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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,”
Lenovo Adds Enterprise Servers
Eager to expand its horizons beyond PCs and tablets, Lenovo on Monday announced the first server from the newly created Enterprise Product Group, which deals in servers, storage, networking and software.
The ThinkServer TD330 is a tower server based on Intel’s Xeon E5-2400 processors. The server will support up to 16 processor cores and start at $929.
Lenovo last week announced the formation of the Enterprise Product Group. It is headed by Roy Guillen, vice president and general manager of the division. Guillen was previously vice president and general manager of Dell’s data center solutions (DCS) division.
Lenovo already offers low-end servers and workstations for homes and small businesses, but the new division will target small, medium-size and large enterprises. Lenovo has offered low-end servers based on Intel’s Xeon E3 and E5 processors, but the company did not respond to a request for comment on whether existing ThinkServer products would be part of the enterprise product portfolio.
“We’ve placed expanded emphasis on building our server portfolio this year, introducing products that meet the needs of all our customers — from enterprise customers to small businesses,” Guillen said in a statement.
Lenovo established itself as a PC company after it bought IBM’s PC division in 2005. Lenovo’s progress in the PC market has been rapid, with IDC placing the company as the world’s largest PC vendor for the first time in the third quarter this year. The new enterprise division will put Lenovo in competition with IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which also sell x86 servers.
IBM Beefs Up
IBM is unveiling a new version of its Connections enterprise social networking (ESN) software, which businesses use to give their employees social media capabilities adapted for workplace collaboration, such as employee profiles and blogging.
Enhancements in IBM Connections 4.0 include a more interactive activity stream, broader support for mobile devices, more granular usage analytics and integration with email and calendar systems, according to Heidi Ambler, director of product management for IBM Social Software. It is available immediately.
“This new release helps customers grasp the power of social analytics, gives them anytime-anywhere access to the software and provides cutting-edge capabilities,” she said.
Instead of a list-like news feed, the new software has an activity stream in employee profiles that users can filter for relevance, as well as act on the notifications right from the Connections interface.
For example, users can trigger pop-up boxes from the activity stream notifications and see the latest comments made about a file, see who posted the latest version of it and add tags to it.
An integration with IBM’s own Lotus Notes-Domino and with Microsoft’s Outlook-Exchange email and calendar systems lets users manage email messages through Connections.
IBM Freezes Employee Salaries
IBM this year won’t be granting any pay raises to its executives or to many of its workers in its Global Technology Services division.
The company said it is only giving pay raises to workers with high-demand skills that the company needs.
IBM customarily issues pay raises during the mid-year period.
“There are targeted skill groups of employees that are eligible for salary increases in 2012,” said Trink Guarino, an IBM spokeswoman. “No executives will be eligible for salary increases.”
Business Insider Tuesday published an internal IBM memo announcing the action that was sent to employees from Global Technology Services executives.
One IBM employee, who didn’t want to be identified, said he believes the lack of pay raises “is part of IBM’s hyper-aggressive plan to meet its 2015 roadmap.”
That IBM roadmap lays out an aggressive growth strategy, which calls for increasing the company’s earnings per share by $20 by 2015.
The employee noted that the company has been spending billions in stock buybacks, but says it can’t afford pay increases.
Rather than reaching profit goals “the old-fashioned way by increasing market share, developing and selling new products,” the company is “maniacally focused on cutting labor costs and off-shoring work to low-cost countries,” the employee said.
U.S. Takes Back Supercomputing Crown
The U.S., once again, is home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer after being kicked off the list by China two years ago and then again by Japan last year.
The top computer, an IBM system at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is capable of 16.32 sustained petaflops, according to the Top 500 list, a global, twice a year ranking, released Monday.
This system, named Sequoia, has more than 1.57 million compute cores and relies on architecture and parallelism, and not Moore’s Law, to achieve its speeds.
“We’re at the point where the processors themselves aren’t really getting any faster,” said Michael Papka, Argonne National Laboratory deputy associate director for computing, environment and life sciences.
The Argonne lab installed a similar IBM system, which ranks third on the new Top 500 list. “Moore’s Law is generally slowing down and we’re doing it (getting faster speeds) by parallelism,” Papka said.
U.S. high performance computing technology dominates the world market. IBM systems claimed five of the top ten spots in the list, and 213 systems out the 500.
Hewlett-Packard is number two, with 141 systems on the list. Nearly 75% of the systems on this list run Intel processors, and 13% use AMD chips.
IBM Goes After Apache’s Tomcat
Java Developers looking for a mobile-friendly platform could be happy with the next release of IBM’s Websphere Application Server, which is aimed at offering a lighter, more dynamic version of the app middleware.
Shown off at the IBM Impact show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Websphere Application Server 8.5, codenamed Liberty, has a footprint of just 50MB. This makes it small enough to run on machines such as the Raspberry Pi, according to Marie Wieck, GM for IBM Application and Infrastructure Middleware.
