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AMD To Slash A 10th Of Its Workforce
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Advanced Micro Devices Inc revealed a plan on Thursday to save about $200 million of operating costs in 2012 by cutting 10 percent of its global workforce and streamlining internal business processes.
The layoffs mark the first major move by Chief Executive Rory Read, who took the helm in August to try to galvanize a microprocessor maker that has bled market share to larger rival Intel Corp, while missing out on the mobile device boom.
“It’s not too surprising given the operating background of the new CEO and this is exactly what you’d bring an outsider in to do, but their problems go far deeper right now,” said Alex Gauna, an analyst at JMP Securities.
The layoffs should be completed in 2012′s first quarter, AMD said in a statement. Savings generated could help bankroll research and expansion into areas such as low-power chips, emerging markets and cloud computing next year.
In late September AMD, a distant second to Intel in selling microprocessors that are the brains of PCs, warned of manufacturing problems manufacturing it new 32 nanometer Llano chips as well as older 45 nanometer chips.
HP Makes Changes At The Top
HP has appointed former Boeing Company executive John Hinshaw as CIO.
In the newly created role of EVP of Global Technology and Business Processes, Hinshaw will oversee IT and shared and administrative services, including indirect and services procurement. Hinshaw also will be in charge of optimising business processes across the company.
Hinshaw was previously VP and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions at The Boeing Company, where he was responsible for running a new business.
Prior to Boeing, Hinshaw was SVP and CIO at Verizon Wireless. Earlier in his career he also served as a consultant with Accenture.
Hinshaw will join HP as a member of its executive council on 15 November, reporting to HP president and CEO Meg Whitman.
Meanwhile, HP also announced that Craig Flower has been promoted to SVP and CIO. Flower will be responsible for data management, application architecture, global business intelligence, sales, and product development and engineering applications. Flower has held a wide range of IT management positions within HP since 1984.
30% Of BlackBerry Users Want Out
October 30, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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The BlackBerry smartphone and its maker, Research in Motion, were in serious trouble even before last week’s global service disruption.
More than 30% of BlackBerry users in large companies said in September, a month before the outage, that they were looking to use a different smartphone device in 2012, according to a survey of 243 smartphone users in companies with more than 10,000 workers by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).
“With last week’s outage, I suspect the 30% number is even higher,” said Steven Brasen, the EMA analyst who conducted the survey. “User satisfaction with BlackBerry is by far the lowest of smartphones. A huge number are dissatisfied.”
Brasen said the survey found that 11% of BlackBerry users in large companies are “completely dissastisfied” with the device, while only 2% of iPhone users and 0% of Android users are completely dissatisfied with their smartphones.
Brasen said the opinions of end users are becoming very important to IT executives.
Will Help Desks Become Extinct?
Tom Soderstrom, CTO at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), views everything through the clouds.
NASA’s JPL uses 10 public or private clouds to store everything from photos of Mars for public purview to top-secret data.
Pretty soon, Soderstrom told attendees of Computerworld‘s SNW conference, data stored by large enterprises like NASA will be measured in Exabytes; one Exabyte is equal to 1.5 billion CDs or a million terabytes.
And, he noted, the only place to store Exabytes of data is on public and private clouds.
The good news is that with data in the cloud, people will be able to “work with anyone, from anywhere, with any data, using any device at any time,” he said.
And the not-so-bad news is that IT help desks, as we know them, will become a thing of the past, and IT workers in general will have to rethink how they approach application development and security.
“Now the workforce and consumers of IT are becoming mobile. Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it. If you can’t get the answer there, you ask your kids. If you can’t get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that’s the workgroup,” Soderstrom said.
IMs To Overtake Emails In Workplace
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Many CIOs predict that real-time communication technologies, such as instant messaging, SharePoint, Chatter and Yammer will outpace traditional email in the workplace in the next five years.
That’s the conclusion of a Robert Half Technology survey of more than 1,400 CIOs at U.S. companies with more than 100 employees. The survey was published last month.
More than half (54%) of the CIOs polled said real-time workplace communication tools will surpass traditional email in popularity within five years. The prediction was a bit lukewarm, however: 13% of the respondents said real-time messages will be “much more popular” than email, while 41% said they’ll be “somewhat more popular.”
Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm, said a transition to real-time tools could yield workplace benefits, potentially making it easier to work as a team, solve problems, share ideas and manage documents.
DRAM Prices Going Up
iSuppli is reporting that global chip revenue should increase to $325.2 due to supply and demand. Two months ago iSuppli originally forecasted a 5.8 percent increase to $320.1 billion. Apparently, DRAM chips will be impacted the most with a price increase due to supply issues as a result of the recent earthquake in Japan. iSuppli had originally forecasted sales of DRAM chips to shrink by four percent this year instead of seeing a drop of 10.6 percent.
Microsoft Eyeing More Software For The iPad
February 2, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The current rumor on the street is that Microsoft might be looking beyond the recently released OneNote for iPad. Insiders are saying Microsoft is closely monitoring the number of downloads of OneNote for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch to perhaps gauge the possible interest in adding more productivity software for Apple iOS suite of products. Read More…..