Silicon Valley’s fuel cell maker Bloom Energy has launched a new practice focused on data centers, the company announced on Wednesday. To lead the group, Bloom Energy has brought on Peter Gross, who co-founded data-center firm EYP Mission Critical Facilities, which was bought by HP. Read more »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Leo Apotheker, the Hewlett-Packard CEO ousted so publicly last September, pretty much disappeared from view. Until recently. Now he’s been spotted in Menlo Park and was featured on a conference call with Wall Street analyst Rick Sherlund. Could he be plotting a comeback? Read more »
Hewlett-Packard continues to be rocked by a flood-induced hard drive shortage; its go-to printing business is sputtering; the company as a whole continues to spend too much on too many products; and it needs to get its design-and-execution mojo back. Read more »
Tablets represent the next evolution in the advancement of mobile computing, and by 2015 or 2016, the tablet will begin to replace the laptop and the desktop operating systems market will begin to level off or perhaps decline. Our latest forecast examines these trends in detail. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Large data centers are increasingly moving to converged infrastructure, and most of the chatter has been about this slick, new hardware. But it also has deep implications for enterprise employees and the CIOS and managers that must retrain them — or do away with them altogether. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
While 2011 was a bad year for Hewlett-Packard, it was a good one for chairman Ray Lane, at least financially. Lane logged more than $10 million in total compensation mostly in stock and options — for the fiscal year, according to the HP proxy. Read more »
Oracle and HP used to coexist quite well — People forget that the first Oracle Exadata ran on HP hardware. Then Oracle bought Sun and things went downhill fast. Public spats played out in CEO letters to The New York Times, and now court documents. Read more »
HP is following other big systems makers into the world of software defined networking with a line of 16 OpenFlow-enabled switches. That’s a pretty serious commitment to OpenFlow, a protocol that helps take the intelligence associated with routing packets off of the high-priced switching gear and […] Read more »
HP won a tactical battle last night when a judge tossed out an Oracle fraud claim. But it also lost one — when he unsealed previously redacted documents that show just how desperate HP was to keep Oracle working on software for HP’s Itanium servers. Read more »
Apple is the king of the PC heap, so long as you consider the iPad among those devices. Research firm Canalys does, and its most recent look at PC sales, focusing on the fourth quarter of 2011, shows the PC market growing with the iPad included. Read more »
For a company that manages to debut a new product line every few years that seizes the public’s attention worldwide, it is rather amazing to see how little Apple spends on research and development as a percentage of its sales compared to its peers. Read more »
The greater Boston area may not be the hub of the big data universe that some recent research suggests, but it got a leg up this week with news that tech giant Hewlett-Packard is moving some of its big data operations to Cambridge. Read more »
Joyent will use the cash to fund expansion of its cloud services and take on Amazon, the behemoth in that space. The company hosts its own public cloud services and sells infrastructure that customers use to field their own public or private cloud services. Read more »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Less than three years in, that’s a very big number, especially since data center buyers tend to be a conservative bunch. Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems definitely has legs, but it still hasn’t cracked the top five server vendors. Rival HP still holds the top slot. Read more »
With the industry in uproar and a good reputation in TVs, Vizio has picked a great (perhaps the greatest?) time in recent PC industry history to try to make its mark on the industry by taking an entertainment-focused, Windows-based approach to laptops and desktops. Read more »
While 2011 was a busy year for the tech industry, don’t expect things to slow down in 2012. We’ve rounded up some of GigaOM’s biggest stories of the year with a bit of insight on what each will mean for 2012. Read more »
I made a lot of predictions about cloud computing and the general IT infrastructure space heading into 2011, and I impressed myself with my skills of prognostication. Of course, it’s possible I’m just grading myself too generously, so I’ll let readers be the judges. Read more »
2011 is surely a year that Hewlett-Packard would like to forget. It fired its second CEO in two years. It said it might sell its PC business and push WebOS phones and tablets only to back off on both moves. Here’s what HP needs to do in 2012. Read more »
Apple’s share of the global tablet market slid in the quarter ending Sept. 30, according to a new report from research firm IDC. Apple did, however, ship 11.1 million tablets during the quarter, more than 10 million more than its next-closest competitor, Samsung. Read more »
Microsoft quietly made a personnel move this week that may indicate the company is working toward a unified operating system for handsets, tablets and PCs. But this is a critical moment for Windows Phone, and Microsoft should first tackle a few other important things to regain ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Digital Reasoning, a somewhat shadowy specialist in big data analytics for the U.S. intelligence community, announced B Series funding and named industry vet John Brennan to its board. Funding came from CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, as well as some Silver Lake Sumeru partners and other unnamed investors. Read more »
