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HP Aims To Boot ‘Useless’ Data
Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations rid themselves of useless data, all the information that is no longer necessary, yet still occupies expensive space on storage servers.
The company’s Autonomy unit has released a new module, called Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, that can delete data automatically based on the material’s age and other factors, according to Joe Garber, who is the Autonomy vice president of information governance.
Hewlett-Packard announced the new software, along with a number of other updates and new services, at its HP Discover conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.
For this year’s conference, HP will focus on “products, strategies and solutions that allow our customers to take command of their data that has value, and monetize that information,” said Saar Gillai, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for the converged cloud.
The company is pitching Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup for eliminating no-longer-relevant data in old SharePoint sites and in e-mail repositories. The software requires the new version of Autonomy’s policy engine, ControlPoint 4.0.
HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup evaluates whether to delete a file based on several factors, Garber said. One factor is the age of the material. If an organization has an information governance policy of only keeping data for seven years, for example, the software will delete any data older than seven years. It will root out and delete duplicate data. Some data is not worth saving, such as system files. Those can be deleted as well. It can also consider how much the data is being accessed by employees: Less consulted data is more suitable for deletion.
Administrators can set other controls as well. If used in conjunction with the indexing and categorization capabilities in Autonomy’s Idol data analysis platform, the new software can eliminate clusters of data on a specific topic. “You apply policies to broad swaths of data based on some conceptual analysis you are able to do on the back end,” Garber said.
IBM Buys SoftLayer
IBM has signed an agreement to purchase SoftLayer Technologies, as it looks to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure. The company is also forming a services division to back up the push.
The financial details of the deal were not announced, but SoftLayer is the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, according to IBM.
IBM already has an offering that includes private, public and hybrid cloud platforms. The acquisition of SoftLayer will give it a more complete in-house offering, as enterprises look to keep some applications in the data center, while others are moved to public clouds.
SoftLayer has about 21,000 customers and an infrastructure that includes 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, according to IBM. SoftLayer allows enterprises to buy compute power on either dedicated or shared servers.
Following the close of the acquisition of SoftLayer, which is expected in the third quarter, a new division will combine its services with IBM’s SmartCloud. IBM expects to reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015, it said.
Success is far from certain: The public cloud market is becoming increasingly competitive as dedicated cloud providers, telecom operators and IT vendors such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard all want a piece. The growing competition should be a good thing for customers if it drives down prices. For example, Microsoft has already committed to matching Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as computing, storage and bandwidth.
Not all hardware vendors feel it’s necessary to have their own public cloud. Last month, Dell changed strategy and said it would work with partners including Joyent, instead of having its own cloud.
Lenovo Soars
PC sales in China and high growth in smartphones sales helped boost Lenovo’s net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter by 90% year-over-year.
For the quarter ended March 31, Lenovo’s net profit was $127 million, the company said on Thursday. Revenue shattered records and was at $7.8 billion, growing 4% from the same period last year.
In Lenovo’s home market of China, the company had an operating margin of 4.9%, an increase of 8% year-over-year. The company also saw continued profitability in its mobile devices business, which makes up 9% of its overall sales. At the end of the quarter, Lenovo’s smartphone shipments were up 206% year-over-year.
Globally, PC shipments were down 13.9% year-over-year in the quarter, the market’s steepest decline since research firm IDC began tracking the market in 1994. Lenovo itself posted flat year-over-year PC shipment growth in the period.
Smartphone and tablet popularity have hurt PC sales, according to analysts. Computers running Microsoft’s Windows 8 have also failed to drum up consumer interest in the previous two quarters.
Lenovo, however, has managed to weather the slowdown by taking advantage of the Chinese PC market, where it has an over 30% market share. Close to half of the company’s revenue comes from the country, now the world’s largest PC market.
The company is now close to surpassing leading PC vendor HP for the top spot. The company had a 15.3% share of the market in this year’s first quarter, while HP had a 15.7% share.
