Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Wednesday 23 July 2008, 2:52 PM
VMware out with results and free deal
It is busy days at VMware as the company said goodbye to its president and chief executive, faced rumblings from investors worried about the company's strategy and then decided to come up with a radical strategy to fix the latter point and fight off Microsoft and others at the same time.
Dianne Green, the former chief executive and president, left earlier this month, and Paul Maritz, a former long-standing Microsoft executive stepped into her shoes immediately.
The new strategy is to give the entry-level version of the VMware product, ESXi, away for free in the hope of attracting more customers to try out the system and then buy the full paid-for version.
"Now customers can enjoy the benefits of virtualisation without having to upgrade just to try it out," said Martin Niemer, product marketing manager at VMware. "This is an easy way to upgrade."
The free version will be available in about two weeks, according to VMware's Maritz who said that the company wanted to make virtualisation as free as possible.
It was perhaps in anticipation to this that analysts, and others, had begun to voice concerns over the company's strategy. Well, it was perhaps because of that and the fact that in losing Greene the company had lost one its most high profile executives.
According to Niemer, VMware has little to worry about the competition from companies like Microsoft. At least not yet. "Microsoft? We haven't seen them getting much traction in the market," he told ZDNet.co.uk.
Whatever the worries thought Microsoft or anyone else, at least VMware's latest results show a company able and willing to fend off all competitors for now.
The second quarter results were released on Tuesday and showed that the company had revenues for the second quarter were $456m (£228m), an increase of 54 percent from the second quarter of 2007. GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $61m, compared to $47m, non-GAAP operating income was $112m, an increase of 52 percent from the second quarter of 2007.
Maritz's take on it was that VMware "had another solid quarter". In his summing up of the benefit for the benefit of analysts he said that the company's mission is "to help customers run datacenters that use powerful, cost-effective, modern hardware to deliver dramatically higher levels of flexibility, manageability and efficiency".
So, VMware has done the housekeeping and got everything in order so let the next phase of the battle for control of the virtualisation market begin. Hmm, that piece did not mention Sun Microsystems or IBM. Is it time for their next moves?
Tuesday 22 July 2008, 3:50 PM
IBM shaves more off its Lenovo holding
IBM is continuing to cut down its interest in the PC market as it announced on Monday that it was again selling some of its shareholding in Lenovo. IBM is selling 116.19 million shares which would decrease its holding in Lenovo from 5.96 percent to 4.7 percent according to Reuters.
It would also take the IBM/Lenovo shareholding below the figure of 5 percent at which shareholdings must be declared.
Ever since IBM's PC business was bought by Lenovo, the shareholding has been steadily decreased.
Friday 30 May 2008, 3:58 PM
HP and IBM tussle in servers
On Wednesday, HP launches a system that doubles the number of blades that can be fitted on one unit, less than a month after IBM introduced the iDataPlex range which also doubled the number and likewise doubled the servers in one any one system.
The move continues the industry trend of increasing the density of systems to get more efficiency, especially in the use of space in data centres as well as power usage.
The HP ProLiant BL2x220c G5 combines two independent servers in one blade. HP is claiming that by combining two servers in one blade it is achieving an industry first, although it appears to be another way of achieving the same end as IBM. HP claims that the BL2x220c delivers 60 percent better performance per watt than similar configurations on the market. IBM claimed that the iDataPlex consumed 40 percent less power and standard rack-mount systems.
Like the IBM system, HP is scalable. Previously, a single 10U chassis would take up to 32 servers. With up to 32 server nodes in a single 10U blade chassis, the new BladeSystem can scale up to 128 servers, 1,024 CPU cores and 2TB of RAM in one standard-sized rack of four enclosures, the company says. The new blade is able to offers double the density of its HP predecessors by fitting two servers into each slot.
Such density should mean lots of heat, but HP's UK product manager, Phil McClean points out that "it users a lower wattage processor than others" and so should be cool enough and stay in control of energy loss without degrading system performance.
The ProLiant BL2x220c G5 costs £3,439 a unit, McClean said.
The competition in this area is definitely hotting up. While IBM's launch last week beat HP to the punch, HP may try and claim the technical stars. Either way, it is more choice for the customer.
Friday 30 May 2008, 10:21 AM
Dell readies ultra-portable?
The Gizmodo site writes that one of their number bumped into Michael Dell who was carrying a brand new ultra-portable.
“He was nice enough to show me this laptop that he was carrying that he said no one's seen before. It's a small form factor notebook, just like the Asus Eee and the HP 2133. He wouldn't tell me what OS it's running, or the pricing, but that it's a low-cost notebook meant for developing countries, and I hope here. Maybe it's Atom-powered. Who knows? But I do see three USB ports, a card reader, VGA out, Ethernet, and that red candy shell.”
It is a long expected mover from Dell and perhaps no surprise that even if low cost portables are not eating into the company profits too much at the moment, may well do in the future.
Wednesday 28 May 2008, 4:15 PM
Ethics? Is that near Sussex?
Embargoes are tricky things. Embargoes are rules that some journalists live by, or not. The choice is up to them.
Officially, embargoes are agreements that a journalist and a subject (company, individual, organisation, etc) enter into in which both sides agree not to publish something before a certain date (or time).
They are voluntary, with both sides choosing to keep to them or not. Both sides must obey them, otherwise the embargo is broken. The latter point escapes a lot of people.
If journalist (a) and company (b) agree to obey an embargo then that is fine. But if publications x, y and z all disobey the embargo then journalist (a) may well decide that as the embargo is well and truly broken he or she is not going to obey it either.
In the real world, things can be even more complicated than that.
I have just been given details of a story that is under embargo and I cannot write about until Thursday. I have been informed of this by company (a) telling me about it and complaining about the way its competition has portrayed the news.
The problem is that I knew nothing about the story whatsoever until the company told me about the that it did not like the way the other company had portrayed it.
Now, it is essential for an embargo to be considered binding for the parties to know what they are letting themselves into BEFORE they enter into it.
I had no idea what I was letting myself into before I agreed to anything. I know that because I have not agreed to anything yet.
I am highly tempted ignore this embargo now, since no-one has officially told me of its existence before the fact, why not?
Tempting it is but will have to remain so I think. I would like to think it is my ethics that stop me, but the reality is much simpler. It is not that good a story.
Anyway, ethics are like motor cars. If they are to remain up to scratch they need to get a quick run out every now and then. Well, not really, but now, who has got some dirt on Microsoft?
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