5 Companies That Had A Rough Week

The Week Ending Sept. 16

Topping this week's roundup of companies that had a rough week was Samsung Electronics, which is faced with a recall of about 1 million of its Samsung Galaxy Note 7 mobile phones in the U.S. due to the possibility of overheating batteries causing burns and property damage.

However, before Apple could capitalize on its rival's misfortunes, it had to deal with its own issues related to the rollout of iOS 10. Also making the list were Microsoft Azure’s latest outage, Oracle's lost software and hardware sales, and Dell's lost money from sale of its enterprise content division to Canadians.

Not everyone in the IT industry was having a rough go of it this week. For a rundown of companies that made smart decisions, executed savvy strategic moves – or just had good luck – check out this week's 5 Companies That Came To Win roundup.

Apple iOS 10: Fast Adoption, But Plagued By Issues

Adoption of Apple's iOS 10 operating system is soaring, with the site Mixpanel estimating late Thursday that more than 24 percent of the company's customers had adopted the new operating system.

However, all is not rosy with iOS 10. Apple's aura of invincibility was pierced this week when, according to multiple sites, a large number of users ran into installation issues that caused their iPhones or iPads to not work. Apple eventually rolled out a fix.

And if having customers mobile devices turn into bricks wasn't enough, Apple scrambled to make changes to the iOS 10's search capabilities as it appeared that certain search terms brought up pornographic images.

Oracle Misses On Q1

Oracle Thursday reported modest 2 percent revenue growth for its fiscal first quarter of 2017 to $8.6 billion. However, analysts had been expecting $8.7 billion.

And while the company enjoyed 59 percent growth in cloud revenue over last year, led by a massive 77 percent growth in cloud SaaS and PaaS sales, its larger software license business fell 11 percent over last year.

Oracle's hardware business also took a huge hit over last year, with hardware sales falling 19 percent and hardware support revenue falling 4 percent in the first fiscal quarter of 2017 compared with last year.

Dell Sale Of Documentum

Dell didn't take long to make its first business sale after it closed its EMC acquisition.

Open Text Corp., Waterloo, Ontario, this week said it plans to buy Dell's enterprise content division, including EMC's Documentum business, for $1.6 billion.

EMC had acquired Documentum as a stand-alone company back in 2003 for $1.7 billion.

Dell's enterprise content division 2015 revenue was $599 million. That's a price-to-ratio of about 2.0. Not so good when the average price-to-sales ration for systems and application software is 4.9, or for internet software is 7.0, according to New York University Stern School of Business.

Microsoft Azure Suffers Outage

In what is becoming an all-too-common situation, a major public cloud vendor--and its customers--suffered an outage.

This week, it was Microsoft Azure, when several U.S.-based services failed, impacting operations in several regions around the globe.

Microsoft, on its Azure status history page, reported that on Thursday, a subset of customers using DNS and many other Azure applications in multiple regions may have experienced degraded service availability when connecting to their resources. This resulted from a spike in networking traffic, causing service-level drops for the DNS services. The DNS issues were self-healed.

However, later in the day, Azure faced instability after the DNS recovery after a high rate of reconnect and retry activity came from an internal service, causing customers in the central U.S. to experience SQL database issues.

Recalled: Samsung Galaxy Note 7

While reports started circulating in the last couple weeks that lithium-ion batteries in Samsung Electronics' much-ballyhooed Galaxy Note 7 mobile could overheat and catch fire, the fallout from the problem really came to light with an official recall announced by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The CPSC on Thursday issued a formal recall of about 1 million Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices after Samsung reported receiving 92 reports of batteries overheating in the U.S., which caused at least 26 burns and 55 counts of property damage.

"Consumers should immediately stop using and power down the recalled Galaxy Note 7 devices purchased before September 15, 2016," the CPSC wrote in the recall notice.