After buying webOS and Palm for $1.2 billion, HP pulled the plug and open-sourced the platform. The first fruits of that labor are appearing as multiple devices are getting ports of the new Open webOS, keeping Palm’s excellent mobile operating system alive for many fans. Read more »
In the latest phase of a well-organized succession plan at IBM, Virginia Rometty will become chairman of the IT giant on October 1. Sam Palmisano will stay on as advisor until December 1, the company said. Read more »
The troubled IT giant is about to tweak its cloud services effort according to a Bloomberg News report. The question is whether yet another new strategy can give the company the traction it needs so badly. Read more »
Whether it’s the iPhone 5, the importance of LTE, or BYOD trends disrupting the enterprise, there are always technologies, trends, and companies changing the way we define mobile. Here are some noteworthy segments to watch in the coming months, from location-based shopping to apps to wireless networks. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Listening platforms — or social media monitoring, analysis, and engagement tools — are bringing massive amounts of new information to businesses’ marketing departments. These tools are also leading the way in the growth of social media information and access throughout organizations so that customers’ wants and needs can be better understood and, presumably, satisfied. This report analyzes how the adoption of listening platforms is transforming marketing departments, their relationships with central IT, and the core systems that run the enterprise. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
HP’s CEO Meg Whitman said that the company is working on getting back into the smartphone market. It’s another twist for a company that has had a confused smartphone strategy. While the news gives some clarity for HP, the company still has to execute. Read more »
While cloud, mobility, social, and analytics have been driving demand for IT products and services in 2012, the worldwide IT spending picture has become dimmer as the year has progressed: We’re looking at 5.1 percent worldwide IT spending growth in 2012. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With Nodester, the polyglot PaaS provider gets deeper and broader Node.js support and access to even more Node.js developers. Next up? J2EE, Go and Perl support, says Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson. Read more »
John McCain and Ron Wyden are among the dozens of congresspeople people from Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico lobbying the ITC against harming the economy by banning the import of computers containing some of Intel’s most-popular processors. But saving the IT economy goes beyond patents. Read more »
It’s slow going for the HP turnaround Meg Whitman is trying to engineer. There’s softness in the PC business, in printers, in servers — just more bad news atop the $8 billion write-down of enterprise services that HP pre-announced. Not a pretty picture. Read more »
Founders Fund and Dustin Moskovitz’s Good Ventures have led a $15 million round in a company that is trying to replicate the intelligence of the human brain in software. Vicarious’ goal is to help humanity thrive by inventing the algorithm to create to intelligent machines. Read more »
Sqrrl plans to parlay technology from the Apache Accumulo project, which enables the lock-down of segments of a record, to make big data applications more secure and compliant with government regulations, said CEO Oren Falkowitz, an NSA veteran. Read more »
The company behind the enterprise Linux market leader has now made preview code of its OpenStack cloud platform available for download. The final release is due next year. Rackspace, Internap, HP and others already have OpenStack deployed. Is IBM next? Read more »
The massive charge is related to HP’s enterprise services arm constructed around its $14 bilion purchase of Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 2008. The company will announce its third quarter earnings on August 22. Read more »
A UBS analyst is calling for the breakup of Hewlett-Packard arguing that the separate parts are way more valuable than the whole. Ironically, that’s the kind of thinking that got former CEO Leo Apotheker booted last year. Read more »
With its OpenStack cloud now ready for its closeup, Rackspace is rebranding itself to emphasize open cloud as opposed to its hosting roots. Company CMO Suaad Sait said the company will continue to stress “fanatical support” as a key differentiator. Read more »
Jelly Bean is officially on few Android smartphones and tablets, but the developer community is already hard at work, porting the software to other devices. Case in point: the HP TouchPad tablet, which essentially has no other software future. It’s an early build, but shows promise. Read more »
The new deal between EMC and Lenovo to sell server-storage bundles could shake up hardware rivals including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and — perhaps most intriguingly — Cisco Systems. EMC, Cisco and VMware are partners on the VCE Vblock effort. Read more »
High-performance web applications are often hamstrung by sluggish IO. Amazon is now attacking that problem with new Provisioned IOPS block storage volumes and the ability to direct-connect those volumes to select EC2 compute instances over a 1000 Mbit/sec pipe. Read more »
