Bartle Doo Article Archives

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Computers

SAP's Snabe to step down in 2014, McDermott to become sole CEO

July 21, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe will leave his post in May 2014 to become a member of the enterprise software vendor’s supervisory board, leaving Bill McDermott as sole CEO.

Snabe’s election to the board is dependent on the support of at least 25 percent of shareholders, SAP said on Sunday.

“After more than 20 years with SAP, I have decided that it is time for me to begin the next phase of my career, closer to my family,” Snabe said in a statement. “What the entire SAP team has achieved since 2010 is remarkable, and the momentum we have built is now driving the transformation of the industry.”

Snabe and McDermott were appointed co-CEOs in February 2010 after CEO Leo Apotheker was forced out of the job. Apotheker went on to become CEO of Hewlett-Packard but left after a short and rocky run, while McDermott and Snabe presided over a repositioning of SAP that included a string of large acquisitions and the release of its HANA in-memory database platform, which is at the center of all SAP product development moving forward.

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Computers

Wall Street Beat: Software a bright spot as tech results bring gloom

July 19, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

Though software sales provided a ray of light in otherwise mixed results this week, gloom settled over the tech sector Friday in the wake of bellwether IT quarterly earnings reports.

The broad Standard & Poor’s 500 Index managed to close Friday at a record high of 1,692.09, but the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 23.66 points to 3,587.61, and the Dow Jones industrial average declined 4.65 points to 15,543.89. Of the five tech stocks on the Dow, only Intel traded up slightly, while Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard were down.

“Overall I’d say the earnings confirmed some common themes — software is going to do better than hardware and services,” said Forrester chief economist Andrew Bartels.

In Forrester’s latest forecast for the global tech market, issued last week, Bartels lowered expectations for spending on IT goods and services to 2.3 percent growth measured in U.S. dollars, from the January estimate of 3.3 percent. Calculated in local currencies, the forecast looks better, at a 4.6 percent increase, but recession in Europe and slower growth in China is putting a damper on tech purchases by any measure.

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News, Politics, Government

The Five Highest Base Salaries In CEO America

July 17, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

By Paul Hodgson, Contributor There’s been a lot of publicity lately for CEOs earning $1 in base salary – the likes of Larry Ellison at Oracle, John Mackey at Whole Foods and Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, though it is only John Mackey who is restrained elsewhere in his package, the others can earn millions in stock and incentives. …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Computers

Lenovo turns to software partnerships to expand server business

July 16, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

Lenovo is expanding software partnerships as it tries to break into a server market dominated by Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell.

Its first such partnership expansion, announced Tuesday, is with VMware on virtualization products. Lenovo will bundle ThinkServer products with VMware’s vSphere with Operations Management.

The servers with VSOM are targeted at customers of small and medium-sized businesses who want higher performance and server utilization rates, said Sean Gilbert, senior alliances manager at Lenovo.

Lenovo has been pursuing the server market for a few years now with single- and dual-socket rack and tower offerings. However, Lenovo offers only basic hardware while competitors and market leaders like HP, Dell and IBM sell servers that combine homegrown hardware, networking, storage and software products.

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Computers

Chromebooks vie to replace netbooks

April 19, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

The once-hot netbook may have been decimated by the arrival of tablets, but inexpensive, lightweight laptops are showing staying power. The latest iteration in that category is Chromebooks, laptops with Google’s Chrome OS, which is seen as a lightweight OS alternative to Windows for users who do most of their computing on the Web. There is substantial backing for Chromebooks with companies like Google, Lenovo, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard and Acer offering models with different screen sizes and hardware.

A first wave of Chromebooks released in 2011 from Samsung and Acer failed to catch on, but a new wave that went on sale late last year have better hardware and a more refined OS. Typical features include 100GB of Google Cloud storage, Wi-Fi, webcams, and in some models, 3G connectivity. However, IDC suggested that early sales of Chromebooks have been weak, and it remains to be seen if they will fill the void left by netbooks.

