the same is happening on Chrome. On Apps, the top enterprise marketplace apps have all been acquired by larger companies. The top apps are getting a lof of distribution through Google. As Google Apps gets wider and stronger, the ecosystem is getting strong, as people want to extend its capabilitles. There’s Backupify; there’s Cloud Log for audits. There’s Smartsheet. We’re seeing the natural evolution, but you can expect us to spend more time cultivating that in the coming year. There’s also a strong ecosystem around implementation and support of Google Apps. We’ve gone from 3,000 partners to 6,000 in one year. So now there’s this massive distribution.

So what’s the big theme for 2013?

“Work the way you live.” Consumerization is here. It’s time to really embrace it. We’re doubling down on the Enterprise. It’s an increasingly important part of Google, and a place where we plan to invest and to support our customers.

While it’s true that Oracle has fared better than most of its rivals amid a crash in global IT spending, analyst Brendan Barnicle of Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Ore., argued in a research note to clients last week that analysts may have set the bar a bit high. He expects EPS of 60 cents and sales of $8.94 billion. “In checks, we heard about more large deals than we have in the recent past. Nevertheless, it is likely that macro uncertainty made it difficult to close all the deals. Therefore, we expect November quarter results generally to be in line to slightly lower than consensus,” he wrote.

On top of that, he thinks the outlook for the quarter ahead is too aggressive, given the state of the world economy. “Oracle has a clear practice of guiding conservatively, and in the current macroenvironment, we expect the same,” Barnicle wrote. With that in mind, he thinks the current consensus that calls for earnings of 66 cents on sales of $9.3 billion is a little too high.

Even so, Barnicle expects mostly positive news from Oracle today. With the shares trading at $32.43 this morning, up more than 26 percent this year, he still thinks there’s room to grow. His price target is $36.

Specifically, Tech Data execs said that 12 percent of their revenue is Apple related, with the bulk generated by sales of Mac and iPad.

Now that’s not a massive percentage, but it’s certainly noteworthy. Extrapolating form it, Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt figures Tech Data is selling about two million iPads into enterprise per year. And that’s just one distributor. Roll a few more into the equation and the number may be quite a bit larger.

“If we presume other distributors are having similar success, then enterprise distribution may account for 5-10 million iPads annually,” McCourt writes. “We view [this] as impressive as this does not include BYOD iPads brought into the enterprise.”

In other words, it doesn’t account for “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) programs that allow employees to use the gadgets they use at home in the workplace as well. And as we’ve noted here before, that is a fast-growing trend, particularly now that the iPad meets a number of enterprise-level security requirements and supports mobile device management solutions. Add that to the mix, and it would seem that Apple is indeed extending its reach into enterprise.

Today, he took to CNBC to talk about that as well as the state of the PC market. He reiterated a few familiar messages: Dell now derives more than half its gross margins from businesses that are new to Dell, namely software and services. And so Dell is less the PC company that everyone remembers and more a full-range IT company that “helps its customers succeed.”

Still, it sells a lot of PCs and derives about half its revenue from sales to both consumers and businesses. And now that Microsoft has gotten Windows 8 out the door, where’s the groundswell of PCs sales?

As yet, we’re still waiting. Analysts at Citi today trimmed their estimate for growth the decline PC market to 3 percent from 1 percent for 2012, the latest in a series of dour forecasts from the likes of IDC and Gartner.

So how does Dell feel about the prospects for the PC market? Excited. In fact, “quite excited”:

“With Windows 8 we are quite excited about the future of the PC. There are a billion and a half PCs out there, and we believe there’s an upgrade cycle coming.”

Here’s the video:

Update: I misread a summary of the Citi note on the PC market earlier today. It called not for any growth at all but for a bigger decline than previously expected. I’ve fixed the text above.

Dubbed Backupify Winter Release 2012, the revision brings a bunch of new administrative features that large companies running Google Apps might need. Its the first update to the Enterprise Edition of Backupify since it was first launched in August.

