Whitman gives HP harsh report card, outlines recovery plan
Hewlett-Packard has underinvested in its business and become "too complex and too slow," President and CEO Meg Whitman said Wednesday, offering a three-part turnaround plan to get the ailing company back on track.
Speaking to analysts and investors after HP released its financial results, Whitman offered a frank assessment of HP's challenges at the end of her first full quarter on the job.
It was a tough three months for HP, which saw its profit dive 44 percent and revenue decline by 7 percent. Its giant Personal Systems Group, where revenue skidded 15 percent, needs to build more innovative PCs, Whitman said.
"The fact is that, for all that's right with PSG, we underinvested in innovation in the last several years and we've been late to market too often," Whitman said. Read more...
HP gives Vertica a fresh face
Hewlett-Packard's Vertica subsidiary has updated its real-time analytics software, giving it a graphical user interface and connectivity to big-data-styled analysis systems.
The Vertica Analytics Platform is a column oriented analytic database, one designed for rapidly ingesting and structuring large amounts of data for quick analysis. "Our use case is focused primarily on real-time analytics," said Scott Howser, Vertica's vice president of product marketing. Internet companies such as Zynga and GroupOn both use Vertica for quick analysis of user behaviors, he said; he expects that an increasing number of organizations will require this type of immediate analysis to better serve their customers.
HP purchased Vertica last year. It has since integrated Vertica with its Autonomy IDOL software, another 2011 HP acquisition, for a single solution, called the HP Next Generation Information Platform, that analyzes both structured and unstructured data. Read more...
HP gives sysadmins a little mobility
HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub.
HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP Global Partner event in Las Vegas the company promised a good deal more functionality would be coming to mobile clients. Read more...
HP shares database smarts with EnterpriseDB
EnterpriseDB is trying to pump up the PostgreSQL database to do battle with Oracle 11g and, to a lesser extent, IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL. So the database upstart is upgrading its Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.1 - and kicking it onto Amazon's EC2 compute cloud to peddle it alongside Amazon's own Relational Database Service.
As El Reg previously reported, the open source PostgreSQL relational database was updated to the 9.1 release level last September, with a lot of the work being done by a team at EnterpriseDB, which has become the "Red Hat for PostgreSQL," led by Robert Haas, the senior architect at the company. Read more...
HP releases Android TouchPad kernel, CyanogenMod to see improved features
Despite never officially releasing an Android-powered TouchPad, HP has gifted the Android kernel on which it based prototype versions of its tablet to CyanogenMod, the team behind the Ice Cream Sandwich port for the now cancelled device.
webOSNation reports that when HP was shipping out TouchPads faster than you could say ‘Firesale’, it mistakenly sent a few tablets running an older version of Android to customers, highlighting the fact it had tested the platform within its labs. Read more...
Clues about HP’s Gen8 servers leaked
Hewlett-Packard has let slip some details on its website about its upcoming Proliant Gen8 servers ahead of their official launch.
The pages list basic details of single- and dual-socket BL, ML and DL Gen8 servers, which will be based on Intel's upcoming Xeon E5 processors.
One system, the single-socket ProLiant BL460c, is a small-form-factor server based on Intel's E5-2650L processor.
Some servers will have HP's latest networking, I/O, storage and management capabilities, according to results that show up during a search of HP's website. The pages the results are supposed to lead to have been removed from the site. Read more...
Oracle handed setback in HP Itanium case
A court in California rejected Oracle's bid to use a fraud claim to undo an agreement to support the Itanium processor, that it is said to have made with Hewlett-Packard.
"The alleged fraud did not prevent Oracle from participating in the negotiations or deprive Oracle of the opportunity to negotiate," Judge James P. Kleinberg of the Superior Court of California, Santa Clara County said in a 21-page ruling on Monday.
The Judge was referring to HP's settlement agreement in 2010 with Mark Hurd, former CEO of HP, who later joined Oracle as president. Although Oracle was not a party to the previous litigation by HP against Hurd, its participation in the Hurd litigation settlement negotiations was extensive, he added. Read more...
HP’s open-sourcing of webOS begins today
The last time we heard about webOS, HP had opted to open-source the mobile platform, letting developers take a stab at breathing some life into it. It was an unconventional move, but not necessarily a bad one: it puts the platform largely in the hands of the development community, and it doesn’t require a large investment.
Today we found out more about HP’s plans for the second coming of webOS. The first step of the open sourcing process, the release of the Enyo application framework, took place today. The entire process is expected to be completed by September of this year. Upon completion of the open-sourcing transition, it will be known as Open webOS 1.0. Read more...