Acer’s Chromebook C7

The US$199.99 Acer Chromebook C7 is the cheapest Chrome OS laptop available. It has an 11.6-inch screen and a 320GB hard drive, while other models have 16GB of local solid-state storage. One disappointment is the three-and-a-half hours of battery life, while more expensive models offer up to six-and-a-half hours. The C7 has an Intel Celeron dual-core processor running at 1.1GHz, 2GB of memory and an HDMI port. Like a majority of other Chromebooks, the screen displays images at a resolution of 1366 by 768. Acer maintains the C7 has sold better than expected, and has said it will come out with more Chromebook models in the future.

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035904/chromebooks-vie-to-replace-netbooks.html#tk.rss_all

Computers

OpenDaylight is building on our work, SDN group's director says

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The OpenDaylight Project may have won attention last week with a founding list of vendors including Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, but it’s standing on the shoulders of others, according to the head of the Open Networking Foundation.

OpenDaylight will be building part of its planned framework for software-defined networking on the OpenFlow protocol that ONF introduced in 2011, ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt said on Tuesday at the Open Networking Summit. The standing-room-only conference is ONF‘s annual gathering to discuss SDN (software-defined networking), which is intended to place the control of networks in software apart from dedicated hardware.

“It’s sort of an evolution of what we were doing,” Pitt said in answer to an audience member’s question at the conference in Santa Clara, California. “I don’t think you would be able to start this … OpenDaylight consortium if you didn’t have a foundation to build upon.”

Specifically, OpenDaylight’s planned API (application programming interface) for communication between its controller software and network devices will be built on OpenFlow, Pitt said. That’s despite the fact that ONF is not a member of OpenDaylight, which includes a long list of major IT and networking vendors including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Ericsson.

From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2035347/opendaylight-is-building-on-our-work-sdn-groups-director-says.html#tk.rss_all

Linux

5 Favorite Sessions from Collaboration Summit Attendees

From: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2013/04/5-favorite-sessions-collaboration-summit-attendees

By libbyclark

Now more than halfway through the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, attendees have started to weigh in on the best sessions and experiences so far. Some cited Monday’s keynote presentations from heavy hitters such as Samsung and Jaguar Land Rover. Others focused on the technical discussions in Tuesday’s sessions, which covered a range of topics from Automotive Grade Linux to kernel scheduler load balancing. And for some, simply meeting the developers on the other side of an email list provided the best experience at the conference.

“It’s been great learning about the open source projects, in particular Jaguar and Samsung and the collaboration they’re looking for and that we can offer.

“Whether you work for a different company or not, it seems like you can really participate. I’m looking forward to some of the other technical presentations where I can learn about Linux and how it’s changing.” – Carol Sanders, Vyatta.

“The subjects are great, but what’s even greater is getting to meet people and have discussions with people on the other side of engineering from different companies. I got to meet people I’ve been working with for several years but I’ve never met with them.

“Even some of the presentations we had that weren’t direclty related to what our company does triggered a lot of good ideas that I can bring back to the company and gave me some ideas for changes.

For cloud computing we talked about what’s missing and what can be done and especially from a storage perspective. We know we’re doing a lot on our end that’s really good but there are parts of the Linux kernel that need to be added as well.” – Abdel Sadek, NetApp.

Pat Summerall, legendary NFL broadcaster, dies at 82

“I was particularly interested in the Linux weather forecast by Jon Corbet yesterday. It presented some challenges that we’re going to face this coming year. Some of which I wasn’t aware, particularly in the new architectures with big.LITTLE and how that will imply changes in course scheduling code. Me working in performance issues, I find that attractive and challenging.

“I’ve been impressed with the keynotes and event organization as well. I hope tomorrow will be just as good.” – Davidlohr Bueso, Hewlett-Packard.

The Flaming Lips Explain New Album 'The Terror'

“Today I attended ACPI 5.0 improvements, which is really interesting. I’ve been kind of watching the Linux mailing lists on Linux LKML. It gave me insight into balance bewtween ARM and ACPI and how we can use the same infrastructure to transparently implement.

“Also, being able to add GPIO interrupts and such, and see where I can contribute, possibly. The second one I heard about was power scheduling which was very insightful. There are a lot of questions to be answered in terms of getting it to primetime.