The headline features the ability to give administrative control to more than one person across multiple lines of business in an organization. Heads of IT in different departments can, say, rescue a Gmail message deleted by mistake, for those employees with fat fingers.

There’s also a new audit log feature, that lets admins track everything that happens within the Backupify account. So if someone deletes something they shouldn’t have, there a record that includes who did it, the IP address of the machine they were using and a timestamp saying precisely when it happened.

The new version also adds support for accounts within Google Apps subdomains.

Backupify has come a long way since it started up primarily as way for people to back up their Twitter and Facebook feeds, which it still does. The company has 5,000 paying customers and is now backing up more than 1 million individual accounts. It recently boosted its total storage capacity to 400 Terabytes. It now backs up 700 million individual items, and 2.7 billion GMail messages.

In August it announce it had raised $9 million in a Series C round of venture capital funding from Symantec. That followed a Series B last September in a round led by Avalon Ventures with General Catalyst Partners and Lowercase Capital also participating.
 

The company intends to change that, at least in one fashion, with the launch of a significant branding campaign combining broadcast, print, Web, social and augmented reality that gets under way today and should run well into next year. CEO John Chambers previewed the “Tomorrow Starts Here” Now campaign at Cisco’s annual meeting with financial analysts in New York on Friday.

The idea appears to be to make networking instead of computing the most important part in the narrative of the Internet’s next phase in growth and evolution. For years, computing has seemed the central player in the march of technology of which the Internet is the logical end result.

Cisco has cleverly attempted to hijack and then enhance the tired-out phrase “Internet of Things,” and has changed it to “Internet of Everything,” implying that everything worth knowing anything about, from traffic lights to trees, will be connected to the Internet in some fashion.

The new campaign — a broadcast spot can be seen below — was created by advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, whose clients include Yahoo, Netflix and TD Ameritrade. It’s also known for doing some high-concept tech ads, like this spot for Sprint connecting 4G cell phones to the wheel, the first supersonic flight and other great scientific firsts in history.

I talked to Cisco’s chief marketing officer, Blair Christie. She said it’s kind of a culmination of a year-long effort to rethink the Cisco brand. You saw some of it earlier this year with bits like the “broken robot” ad, in which a manufacturing robot breaks down, but then gets fixed by another robot, thus allowing the assembly line to “fix itself.”

“From a marketing perspective, the story has shifted toward the value of connections,” Christie told me in an interview last week.

The piece that will get the most attention is the “augmented reality” part, which harnesses an iPhone app that allows people seeing print versions of the campaign to drill down and get to know Cisco more. You can, depending on how you navigate through the app, see several videos or download some white papers. The point, Christie says, is that Cisco is a complex company, and even the masters of the advertising industry can’t tell the whole thing in 60 seconds. More about it and the rest of the campaign here.

Anyway, here’s the video part that I can show you. That Cisco is taking the initiative in seeking to tell its own story better is a good sign. It has suffered of late from the appearance of being an older company that has lost a lot of its mojo. We’ll see if this can help get some of it back.

The company on Thursday announced BlackBerry 10 Ready, a new program intended to woo business customers to its new platform. Enrollment gets participants online training, a free BlackBerry 10 smartphone and the opportunity to trade up their BlackBerry Enterprise Server licenses.

That last offering is an important one, allowing companies transitioning to RIM’s new platform to swap their existing BES licenses for new BES 10 licenses at no cost on a one-for-one basis. BES licenses aren’t cheap. So RIM’s offer of a free upgrade will likely appeal to some — particularly corporate holdouts that still subscribe to the “you will use a BlackBerry and that’s an order” view of employee empowerment.

But these days, such firms are becoming fewer and fewer. As we’ve noted here before, the “bring your own device” era has given Android and iPhone serious traction in the enterprise market that RIM once dominated. And while promotions like BlackBerry 10 Ready will certainly garner interest, how much can they actually reverse a trend as seemingly powerful as the consumerization of IT?