Updates and bug fixes can also be done on the fly with no need to take down the server, she added.
The Liberty release will be launched this quarter, and already has 6,000 beta users, according to Wieck.
John Rymer of Forrester said that the compact and dynamic nature of the new version of Websphere Application Server could make it a tempting proposition for Java developers.
“If you want to install version seven or eight, it’s a big piece of software requiring a lot of space and memory. The installation and configuration is also tricky,” he explained.
“Java developers working in the cloud and on mobile were moving towards something like Apache Tomcat. It’s very light, starts up quickly and you can add applications without having to take the system down. IBM didn’t have anything to respond to that, and that’s what Liberty is.”
For firms needing to update applications three times a year, for example, the dynamic capability of Liberty will make it a much easier process.
“If developers want to run Java on a mobile device, this is good,” Rymer added.
The new features are also backwards compatible, meaning current Websphere users will be able to take advantage of the improvements.
However, IBM could still have difficulty competing in the app server space on a standalone basis, according to Rymer.
IBM Scientist Unveil Terabit Optical Chip
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IBM has designed a prototype optical chipset that transfers one terabit of data per second (1Tbit/s).
IBM scientists revealed today that the chipset, dubbed “Holey Optochip”, is the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits of information – or 500 HD movies – per second.
Speaking at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference taking place in Los Angeles today, the scientists reported that the chipset is eight times faster than other parallel optical components available today.
They estimate that the raw speed of one transceiver is equivalent to the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users at today’s typical 10Mb/s broadband internet access speed. This means it would take just around an hour to transfer the entire US Library of Congress web archive through the transceiver.
According to the boffins, optical networking offers the potential to significantly improve data transfer rates by speeding the flow of data using light pulses instead of sending electrons over wires.
A single 90nm IBM CMOS transceiver IC with 24 receiver and 24 transmitter circuits becomes a Holey Optochip with the fabrication of 48 through-silicon holes, or “optical vias” – one for each transmitter and receiver channel. Simple post-processing on completed CMOS wafers with all devices and standard wiring levels results in an entire wafer populated with Holey Optochips.
The transceiver chip measures only 5.2×5.8mm. Twenty-four channel, industry-standard 850nm VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting laser) and photodiode arrays are directly flip-chip soldered to the Optochip. This direct packaging produces high-performance, chip-scale optical engines. The Holey Optochips are designed for direct coupling to a standard 48 channel multimode fibre array through a microlens optical system that can be assembled with conventional high-volume packaging tools.
Future PCs Will Be Constant Learners
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Tomorrow’s computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which in turn will aid them in providing users with more appropriate information, predicted the software mastermind behind IBM’s Watson system.
Computers in the future “will learn through interacting with us. They will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need,” said IBM Fellow David Ferrucci, who was IBM’s principal investigator for Watson technologies. Ferrucci spoke at the IBM Smarter Computing Executive Forum, held Wednesday in New York.
“This notion of learning through collaboration and interaction is where we think computing is going,” he said.
IBM’s Watson project was an exercise for the company in how to build machines that can better anticipate user needs.
IBM researchers spent four years developing Watson, a supercomputer designed specifically to compete in the TV quiz show “Jeopardy,” a contest that took place last year. On “Jeopardy,” contestants are asked a range of questions across a wide variety of topic areas.
Watson did win at its “Jeopardy” match. Now IBM thinks the Watson computing model can have a wide range of uses.
Big Blue Still The Patent King
As technology companies start to stockpile patents so that they can see off their rivals IFI Claims Patent Services, a company that maintains global patent databases, has clocked the outfits with the most weapons in any patent war.
More than 224,505 utility patents were awarded in the U.S. last year, jumping two percent over the previous year’s record-breaking tally of 219,614 patents. IBM has always had the most patents, probably because it has been around the longest. The company was granted 6,180 utility patents, up nearly five percent from 2010. Samsung was the number two 4,894 patents, followed by Canon at 2,821 patents, Panasonic with 2,559 and Toshiba with 2,483 utility patents.
Microsoft, which held on to the third spot in 2010, is in the sixth place with 2,311 utility patents granted last year, According to IFI CEO Mike Baycroft global companies, and especially Asian ones, are collecting U.S patents at a dizzying pace, and now Asian firms hold eight of the top 10 slots in the 2011 ranking.
Apache Finally Goes To The Cloud
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Hadoop 1.0.
The open source software project has reached the milestone of its first full release after six years of development. Hadoop is a software framework for reliable, scalable and distributed computing under a free licence. Apache describes it as “a foundation of cloud computing”.
“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop.
“Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security,” he added.
Apache Hadoop allows for the distributed processing of large data sets, often Petabytes, across clusters of computers using a simple programming model.
The Hadoop framework is used by some big name organisations including Amazon, Ebay, IBM, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo.
Yahoo has significantly contributed to the project and hosts the largest Hadoop production environment with more than 42,000 nodes.
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