Despite its current decline, RIM is a different firm today than it was in 2007, with new management, a full awareness of its shaky position, an upcoming OS release and a number of lingering advantages that can still be leveraged. Here’s how it just might survive. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon is offering customers unprecedented deals to stick with its cloud services. Some big companies can get annual “true up” deals while many report incentives to use reserved, rather than on-demand, instances. And Amazon is making an effort to keep startups in the fold. Read more »
Remember when there were just two or three cloud computing platforms to choose from, and just about as many cloud databases? Well, as clouds have proliferated, so have the database services built on top of them. Here are the available services and where they’re running. Read more »
In cloud and big data, the second quarter of 2012 featured several high-profile deals and product launches that could reshape the marketplace for everyone. Google and Microsoft launched Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, software-defined networking took off, and all eyes stayed fixed on the continuing promise of data analytics. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With the OpenStack project turning two years old soon amid what will no doubt be a ton of vendor-generated hoopla, Ignacio Llorente wants the world to know that the more mature OpenNebula open-source cloud continues to evolve, just with a lot less noise. Read more »
Two tech conferences took place this week on opposite coasts. One featured storage product updates and cocktails at Fenway Park. The other highlighted augmented-reality glasses and skydivers. One was the Red Hat Summit, the other Google I/O. Guess which was which. Read more »
Most platforms as a service focus on helping developers write shiny new cloud-based applications. Startup CliQr Technologies is more interested in putting the applications that already run businesses into the best cloud to run them and then to make them transportable from cloud to cloud. Read more »
Facebook is boosting its edge network with its own servers to speed the delivery of its photos according to Frank Frankovsky, a VP at the social networking company. Frankovsky outed his plans onstage at the structure 2012 event and explained how he hopes to scale. Read more »
As we move into the age of webscale and cloud computing the traditional data center architecture is blowing apart, according to execs of startups that have built new kinds of disruptive data center gear and software at the Structure conference on Wednesday in San Francisco. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon is looking more like an enterprise tech vendor all the time. On Thursday, it announced spruced-up support offerings for customers deploying work on the AWS cloud. As it woos companies to put mission-critical loads into Amazon’s cloud, expect more support services to come. Read more »
With all the cloud computing hubbub this week as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Oracle gala events all vie for attention, it’s telling that most of the buzz centers on what exactly, Larry Ellison will tweet some time tomorrow. Read more »
Microsoft hopes to prove Windows Azure a worthy adversary to Amazon Web Services with new solid-state block storage cloud, dramatically revamped REST API, and a console to meld management of on-premises and Azure-based applications on a single screen. Read more »
Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it’s actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale. Read more »
For power company ABB, DC — or direct current — is the future of the data center. This week ABB and IT firm Green opened up a new DC-powered expansion at Green’s data center, which the companies say is the most powerful use of DC for a data center. Read more »
Dell showed off a box that contains 48 ARM-based servers, joining others making boxes with processors that uses the same architecture as the chips inside your cell phone. The server consumes less power and could find a home in web servers and Hadoop clusters. Read more »
Dell may buy Quest Software in a bid to bolster its overall software management play, according to a Bloomberg report. Quest makes management software and tools that could help Dell to become an enterprise services provider — a long-time goal for the PC maker. Read more »
NASA, one of the two original backers of the OpenStack project, plans to stop actively developing software for that open-source cloud computing platform. NASA executive Karen Petraskas signaled the move at the Uptime Symposium this week, according to a published report. Read more »
The big news out of Hewlett-Packard’s second quarter earnings call is that the company will lose 9,000 employees in FY 2012, with former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch among the departed. Enterprise software chief Bill Veghte will take over stewardship of Autonomy. Read more »
With news that Google and Microsoft plan to take on Amazon Web Services with infrastructure services of their own, you have to ask: How many clouds do we need? Legacy vendors IBM, Microsoft and HP are hoping at least a couple more. Read more »