“And the big thing I’m getting out of this conference is

Science & Technology

Kinect-Like Controller to Be Bundled with HP PCs

From: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/16/leap-motion-to-be-embedded-in-hp-pcs

After striking a lucrative deal with ASUS earlier this year, touch technology controller and Kickstarter success story Leap Motion has a partnership Hewlett Packard to bring the technology inside the computer company’s new generation of PCs. This is the first embedding deal for the hardware startup, which has landed major partnerships even before its initial controller has been shipped to the public.

In addition to a fully integrated hardware system, every HP product with Leap Motion integrated will also have a native build of the hardware’s app marketplace, AirSpace. There is no specific product list, price range or timing calendar at this time, but HP PCs will be bundled with a separate Leap Motion controller as early as this summer.

Science & Technology

HP will integrate Leap Motion controllers with PC

Leap Motion says its 3-D motion controllers will be included in some computers from Hewlett-Packard this year.

From: http://phys.org/news285330411.html

Articles of Interest

HP Adding 3D Motion Technology to Computers

From: http://www.newser.com/story/166332/hp-adding-3d-motion-technology-to-computers.html

Leap Motion says its 3D motion controllers will be included in some computers from Hewlett-Packard this year. The Leap Controller tracks people’s fingers and hand motions as they gesture, swipe, and point at their computer screens. Applications developed for it let people control games, work on office tasks, paint pictures,…

By Tim Beyers, The Motley Fool

Is the Google Stock Rally Over for Now?

April 14, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

Filed under: Investing

Each week, I endeavor to report the results of the Big Idea Portfolio, a collection of five tech stocks that I believe will crush the market over a three-year period. I’ve done it before; my last tussle with Mr. Market ended with me beating the index’s average return by 13.35%.

Real money was on the line then as it is now, which means any one of the five stocks you see below could cause me a lot of public embarrassment. This time, Google fell slightly in a big week for the market indexes. Facebook and Microsoft deserve most of the blame.

Google stock retreated about 80 basis points last week as thousands awaited Friday’s official release of Facebook Home for Android. That appears to have been an overreaction. As of Sunday, more than 3,000 had downloaded and rated the app at Google’s Play Store. Of those, nearly 1,600 give the app 1 out of 5 stars. Overall, they give it 2.4 stars.

“No widgets, kinda clunky, and pretty much just Facebook with access to your apps drawer. Meh, an unimpressive launcher compared to most others,” wrote reviewer Jeremy Noah, who called the app “good for Facebook-ophiles” after trying the app on his Samsung Galaxy S3.

The message? Facebook has much work to do before Home becomes a suitable substitute for Google’s existing Android interface. In the meantime, Microsoft has allied itself with 16 others to urge European regulators to take action against the search king for what it deems “predatory” efforts to control the market for mobile software and devices.

We don’t yet know how EU officials will respond to Mr. Softy’s urging, or Google’s own efforts to settle existing grievances. The resulting uncertainty appears to be weighing on Google stock.

What’s the Big Idea this week?
Elsewhere, a small move in Apple shares fell short of the market‘s overall rally, costing me another 135 basis points in my three-year battle with Mr. Market. All four indexes reported strong gains.

This time, the Nasdaq led the way with with a 2.84% surge, followed by the S&P 500’s 2.29% rally, the Russell 2000’s 2.12% jump, and the Dow’s 2.06% gain, according to data supplied by The Wall Street Journal. Here’s a closer look at where I stood through Friday’s close:

Company	Starting Price*	Recent Price	Total Return
Apple	$416.26**	$429.80	3.3%
Google	$650.09	$790.05	21.5%
Rackspace Hosting	$41.65	$48.40	16.2%
Riverbed Technology	$25.95	$14.60	(43.7%)
salesforce.com	$100.93	$169.52	67.9%
AVERAGE RETURN	—	—	13.04%
S&P 500 SPDR	$124.39**	$158.80	27.66%
DIFFERENCE	—	—	(14.62%)

Source: Yahoo! Finance.
* Tracking began at market close on Jan. 6, 2012.
** Adjusted for dividends and other returns of capital.

