Chairman Ray Lane and three fellow board members plan to meet with about 20 of the computer maker’s big investors Monday in hopes of heading off a campaign to unseat Mr. Lane and two other directors.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The buyout would be the largest such transaction since the financial crisis, and reflects the combined heft of Michael Dell, the computer maker’s founder and chief executive, software titan Microsoft Corp., private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners and a handful of investment banks.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

During a call with an HP delegation, outside auditors for British software maker Autonomy Corp. mentioned that an executive there had raised an allegation of improper accounting at the firm, according to people familiar with the call, who said the auditors added that the allegation was found to be groundless.

The HP executives never passed this mention on to their board or chief executive, one of the people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Now the question is whether going private would present the best way for Michael Dell, the company’s founder and CEO, to move the company forward with a focus on products for business, rather than consumers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The door, in fact, led to a broom closet, Mr. Lynch recounted in a 2010 speech. By then, Autonomy had grown from its founding in 1996 to one of Europe’s largest and fastest-growing software companies. Hewlett-Packard Co. bought it in October 2011 for more than $11 billion.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Two years and two CEOs later, HP is stumbling. Over that time, the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s market capitalization has fallen to less than $30 billion from more than $100 billion. On Friday, HP’s shares hit a new 10-year low.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The printers, so-called multifunction machines that combine standard printers with scanners and software to manage electronic documents, are among the fastest-growing segment in the printing industry. But H-P, the world’s largest printer maker by units, has just a middling share of the multifunction printer market — less than 12 percent of such laser color printers by its own estimate.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

His start-up makes software for marketing departments, and for years, he toiled in obscurity as the tech spotlight shined on hip Web arenas like social networking and their young Internet entrepreneurs, such as Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg.

But now it is Mr. Fernandez’s turn in the limelight. His firm, Marketo Inc., is generating buzz among investors as an initial-public-offering candidate. He says he is getting daily invitations to baseball games, lunches with investment bankers and fancy society dinners.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Spearheading the change are tech buyers such as Vanguard Health Systems Inc., a Nashville, Tenn., health-care company that has a $100 million-plus annual tech budget. In the past, Vanguard Health used to stick with just a few tech vendors such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc.

But more recently, Scott Blanchette, Vanguard’s chief information officer, chose a three-year-old start-up instead of one of its incumbents for software to help spot trends in clinical data. The software from the start-up, Explorys Inc., costs less and could get up and running faster, he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

LinkedIn said in a blog post over the weekend that it had received no reports that member accounts were breached as a result of the stolen passwords.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The claim came during opening arguments in California Superior Court for Santa Clara County. At issue in the closely watched case is whether Oracle is obligated to keep updating its popular database software for high-end H-P server systems that use Itanium chips — a sideline from Intel Corp.’s mainstream technology that Oracle alleges was artificially kept alive by HP payments to the chip maker.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

After a year of high-profile consumer Internet IPOs — from Groupon Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and Zynga Inc. last year to Yelp Inc. and Facebook Inc. now — a slew of Silicon Valley companies that sell technology mainly to businesses are also getting ready to hit the stock market.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Round Rock, Texas, company on Tuesday reported that revenue rose just 2 percent in the fiscal period ended Feb. 3, which included an extra week that Dell said added to its growth. Dell also projected that revenue in the current quarter would decline slightly, an estimate that was lower than analysts expected.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The companies — along with others such as financial-service companies Bank of America Corp., FMR LLC’s Fidelity Investments and eBay Inc.’s PayPal — are hoping to create an environment that allows the recipient of an email from, say, a bank, to feel secure that it isn’t a trick.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

“I’m very impressed by the great technology produced by this company,” the superstar singer told 46,000 techies, for whom he performed later that night.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The revised severance policy, disclosed in the technology giant’s annual report filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, means any executive officer terminated without cause will have to leave behind restricted shares or options that aren’t vested at the time they leave the company.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

But the company said that in an effort to woo new customers, it is adding a new feature to the 2012 TurboTax: some 700 live tax advisers who will answer customers’ questions by phone, for free.

Intuit didn’t provide a precise figure, but said it plans to spend millions of dollars to provide the tax-preparation assistance, which starts in December and runs through the end of April. It said it hopes the effort will keep its TurboTax business growing at its typical 10 percent-plus annual clip.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The vast majority of servers — including those from H-P — use the chips sold by Intel and AMD that are based on a technology called x86. But HP, which jointly developed Itanium with Intel in the 1990s, continues to use that chip for three lines of large systems used for heavy-duty computing jobs.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In a shift away from the frenzy surrounding consumer-focused companies such as social-games maker Zynga Inc., venture capitalists are pouring more money into business-to-business start-ups.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That applies to Ray Barnard, chief information officer of Fluor Corp., an engineering and construction company that spends around $25 million a year on new hardware and software. Fluor was recently considering buying high-end computers capable of displaying 3D graphics from H-P, as well as doing a pilot project involving tablets with the tech company.
Now, however, “I’ve put that all on hold” and won’t buy from H-P, he said. “It appears that they’re lost right now.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Mr. McLaughlin has been tapped as CEO of Palo Alto Networks Inc., a closely held security-technology company widely viewed as a candidate for an initial public offering.

“I’ve had the chance to be the CEO of a great public company,” said the 45-year-old executive, whose new job is set to be announced Monday. “Something I haven’t done is to take a great private company public.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Unbeknownst to owner Joe Angelastri, cyber thieves planted a software program on the cash registers at his two Chicago-area magazine shops that sent customer credit-card numbers to Russia. MasterCard Inc. demanded an investigation, at Mr. Angelastri’s expense, and the whole ordeal left him out about $22,000.

His experience highlights a growing threat to small businesses. Hackers are expanding their sites beyond multinationals to include any business that stores data in electronic form. Small companies, which are making the leap to computerized systems and digital records, have now become hackers’ main target.

“Who would want to break into us?” asked Mr. Angelastri, who says the breach cut his annual profit in half. “We’re not running a bank.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The 46-year-old has been acquiring high-end technologies—such as storage and security systems—that Dell can sell to businesses to lessen its reliance on selling low-margin desktop and laptop computers.

Dell bought services provider Perot Systems Corp. for $3.9 billion in 2009. Last year, it lost a high-profile bidding war for 3PAR to rival Hewlett-Packard Co. but later scooped up another data-storage company, Compellent Technologies Inc., for $960 million.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Epsilon Data Management LLC, a division of Alliance Data Systems Corp., said last week that hackers had accessed names and email addresses in its systems. In the days that followed, more than 40 companies—including J.P. Morgan Chase, TiVo and others—have said that their customers were among the victims.

The companies had hired Epsilon to manage marketing campaigns. When retailers such as Best Buy Co. and Target Corp. email promotions to customers, the likely buyers are often identified by and the messages are sent by firms such as Epsilon. Managing bulk mailings can be time-consuming and the technology to sort through customer information to come up with targeted promotions is often changing too quickly for businesses to do it on their own, experts say.

Read the rest of this post on the original site