On eve of departure, Otellini looks back on four decades with Intel
Just a month away from retirement, Intel CEO Paul Otellini has reflected on his four decades with the company during his last quarterly earnings call with analysts and reporters.
Otellini is not going out on a high note, with Intel reporting a sharp drop in profits Tuesday thanks mainly to the slumping PC market. But despite finding little success in the smartphone and tablet markets, Otellini said Intel creates opportunities for itself by staying ahead of the fast-moving tech industry, and that this will drive the company forward in the future.
"Even as I prepare to pass the baton to a new generation, I know Intel's story is not completely written," Otellini said.
Intel's future is not entirely clear, but the company is putting more focus on mobile products and manufacturing technology, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. Read more...
Intel profit dives 25 percent amid PC market slump
Intel reported a drop in profits and revenue for the first quarter, as the biggest PC market slump in recent memory weighed on its business. Intel reported a profit of $2.05 billion for the quarter ended March 30, down 25 percent from a year earlier. Revenue was $12.6 billion, Intel said, a drop of 2.5 percent.
About two-thirds of Intel's revenue comes from its PC client group, which makes chips for laptops and desktops. Revenue from that division was down 6 percent year on year, to $8.0 billion.
Intel's Data Center Group, which sells server chips and other enterprise hardware, fared better. Quarterly revenue from that division was up 7.5 percent year-over-year, to $2.6 billion. Read more...
Update: BlackBerry ships 1 million Z10 smartphones in move to profit
Research In Motion Limited, now doing business as BlackBerry, shipped about 1 million BlackBerry Z10 smartphones during its fiscal fourth quarter.
Anything more than a million in Z10 sales in the quarter can be considered a success for BlackBerry, anything less would have been disappointing, according to Ovum. The Z10 is the first BlackBerry 10 OS device.
BlackBerry shipped a total of 6 million smartphones in the quarter, the company said Thursday as it released its quarterly earnings.
Revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended on March 2, was approximately $2.7 billion, down 36 percent from the same quarter of fiscal 2012. Net income from continuing operations for the quarter was $94 million, compared to a net loss of $118 million during 2012. Read more...
The 2013 Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders
"You have to show the business the possibilities," says Steelcase CIO Bob Krestakos, who with another colleague holds the patent for the HD video technology. "One of the big insights IT was able to bring [to product development] is the power of video in sharing data and collaboration." Read more...
Hadoop Hive stung into action, swarms around SQL
Hortonworks has unveiled the Stinger Initiative, a project to make Hadoop’s Hive data warehouse friendlier with SQL and faster.
Hortonworks has also unveiled two accompanying Hadoop projects, which it’s submitted to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in the hope they become community-supported projects. They are a runtime called Tez and a sign-in and authentication system called Gateway. Both Tez and Gateway are ASF incubator projects.
Hadoop services startup Hortonworks said Stinger would “enhance Hive with more SQL and better performance” for what it called “human-time use cases”. Read more...
IBM makes big mobile push with ThinkMobile
Forget the ThinkPad, IBM is now all about ThinkMobile.
IBM is making a renewed push into the burgeoning market for all things mobile, saying it can help its corporate customers grow revenue and become more competitive through mobile app development.
The effort pulls together a raft of IBM products and services, some recently acquired, under a new umbrella brand: ThinkMobile. It's aimed at a market that many view as ripe for expansion -- helping business turn the proliferation of smartphones and tablets from a management headache into an advantage. Read more...
SAP vows to unravel user snarl-up over software licensing
SAP is "actively discussing" ways to make its software licensing easier to understand, the software giant has told The Reg.
A spokesperson for SAP, the world’s largest maker of business software, said it plans to announce specifics “shortly.”
SAP didn’t provide any more details, but the statement follows a damning condemnation of the current state of SAP licensing in a user group survey.
An annual survey of 336 SAP users in 150 user organisations found near-universal dissatisfaction with confusing and expensive pricing.
SAP is expected to unveil the changes at next month's UK and Ireland User Group conference in Manchester.
Users in the group's survey called on SAP to introduce a licensing holiday, to let them park unused licences they’ve paid for, and for SAP to publish a clear price list. Read more...
Mayer names former Googler to be Yahoo COO
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer appointed another former Google employee as her chief operations officer on Monday, her first day back at work since the birth of her baby.
Henrique de Castro, previously vice president of Google's worldwide partner business solutions group, will join the company by Jan. 22, and will report directly to Mayer. He will manage Yahoo's sales, operations, media and business development worldwide, the company said.
Reports surfaced in August that the company was searching for a COO with "turnaround experience."
In a prepared statement, Mayer praised De Castro's experience in operating an online advertising business and in building up a global organization.
Before joining Google, De Castro managed Dell's Western European sales and business development activities, and before that was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Read more...