Notable newsmakers
Among the other tech stocks making news last week:

New data from IDC research found that first-quarter PC sales fell short of even the most pessimistic predictions. Global unit sales fell 14% in Q1, the biggest single-quarter drop in nearly two decades. Of the major PC players, Hewlett-Packard stock took the biggest hit following the news and ended the week off nearly 5%.
On Thursday, Salesforce will complete

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/14/is-the-google-stock-rally-over-for-now/

News, Politics, Government

How Hewlett-Packard and Dell Destroyed Their PC Advantage . . . Piece-by-Piece

April 14, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

By Panos Mourdoukoutas, Contributor

Last week was a torturous time for PC-makers like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, especially after IDC reported a 14 percent decline in desktop and laptop shipments in the last quarter—the stocks of both companies dropped sharply following the release of the report.

From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2013/04/14/how-hewlett-packard-and-dell-destroyed-their-pc-advantage-piece-by-piece/

By Andrew Tonner, The Motley Fool

Can Cloud Computing Save Hewlett-Packard?

April 13, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

Filed under: Investing

Hewlett-Packard stock has suffered greatly over the past five years. But in this video, Andrew Tonner reviews some good news about the company, including its new line of energy- and space-saving servers that should help turn the company around. As mobile computing increases demand for servers, Andrew says this new product line should pay off for HP as it diversifies away from its dependence on the declining PC market.

Check out the video for more details.

The massive wave of mobile computing has done much to unseat the major players in the PC market, including venerable technology names like Hewlett-Packard. However, HP‘s rapidly shifting its strategy under the new leadership of CEO Meg Whitman. But does this make HP one of the least-appreciated turnaround stories on the market, or is this a minor blip on its road to irrelevance? The Motley Fool’s technology analyst details exactly what investors need to know about HP in our new premium research report. Just click here now to get your copy today.

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From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/13/can-cloud-computing-save-hewlett-packard/

By Anders Bylund, The Motley Fool

The 3 Biggest Surprises in Tech This Week

April 13, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

Filed under: Investing

Say what you want about the tech sector, but it’s never boring. Any given week will keep tech investors flooded with product announcements, earnings surprises, and crazy strategy shifts that absolutely nobody saw coming.

These are three of the most shocking pieces of tech news this week.

That’s just ostrichious! Image credit: Flickr Commons.

The return of solar power
Solar-power giant First Solar published an updated revenue and earnings outlook for the next couple of years. The next day, shares soared 45.5% higher. At the midpoint of management’s guidance ranges, First Solar beat Wall Street‘s 2013 revenue target by 25% and next year’s estimates by 13%.

Investors were pleasantly surprised by First Solar‘s new targets, which include the impact of a recent acquisition. As the company incorporates TetraSun’s high-efficiency solar technology in its own products, First Solar will be able to enter whole new markets and offer better solutions at a lower cost.

“This breakthrough technology will unlock the half of the PV market which favors high-efficiency solutions, which has been unserved by First Solar to date,” said CEO Jim Hughes.

Are these BlackBerrys rotten?
Here’s one that will shock you one way or another, no matter which side of the street you’re on.

First, The Wall Street Journal reported that BlackBerry‘s new Z10 phones have been an unmitigated disaster. One analyst pinged his retail connections and found that “returns are now exceeding sales” of the Z10 in many cases. Another noted that sales started out poorly and “weakened significantly as the days passed.” This is the shocker if you believe in the new BlackBerry platform and hope that it will revive the company’s flagging fortunes.

So here’s a surprise for BlackBerry doubters. The company not only denies and refutes these claims, but it even filed complaints with the SEC and with Canadian market regulators.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the merits of the many competing products in the smartphone industry, but when false statements of material fact are deliberately purveyed for the purpose of influencing the markets a red line has been crossed,” said BlackBerry’s chief attorney, Steve Zipperstein.

It’s one thing to shake your head and wag a finger at supposedly false conclusions, but it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame when the lawyers come marching in. Keep an eye on this unfolding drama with our Foolish watchlist feature.

The PC is dead!
Wait, wasn’t this old news already? The writing has been on the wall for months already.

Apparently not for many investors.

This week saw fresh PC sales estimates for the first quarter from analyst firms IDC and Gartner, and they both pointed to a drastic drop. IDC said unit sales fell 14% year over year, reaching rock-bottom levels not seen since 2009.