HP palms £316m in DWP desktop deal
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has awarded a significant desktop management contract to HP under the Desktop 21 framework agreement.
The five-year £316m Desktop 21 deal covers a range of desktop services including security, print, service desk and device provision and support, and will see the DWP move to HP's WorkPlace360 desktop management platform from 2013.
HP will begin work immediately to put in place the infrastructure needed to support Desktop 21, before moving on to virtualise DWP's desktop applications on a rolling programme, according to the DWP.
HP will then begin the roll-out of the new desktop hardware, including the deployment of thin client devices, which will be able to "support full or partial moves to cloud services at DWP's discretion", the department told Guardian Government Computing. Read more...
HP Unveils Two New Desktop PCs: The Omni All-In-One And The HPE h9 Phoenix
Ultrabooks are all the rage for 2012, and we’ll probably see quite a few of them at CES next week. But there are still some of us who prefer a more robust computing experience, which is why HP has today announced the Omni 27-inch all-in-one and the Pavilion HPE h9 Phoenix, the most powerful Pavilion model to date.
I actually was lucky enough to get hands-on with these puppies a few weeks ago, and the 27-inch Omni is a sight to behold. It’s sleek, seemingly well-constructed, and speaks to the minimalist in me. The PC hosts all the ports you’d expect out of an all-in-one, including HDMI-in, Blu-Ray disc drive, two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader, and an ethernet jack. Read more...
Why there’s real hope for webOS – if HP is committed
It's too soon to declare that Hewlett-Packard has "dump[ed] webOS in the open source trash can", as my friend and mobile open source expert Fabrizio Capobianco insists. But it's also way too soon for HP to speculate on its action being any sort of victory, given the immense difficulties inherent in successfully open sourcing technology.
Open sourcing webOS is not an end, but a means to an end, and one that depends heavily on HP's ability to get out of the way and cooperatively construct a community around the mobile platform.
It's not for the faint of heart.
Just ask Nokia, which sought to sustain Symbian as a mobile powerhouse by turning Symbian into an open-source project. Except that it didn't. Not immediately, anyway. From the outset, the Symbian Foundation promised a long wait for the Symbian code, but it took years, and was eventually pulled back into proprietary software land.
In open-source land, the lack of shipping code is a deal killer. It is impossible to sustain interest in chimerical code. Read more...
WebOS Open-Sourced; New HP Tablets May Be in the Works
No one can blame you if you haven't heard of WebOS. But just like how iOS powers the iPad and Android powers the Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire, WebOS is what's under the hood of the HP TouchPad -- the iPad-size tablet that HP sold off in a $99 fire sale not too long ago.
The fact most of Android is open-source is one of the big things that's made it so popular, with app developers and hardware manufacturers. Because the programming code is out there on the Internet, for anyone to download and do what they want with it, Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble were able to make their e-reader tablets without asking Google's permission. Meanwhile, hobbyists like the ones behind CyanogenMod have created "custom ROMs" of Android, which are now being used by projects and startups like Republic Wireless.
Now, HP has announced it's making its WebOS code open-source. Will the open-sourcing of WebOS revitalize HP's failing project? More importantly, what does it mean for you? Read more...
Former HP chair Dunn, 58, dies after cancer bout
Patricia Dunn, the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chairwoman who authorized a boardroom surveillance probe that ultimately sullied her remarkable rise from investment bank typist to the corporate upper class, has died after a long bout with cancer. She was 58.
Dunn died Sunday morning at her home in Orinda surrounded by her family, according to her sister, Debbie Lammers. She said Dunn's ovarian cancer had returned.
Once one of the most powerful women in corporate America, Dunn saw her career tarnished in 2006 when she was ousted from HP and brought up on criminal charges — which were ultimately dropped — for approving the company's plan to snoop into the private phone records of board members, journalists and HP employees to catch people leaking to the media. Read more...
HP to put Xeon chips in high-end Integrity servers
Hewlett-Packard has updated the road map for its high-end Integrity servers to include systems that can accommodate both Xeon- and Itanium-based servers side by side, the company announced Tuesday.
It's a significant move for HP, and one that could help it to deflect the onslaught of criticism against Itanium from server rival Oracle, which insists that Itanium is a platform with no future.
HP's announcement doesn't extend the road map for Itanium, but it might give HP customers the confidence to stick with Integrity servers because they will soon have a choice of processors and therefore some investment protection, said Gartner analyst George Weiss. Read more...