HP signs deal with Sun to sell ProLiant servers with Solaris
February 28, 2009
HP will be selling Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system with its blade systems and ProLiant servers.
It is the first time that the hardware maker, under a multi-year deal, endorsed Sun’s operating system which is rival to its own HP-UX Unix implementation. The terms of agreement, which exclude HP’s Integrity servers, make Sun a strategic partner in HP ProLiant OS distribution, as stated by both the companies. Read more
Dell mulls more jobs cuts as Q4 profits slide
February 28, 2009
Dell, the computer and IT giant witnessed a major downslide in its profits during the last quarter of 2008.
The PC manufacturer said reportedly generated revenue of $13.4 billion in the fourth quarter. This was around 16 percent lower than the $15.9 billion revenue reported last year for the same quarter.
Dell’s total profit for the year was $351 million, about 18 cents to a share. This is substantially lower to the last year’s earnings of $671 million and 31 cents to a share.
The drop in profit is nearly 48 percent. Most of the analysts had estimated the earnings to be close to 26 cents per share.
Dell declared last month that it would have to take a $280 million pre-tax charge i.e. about 11 cents to a share due to restructuring and cist cutting related measures in the quarter.
Many of the customers of Dell had started delaying or deferring on spending during summer which continued even during the second quarter. Brian Gladden, the chief financial officer for Dell said during a conference that they expected the weakness to continue for the ongoing quarter.
The focus of Gladden would continue to be on cost cutting for the company including luxuries such as corporate entertainment. Dell had cut its operating expenses by around 16 percent or nearly $363 million for the fourth quarter.
Critix ups competition with offer of free XenServer hypervisor
February 28, 2009
Critix has intensified competition in the virtualisation market with offer of providing its XenServer hypervisor free of cost. Read more
Red Hat to build KVM hypervisor
February 28, 2009
Red Hat will be building KVM hypervisor into its Enterprise Linux offering, the company announced yesterday.
Induction of virtual machine monitor in RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5.4 is the part of company’s virtualisation strategy. Despite framing strategy on KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), company will continue with Xen-based deployments for full lifetime of RHEL. Customers will be given tools and services to migrate from Xen deployments to KVM. Read more
Google to start charging for heavy use of App Engine
February 28, 2009
Google is planning to charge people for heavy use of cloud-computing foundation. The App Engine was available as free service, with some caps on network resource and computing usage, when Google launched it in April 2008. It is still free for lower traffic sites, but users will now be charged for higher access. This was one of the major requests from their developer, disclosed Google App Engine Product Manager, Pete Koomen. Read more
Software giant Microsoft to rethink its strategy for SQL Server
February 27, 2009
Microsoft is reconsidering its strategy for its very popular product, SQL Server and particularly about what it intends to do with SQL Data Services. SQL Services, which is a part of Microsoft’s Azure services platform, apparently was about to produce a very straightforward and possibly a cut down platform for database services.
Many users were not very happy with this development. If Azure was being offered by Microsoft for cloud computing then it should have all the functionality of an advanced database. There were reports at the conference of MSDN Developers that Microsoft would be doing exactly that.
According to reports, officials from Microsoft had given a commitment that they would come up a service which would be fully hosted and that Microsoft would be delivering it before the end of this year.
Users had a mixed reaction, some finding it inevitable whereas some actually welcomed it. The concept of having a mix of business intelligence and critical applications like SQL Server and many such things have long been discussed, but now they are close to reality.
Steve Ballmer, the chief executive for Microsoft said the Wall Street Journal that the upcoming version of SQL Server would do exceptional things in data warehousing and business intelligence. The company would have an advanced version called Data Center sometime in the next year.
Plan to float single Blu-ray licence
February 27, 2009
A simpler and less expensive licensing process is being floated for the makers of Blu-ray devices, it was announced by Philips, Sony and Panasonic in a joint statement on Wednesday.
A ‘one-stop shop’ licence would be introduced by mid-2009, that will include all necessary CD, DVD and Blu-ray patents for sale of Blu-ray players. Licensing work will be handled by a newly formed licensing company to be headed by ex-head of IBM’s intellectual property business. With head office in the US, it will have branches in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
The single licensing process will eliminate existing practice of individual approach to CD, DVD and Blu-ray holders and paying royalties separately. According to Sony’s estimate, this procedure will cut down overall cost of royalty payments to the extent of 40%.
New licence fees would be $14 for Blu-ray recorder and $9.50 (£6.70) for Blu-ray player. Cost of Blu-ray disc will be 11 cents for read-only, and 12 and 15 cents each for recordable discs and rewritable discs respectively.
One-stop shop idea for Blu-ray was under consideration since meeting of 18 Blu-ray patent holder companies in 2007. Licensing fees was most lucrative for the patent holders of disc-format. Long ago, cost of licence fees for DVD player was around $15 to $20. This single licence process will eliminate hassles created by DVD licensing.
Nokia likely to enter laptop business
February 27, 2009
A proposal to enter laptop business is under active consideration, declared Olli-Pekka Kallavuo, chief executive of the world’s top mobile-phone maker Nokia, in an interview to Finnish broadcaster YLE.
When asked if Nokia planned to make laptops, he replied that it was looking very actively at that opportunity. Read more
Google to release Chrome for Mac soon
February 27, 2009
Google is edging closer to release its working version of Chrome browser for Mac.
Google’s programmers were building an engine, within a test shell, which could render web pages. They have now started hooking up the engine to a full-fledged browser. This browser, apart from doing other things will also be able to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. That is the key feature for real application especially for Chrome which enables isolation of each browser tab into its computing process. Read more
Open source gets Government support
February 27, 2009
The government is promising use of open source if difference in cost of products and services compared to proprietary alternatives was not significant. This was stated in the policy statement on open-source software, published by the government. Read more