That’s the classic line that companies often use when the choice was “resign or be fired.” It’s not exactly clear what happened. (Update: Not so much. See below.)

Suresh Vaswani was named to replace him. Vaswani is a 25-year veteran of India’s Wipro and is a former co-CEO of its IT business unit, and even served on its board of directors.

I spoke at length with Schuckenbrock in September. He had been co-COO at EDS, the IT services company that Hewlett-Packard acquired for $13.9 billion in 2008. (It later wrote down the value of EDS by $8 billion.)

Schuckenbrock was part of a new wave of senior hires at Dell — including Marius Haas, who’s running the Enterprise business, and former CA CEO John Swainson, who’s running the new software division and has been tasked with turning the old PC giant into an enterprise-focused full-service IT company.

It’s also odd that he would leave so soon, especially after Dell spent $1.9 million to move him and his family from Round Rock outside Austin, to Plano, Texas, which worked out to a cost of $9,655.19 a mile.

The move was to take over the services business, including the former Perot Systems business that Dell acquired in 2009. Before that, Schuckenbrock had been CIO and then for two years he had been President of the Large Enterprise Business Unit.

Update: I just checked in with a source familiar with the situation and he says it was definitely a resignation. The short explanation: Shuckenbrock wants to be CEO somewhere.

“Apple iOS devices are being brought into the enterprise in droves, both by corporate and by employee purchase,” IDC explained. “In fact, [we believe] that by the end of 2012, iOS will be the number 1 corporate-liable operating system (OS) device by volumes shipped.” And the top employee-liable mobile-device OS? Android. (“Corporate-liable” is research-house jargon for “company-owned”; “employee-liable” means “employee-owned.”)

To be clear: The BlackBerry’s installed base in enterprise remains far larger than those of its rivals, but the iPhone will surpass the BlackBerry by volume of devices shipped to enterprise by year’s end.

Ugly news for RIM. But with the consumerization of IT in full swing and more companies offering “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) plans to their employees, it was inevitable.

By losing the smartphone battle in the consumer market, RIM has lost its footing in the enterprise market it long dominated. Now it must fight for relevance in a broader market that’s essentially an estuary of the two. And that’s a tough place to be for a company that’s transitioning to a competitive mobile OS years later than it should have.

“While corporate customers will continue to offer Blackberry as a corporate-liable device, they are also now much more open to offering iOS as well, and giving end users a choice of devices,” IDC Mobile Enterprise Program Manager Stacy Crook told AllThingsD. “From a BYOD standpoint, the BlackBerrys will also continue to easily make the approved device list, but again, most companies with a BYOD strategy will allow for iOS and, increasingly, Android is starting to make more of those lists, as well. In either of these scenarios, it boils down to end-user choice, so the end users have to want to choose the BlackBerry device over the others.”

And these days, fewer and fewer are making that choice. Which is why strong adoption of BlackBerry 10 is crucial to RIM’s longevity. The “You Will Use a BlackBerry and That’s an Order” market is disappearing, whittled down by corporations’ widening embrace of BYOD. RIM’s battle for the enterprise space is increasingly becoming the same one it already lost in the consumer space. And it can ill afford to lose it a second time.

BlackBerry 10 really needs to be “a quantum leap over anything that’s out there,” to quote former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie.

According to RIM, it will be. And the company, for its part, says it has no intention of forfeiting the enterprise market to anyone.

“BlackBerry continues to be the best mobile platform for business, providing a complete enterprise mobility solution, including smartphones and tablets managed by a scalable, reliable and highly secure software platform,” the company said in a statement given to AllThingsD. “Our infrastructure is trusted by some of the most security conscious organisations in the U.S. and over 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies. We’ve been meeting with many of our top enterprise customers and they are excited about BlackBerry 10 and its potential.”