And yes, investors were flabbergasted. Shares of PC giant Hewlett-Packard traded 6.6% lower after these announcements, and Microsoft plunged 5%. You can bet that Dell would be in the dumps

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/13/the-3-biggest-surprises-in-tech-this-week/

Computers

Dell: Little momentum in ARM servers until 64-bit processors

April 12, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

The low-power capabilities of ARM-based processors have created high expectations for their use in servers, but one of Dell’s top engineers said they are unlikely to take off until 64-bit versions hit the market.

“I don’t think you’ll see any serious momentum in ARM until 64-bit comes out,” said Jimmy Pike, vice president, senior fellow and chief architect of Dell’s Data Center Solutions division. ARM has said it expects 64-bit server chips based on its processor design to start shipping next year, with servers shipping in volume starting in late 2014 or early 2015. Pike is highly regarded in low-power server design and the Dell division he’s in was among the first of the top-tier server providers to experiment with very low-power servers for hyperscale data centers.

ARM processors are being used in most smartphones and tablets, but are being investigated for use in servers as a way to cut electric bills while efficiently processing large volumes of Internet transactions. To counter ARM, Intel is offering Atom server processors as low-power alternatives to its power-hungry Xeon server chips, which dominate the data center landscape today.

But Intel has an early advantage over ARM. Hewlett-Packard last week announced its Project Moonshot dense server with Intel’s Atom processor and Dell is already offering dense servers with low-power x86 chips. The companies are relegating ARM servers to the labs, where they are offered to customers for testing.

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2034178/dell-little-momentum-in-arm-servers-until-64bit-processors.html#tk.rss_all

By Chuck Saletta, The Motley Fool

The Investable Beauty of Low Expectations

April 12, 2013 Bartle Doo Leave a comment

Filed under: Investing

Back in December, when Microsoft became a selection for the real-money Inflation-Protected Income Growth portfolio, its stock looked to be bargain-priced. How cheap was it? Well, to quote its selection article: “By a discounted cash flow analysis that assumes no growth ever again, the company looks to be worth around $234.5 billion, making its recent market price of $229.9 billion look reasonable.”

Microsoft’s stock had such low expectations priced into it that it still looked reasonably priced if you assumed it never grew again — ever. That’s low expectations, all right. For the most part, about the only time a company’s expectations are lower are if it’s actively collapsing or if it’s facing down some make-or-break scandal with a high chance of sinking the business.

So what?
In yesteday’s trading session, Microsoft’s stock dropped an astounding 4.44%, on news that personal computer sales were far lower than expected. Predictably, PC maker Hewlett-Packard saw its shares plummet as well, down an astonishing 6.45%, as its shipments were particularly hard-hit. HP‘s PC shipments dropped by nearly a quarter versus year-ago levels — far worse than the industrywide 14% drop.

Yet in spite of that plummet, as of yesterday’s market close, the iPIG portfolio is still showing a net gain on the Microsoft shares it owns. On top of that gain, the portfolio has already picked up a reasonable dividend payment from Microsoft, increasing its overall returns.

The secret of the iPIG portfolio’s investing success with Microsoft? Low expectations. All stocks are priced based on what the market expects from them in the future. The market had already largely priced in a Microsoft flop. When the company delivered on that flop, investors — like the iPIG portfolio — who had bought in only because the company had been valued on those low expectations still came out OK.

Going from atrocious to merely very bad
In many respects, Microsoft’s story of investing success in spite of bad news could be repeated for Hewlett-Packard. In fact, it was, late last year, on Dec. 21, 2012:

One of the easiest ways to have a better next year is to royally mess up this year. With that in mind, few screwups in 2012 rate worse than Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy acquisition fiasco. Earlier this year, Hewlett-Packard wrote down a whopping $8.8 billion of the $11 billion price tag it paid for the acquisition just last year.

That $8.8 billion shows up as a charge against its fourth-quarter earnings for fiscal year 2012. Hewlett-Packard alleges that the writedown was driven by improperly recognized revenue prior to the acquisition — essentially, accounting fraud on Autonomy’s part. While many wonder whether the magnitude of the alleged fraud was big enough to justify that large a writedown, the one thing that’s clear is that it sets an incredibly low bar for the company to clear in 2013.

On the day that piece was published, HP‘s shares closed at $14.34. Yesterday, after the

From: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/04/12/the-investable-beauty-of-low-expectations/