But the Chinese PC maker also plans to focus more of its investment on tablets, smartphones and enterprise hardware, the company’s CEO Yang Yuanqing said in a statement. Earlier this year, Lenovo also reorganized its operations to sharpen the company’s branding and compete better in high-end products.
For the current fiscal year, Lenovo aims to ship 50 million smartphones, up from 30 million last year, Yang said Thursday in an earnings call. It aims to ship 10 million tablets, a five-fold increase from the previous fiscal year.
Most of Lenovo’s smartphone sales come from China, but the company has also begun selling handsets in the emerging markets of Russia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. In addition, Lenovo is preparing to bring its smartphones to the U.S. and European markets, Yang said, without saying when.
HP Goes All-In On Tablets
Hewlett-Packard garnered attention at Mobile World Congress show with its new Slate 7-inch tablet and then the sale of webOS assets, but the company is looking to put past distractions behind and will release more tablets in the future, the company said.
“You can expect going forward [to release] a family of products,” said Shane Wall, chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard’s mobility group, in an interview at MWC. The mobility trade show is being held in Barcelona from Feb. 25 to 28.
The 7-inch tablet attracted a small crowd at the HP booth, with people lining up to photograph or use the device. The company effectively took a dive into the low-cost tablet and tried to differentiate its tablet by a lower price, and also features like a micro-SD card slot for expandable storage and dual-cameras. Google’s $199 Nexus 7 is priced higher and has a quad-core processor, a higher-resolution screen and Android 4.2, but HP believes it will sell a lot of the tablets at the $169 price.
“We’re obviously late,” Wall said. “We wanted to start and see how aggressive we can be on the low end.”
The Slate 7 also signifies HP’s re-entry into the consumer tablet market after a disastrous stint with the webOS mobile operating system, which it got with the acquisition of Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion. The first webOS tablet, the TouchPad, was launched in 2011, but later discontinued along with webOS smartphones. Since then HP has released enterprise tablets such as ElitePad 900 with Windows 8, and now the company has adopted Android for consumer tablets.
LG Buys webOS From HP
Hewlett-Packard has sold some of the rights to its webOS mobile operating system to LG Electronics for use in smart TVs manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant.
LG has agreed to acquire the source code, webOS engineering team and other assets from HP, in a deal announced on Monday. LG will also license HP patents related to webOS and cloud technology, the companies said.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
HP acquired the mobile operating system, along with device maker Palm, in February 2010. HP used the OS on its short-lived TouchPad device, which debuted in mid-2011 then disappeared weeks later.
HP announced a new tablet, the US$169 Slate 7, on Sunday. The Slate 7 will run the Android operating system.
LG will lead the Open webOS and Enyo open-source projects as part of the deal, the company said. HP will retain ownership of all of Palm’s cloud computing assets, including source code, talent, infrastructure and contracts.
HP said it will also continue to support Palm users.
LG will use the technology to expand the Web capabilities of its smart TVs, said Sam Chang, LG vice president and general manager of innovation and Smart TV, in an interview.
LG bought the webOS assets in part for the engineering team, which includes user experience engineers, he said. The webOS engineers who remained at HP — the companies aren’t saying how many there are — are to join LG’s Silicon Valley labs.
Will Intel Drop Itanium?
Intel has scaled back plans for its next Itanium chip, prompting observers the question Intel’s commitment to the chip.Intel said the next version of Itanium, codenamed Kittson, will be a 32nm part. It will not migrate to a more advanced process. The new chips will use the same socket as the existing Itanium 9300 and 9500 chips.
Analyst Nathan Brookwood said the move is Intel’s idea of an exit strategy.
“It may very well be that Itanium’s time has come and gone,” he said.
Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds told Computerworld that Itanium might see a new process in the future, if it proves successful enough to make the investment worthwhile. However, he does not expect any more major updates to the architecture.
Itanium launched in 2001 and it quickly became a running joke in the industry. It never achieved the volumes expected by Intel and AMD seized the opportunity to take on Intel with 64-bit Opterons. However, Itanium soldiered on for years, although many vendors stopped developing software for the chip.