The race for market share among cloud storage providers continues with some HP PCs now offering an easy on-ramp to Box.net’s cloud storage. But how much traction can a PC bundle get when most business users rely more and more on their mobile devices? Read more »
By 2020 it is estimated that 20–50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. Many of these devices will be collecting health data or will be connected to health and medical devices in the home, the hospital or the wider environment. The Internet of things (IoT), meanwhile, refers to the growth of sensors and things that connect to the Internet via RFID, Bluetooth, ZigBee and satellite. In health care, its growth is likely to open new disruptive business opportunities for services that add value to the data collected. This paper provides a preliminary overview of the landscape of opportunities and drivers in the current health and health care environments and highlights some of the challenges that remain. Companies mentioned in this report include IBM, Arrayent Health, Kaiser Permanente and Ford. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Michael Rizkalla, the former senior director of webOS application development at HP, has just started at Xobni, where he will be its senior director of mobile applications. It’s the latest exodus from the webOS team as HP contemplates what to do with the mobile operating system. Read more »
With its new Idol 10 software, Hewlett-Packard brings together key Vertica and Autonomy technologies acquired over the last year for an assault on knotty big data problems. HP says the software can collect and analyze unstructured data including video, audio and social net feeds. Read more »
Here’s hoping 2012 will be the year we separate the wheat from the chaff in cloud computing. At the very least, more businesses will know about the potential benefits and pitfalls of cloud computing so they can differentiate the real from the bogus. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard continues to struggle with fallout from the decision to nix its webOS-based tablets, a less-than-stellar mix of IT services, and its newly completed acquisition of Autonomy. The question is how long those reverberations will impact the company’s profitability and growth prospects. Read more »
Mayfield Fund named Sandeep Johri as its new executive in residence. He willl use his experience in enterprise software to drive the VC’s enterprise strategy. Johri helped drive HP’s cloud and enterprise strategy and also held management posts at Silicon Graphics and Gemini Consulting. Read more »
Despite a tough economy, technology investors expect to fund more cloud-computing-related technologies, according to new research. More than half of those surveyed by Peachtree Capital predicted investment growth in cloud technology going forward. Read more »
Fujitsu’s new hybrid implementation of Microsoft Windows Azure could address corporate concerns about deploying global workloads on Microsoft’s public cloud. With Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, Fujitsu can use its global presence to make sure that data stays within prescribed areas Read more »
Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, has cycled through a flurry of client device strategies in the past year. Those changes, including the discontinuation of the TouchPad, bred confusion not only about HP’s hardware roadmap but also about its ability to drive future cloud services. Read more »
You sort of knew this was coming: Reuters reports that Hewlett-Packard is looking to unload webOS, the mobile operating system it got when it bought Palm last year, for hundreds of millions of dollars, and far below the $1.2 billion it paid just 18 months ago. Read more »
SolidFire, which wants to bring all-solid-state storage to cloud providers serving you, raised an additional $25 million in venture capital bringing its total to $37 million. New investors in this second round include Data Domain veterans as well as former Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopolous. Read more »
Last quarter we highlighted the fast maturation of the Platform-as-a-Service and big data spaces. Those two trends only picked up speed during the third quarter of 2011. Joining them on the cusp of IT greatness, though, are the OpenStack project and flash storage. The former gathered serious validation from big-name companies, while the latter saw less funding than last quarter but a significant number of product launches. Of course, the third quarter wasn’t all lollipops and rose petals. We saw new computing technologies and delivery models such as tablets wreak havoc on both HP and Cisco, and there are concerns (aren’t there always?) about how the Internet will handle our increased use of streaming video and cloud computing. Unfortunately for HP and Cisco, the latter problem might be an easier fix than the strategic woes facing them. Additional companies mentioned in this report include CloudBees, Rackspace, Engine Yard and Joyent. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As the OpenStack project moves into its second year and more companies evaluate the open-source cloud technology, prospective users have some requests. Documentation, for one. A longer-term roadmap, for another. A more formal process for submitting and receiving feedback, for yet another. Read more »
Red Hat’s planned $136 million purchase of Gluster should give the enterprise Linux leader a strong play in the cloud-inflected world of scale-out storage. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions by vendors trying to stake a claim in the storage of unstructured data. Read more »
Oracle customers have lots of questions for the database giant. If you’re one of the 50,000 people Oracle expects to converge on the Moscone Center starting Sunday–or even if you’re not–here are some key things to look out for at the big Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Conference. Read more »