Listen up, Nokia: Get Lumia show-offs in pubs or it’s game over
Nokia has a couple of mountains to climb. There's the real mountain: in the marketplace it's starting from scratch, a newcomer that just happens to have a large distribution business in place, and a couple of billion euros in capital. Then there's the metaphorical mountain, which is a mountain of cliches.
For Nokia to survive it will have to prove the armchair pundits wrong. Nokia showed off two surprisingly good new phones in New York this week, but a swarm of experts largely didn't agree. But all is not lost. A few hundred pundits, who typically act as a herd, are outnumbered by millions of consumers making very personal buying decisions. And armchairs don't buy phones. Read more...
Dell, VMware team up on bundled VDI package
Dell and VMware announced a partnership this week through which the two companies will sell a bundled system with server, network, and storage components in support of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
Dell's new vStart for VDI is based on VMware's View 5.1 VDI software and Citrix XenDesktop 5.6. The rack-mountable hardware bundle is validated in various capacity configurations, depending on the size of the business.
Additionally, plug-ins are available for both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V configurations.
On the hardware side, the vStart for VDI includes Dell's new 12th generation PowerEdge servers, as well as Dell Compellent and EqualLogic storage and Dell Force10 networking. Read more...
Worried you’ll be forced to buy Windows 8? Relax!
I've heard from several people who are concerned they won't be able to find new PCs with Windows 7 this holiday season. Businesses planning on buying new PCs may have money allocated for the machines, but there's not nearly enough in the coffers to train the troops in the care and feeding of the new dual-faced operating system as well.
For those people, I have some good news and some sorta good news.
Back in July 2010, Brandon LeBlanc on the Windows Team Blog had some words of cheer. "In the interest of providing more consistency and predictability with how we manage the Windows lifecycle," LeBlanc said, "we are confirming our current policy of allowing retailers to sell the boxed version of the previous OS for up to 1 year after release of a new OS, and that OEMs can sell PCs with the previous OS pre-loaded for up to 2 years after, the launch date of the new OS." Read more...
IBM wants RIM’s crown jewel — its enterprise business, report says
IBM has shown interest in acquiring the vital enterprise services business of struggling smartphone maker Research in Motion, according to a Bloomberg report on Friday.
The report cites two unnamed sources, including one person who said IBM has informally approached RIM about buying the unit. The unit is valued at at around $2 billion, industry experts say.
Officials from IBM and RIM declined to comment on the report.
However, one person with knowledge of the situation told Computerworld today that the report is "not true" and that IBM is not interested in buying RIM's crown jewel. Read more...
Top 5 cities for big data jobs
Corporate data stores are growing exponentially, nearly every tech vendor is positioning their products to help handle the influx of data, and IT departments are scrambling to find the right people to collect, analyze and interpret data in a way that's meaningful to the business. On the employment front, the big data deluge is creating a hiring boom across North America. Modis, an IT staffing firm, identified five cities in particular where big data is driving job growth.
San Francisco tops the Modis list, followed by McLean, Va., Boston, St. Louis and Toronto. The roles that companies in these cities are fighting to fill include data scientist, data analyst, business intelligence professional and data modeling/data modeler.
Business intelligence and data analysis have been core enterprise disciplines for a long time, but they're becoming more important to businesses as data volumes rise, says Laura Kelley, a Modis vice president in Houston. "We're in a new era in terms of how large the databases are, the amount of data we're collecting, and how we're using it. It's much more strategic than it's ever been." Read more...
Hackers increasingly zero in on small businesses
The percentage of targeted attacks aimed at small businesses doubled in the first half of 2012, an indication that hackers are dedicating more resources to what they see as the most vulnerable marks, a major security vendor said.
In the first six months of the year, more than a third of targeted attacks on businesses were pointed toward companies with fewer than 250 employees. That was twice the percentage of attacks aimed at similar sized companies at the end of 2011, Symantec said in its mid-year Intelligence Report.
A targeted attack is one that's tailored to a specific company. Cyber criminals customize malware to particular vulnerabilities and use information gathered publicly -- or stolen from other companies -- to create emails with malicious attachements that have a higher chance of being opened by employees. That type of social engineering has proved successful despite corporate efforts to bolster security training and warn workers away from opening potentially dangerous emails. Read more...
Facebook says mobile ads successful; analysts say challenges remain
Facebook seemed to answer at least one burning question about its mobile business on Thursday -- it doesn't plan to build its own smartphone -- but it's still not entirely clear how it will capitalize on its rapidly expanding base of mobile users.
"Building out a whole phone wouldn't really make much sense for us to do," said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, when asked about Facebook's mobile strategy during a conference call to discuss its first financial report as a public company.
The number of people who access Facebook's service from mobile devices is expanding rapidly. The company had 955 million monthly active users at the end of June, of which 543 million accessed Facebook from a mobile device, the company said Thursday. That was up 67% from the same quarter last year, it said. Read more...