HP Looks Beyond Windows
Hewlett-Packard has announced the availability of its latest Pavilion laptop with Google’s Chrome OS as the PC maker attempts to improve laptop sales by offering an alternative to the Windows OS.
The Pavilion 14 Chromebook has a 14-inch screen and runs on a dual-core Intel processor. The laptop is roughly 21 millimeters thick, and weighs 1.8 kilograms. It offers just over four hours of battery life, said David Conrad, director for product management at HP’s consumer products group.
The laptop is expected to ship on Monday in the U.S. starting at $329.99. The company did not immediately provide worldwide availability information.
HP wanted to widen its product offerings and the new Chromebook is targeted at those who do most of their computing on the Web, Conrad said.
“It’s really about choice. We have a very wide offering,” Conrad said. “We think the time is right for an additional choice for people to have a gateway to their Google digital lifestyle.”
The laptop has only 16GB of solid-state drive storage, but will offer 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years.
The Chromebook has the same design as HP’s other PC offerings, which mostly run on Windows and have standard-capacity hard drives. But, with a lot of data moving to the cloud, the Chromebook provides a different usage model.
“We see this as another device to be used around the house. It’s easily managed,” Conrad said.
Will Lenovo Go Public In 2K14?
Lenovo’s parent firm Legend Holdings could float an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as 2014, according to the firm’s chairman.
Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Legend Holdings told China Business News that the firm plans to list on the China A-share market between 2014 and 2016. Chuanzhi also reportedly said the company will invest $3.2bn by 2014 to develop its various businesses.
Legend Holdings is 36 percent owned by the Chinese state controlled Academy of Sciences, with a further 20 percent owned by the private investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings Group.
Legend Holdings also has venture capital and real estate interests outside of Lenovo Group. The firm’s system building operations however have gone from strength to strength since it bought IBM’s PC business back in 2005, and it is now heavily promoting its Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid device.
Earlier this year Gartner reported that Lenovo had overtaken HP to become the largest PC vendor, something that HP disputed by offering IDC’s figures. Regardless of HP’s protestations then, Lenovo is set to overtake HP as its PC business continues to grow while HP’s has been shrinking for some time.
Legend Holdings might want to cash in on Lenovo’s high flying status and a cash injection from an IPO could help the company invest in designing products for the smartphone and tablet markets.
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Is HP Getting Sued?
HP is in the process of being sued by an angry investor who claims the company knew statements about its Autonomy acquisition were misleading and led the stock to fall.
A proposed class action lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court. HP bought British software firm Autonomy for a $11.1 billion last year but made an $8.8 billion write-down on its acquisition claiming the company inflated sales with improper accounting.
Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch has denied any wrongdoing. The lawsuit, one of the first to be filed by investors on the Autonomy mess, said HP hid the fact it gained control of Autonomy based on financial statements that could not be relied upon.
It claims HP had not revealed to investors that it tried to undo the Autonomy agreement before it closed because of the accounting issues.
Lenovo On The Rise
Lenovo has topped off a great 2012 with record sales figures and revenues, and claimed it took 15.6 percent of the PC market.
Lenovo is the PC maker that has bucked the industry trend of a shrinking PC market, posting faster than average industry growth for 14 consecutive quarters. All of that has left the firm announcing an 11 percent increase in second fiscal quarter sales to $8.7bn with profits of $162m, an increase of 13 percent over the same period last year.
Lenovo has managed to maintain the legendary status held by IBM’s Thinkpads and introduce its own low-cost models aimed at consumers. The firm has also been pushing smartphones in China and close to half of its revenues in its second fiscal quarter came from its home market.
Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo said, “Our global PC market share reached another historic high, moving us closer to our dream of becoming the worldwide PC leader. With four years’ effort, our consumer PC business has become the world’s number one in this segment for the first time. Our smartphone business in China, which we started only two years ago, has again strengthened its number two position,”