“We strongly believe that one or more very strategic opportunities may come along, that we are in a unique position to take advantage of because of our strong cash position,” he said. “You know, we’ve demonstrated a strong track record of being very disciplined with the use of our cash. We don’t let it burn a hole in our pocket, we don’t allow it to motivate us to do stupid acquisitions. And so I think that we’d like to continue to keep our powder dry, because we do feel that there are one or more strategic opportunities in the future. That’s the biggest reason.”

That remark spurred all sorts of speculation about what sensible large-scale acquisitions Apple might make. And while it was certainly reasonable to conclude from Jobs’s remarks that Apple is preparing itself for some big M&A plays in the future, there was another equally plausible conclusion: What if by “strategic opportunities,” Jobs was referring to supply chain investments–money spent to overcome impediments to growth? Apple has done this before, most notably in 2005, when it arranged to purchase up to 40 percent of Samsung Electronics’ holiday NAND flash output for use in it iPods. It inked a similar iPhone-related deal in 2008, forcing Samsung to reduce its supply to other customers to fulfill its obligation to Apple. And there was another half-billion-dollar deal with Toshiba is 2009.

And according to COO Tim Cook, Apple just did it again–but on a much grander scale. During the first-quarter earnings call last week, Cook said the company had invested $3.9 billion to secure component supplies and capacity.

“We’ve historically entered into certain agreements with different people to secure supply and other benefits,” he said. “And the largest one in the recent past has been we signed a deal with several flash suppliers back at the end of 2005 that totaled over $1 billion because we anticipated that flash would become increasingly important across our entire product line and increasingly important to the industry. And so we wanted to secure supply for the company, and we think that, that was an absolutely fantastic use of Apple’s cash. And we constantly look for more of these. And so in the past several quarters we’ve identified another area and come to some recent agreements that [CFO Peter Oppenheimer] talked about in his opening comments, in that these payments consist of prepayments and capital for process equipment and tooling. And similar to the flash agreements, they’re focused in that area we feel is very strategic. And so I’d prefer not to go into more detail about what specific area it’s in, but it’s the same kind of thinking that led us to those deals that led us to the flash deal.”

For what particular components, he wouldn’t say. There are some likely candidates, though: The high-res LCDs used in the iPhone 4 and iPad; solid-state drives like the ones in the new MacBook Air, which are presumably headed to other portions of the MacBook line as well; or perhaps some new system on a chip that will infuse the next-generation iPad and iPhone with significant performance gains. I’m sure there are others as well. And all fit quite nicely into Jobs’s vision of “strategic opportunities.”

The headliner was VNXe, its first low-end offering, priced at less than $10,000 and aimed at small and medium businesses, a segment where Dell used to resell EMC equipment. In another bit of product-launch theater, EMC had a fourth-grade boy onstage to demonstrate that the box–which in this case was mounted on the back of another Mini Cooper–could be managed and configured from an iPad.

I caught up with EMC Chief Marketing Officer Jeremy Burton to talk about it and the 40 other products EMC launched yesterday.

NewEnterprise: So 41 products all at once?

Burton: I’ve never been in a situation where the release dates of so many products aligned. We realized we might as well do them all at the beginning of the year. Internally we called it the “mega-launch.”

What kind of opportunities do you see in that lower-end market. This was your first entry into that market.

We estimate maybe a $4 billion opportunity there. We don’t have much of it now, call it zero. We’ve never really built a product that’s tailor made for that market. And for a product like that, you can’t just build it–you have to build it in a way that the channel can make money on and create customer satisfaction. We’ve got several partners who will take this product to market. We’ve committed $20 million there to generate demand and bootstrap the whole thing.

Tell me about this go-to-market effort.

Traditionally EMC has been led by direct sales. We have a sales force and they call on the customer directly. With a products that sells for $9,000 or $10,000 you can’t afford to sell that in the same way. We have to create pull for the product with our partners. You have to get the customers calling to ask for the product. It’s a little bit of everything. There’s advertising, there’s direct campaigns. Anything to get the phones to ring. To get the reps at the events jazzed up we’ve leased a fleet of 21 Mini Coopers. We’ll be doing 108 partner events around the world.

So who do you see as a typical customer for this?

Before I worked for EMC I ran a software company that had about 700 or 800 people. We had about 20 guys in the IT department. We didn’t have a lot of specialists, we had a lot of generalists there. So I’d say any company that’s at less than $25 million in annual sales is a perfect candidate. They’re not going to have the high-end skills to deal with the complexity of the high-end arrays. But they’ll have VMWare, they’ll have exchange environments, they have file shares, and they’ll want to get going quickly.

It’s funny I should be talking to you today. I just published a Q&A with Ping Li of Accel Partners. We got to talking about the storage needs of companies moving to the cloud, particularly around their database environments, and he said the trend is toward running open-source things like Hadoop on commodity hardware. He said he’s not seeing a lot of EMC gear at Google or Facebook or many of the other Web companies. There’s a lot of people who are seeing both a trend and an opportunity around that. What do you see?

If you’re Google and you’ve got your own team of rocket scientists who can build your own file system and kernel and download modules from the Internet every day, you don’t need it. But if you’re Pfizer, you probably have a lot of rocket scientists, but you probably don’t want them working on reconfiguring kernels, you probably want them working on discovering new drugs. And so, picking the techiest of the tech companies and saying they don’t use our stuff, yeah those are companies with the smartest tech guys on the planet. The problem is they’re not in all the Fortune 500 companies in the world, and in fact I’d argue they’re in almost none of them.

So if you want to have that scaled-out commodity storage and you want to manage big data, and you don’t want to hire 1,000 rocket scientists to do it, we can sell it to you. It won’t be true commodity hardware, but then you won’t have to hire so many people to manage it. That to me is kind of the rub. EBay is a big name on the Web, and it uses our Object Storage infrastructure. Could they have built it themselves? Probably. But there’s a little intellectual snobbery inside these companies. They say, “We don’t want to buy your stuff because we’re smarter than you.” Those are the edge cases. If we just get the rest we’re happy.

Let’s talk about the broader picture in IT spending. What are you hearing from your largest customers about their intent to spend this year?

2010 was a decent year. Going into 2010 folks said they thought their spending would increase two to three percent. They probably ended up with three to four percent. Looking out into this year, people seem a little more optimistic. But even still I think it’s in the three to five percent range. One thing we saw in 2009 is that folks didn’t buy much storage capacity last year and instead tried to use what they had. Going into 2010 there were signs of recovery and people started to spend again, and we see that continuing into 2011. One reason for the Isilon acquisition is that we do see a trend toward spending into different areas of the business.

At another level I think I agree with you and with Ping that certain companies will move to Hadoop for a certain class of application and we’ve got a pretty strong relationship between our Greenplum division and Hadoop. What a lot of people want to do is analyze traditional enterprise data in conjunction with something else. What Greenplum has tried to do is bridge the gap between Hadoop and the more traditional storage infrastructure. Hadoop is not going away, and its something that we fully intend to work with.

I had a hunch that Viacom sold off Harmonix, which makes the Rock Band games, at a steep discount last month. But I’m still surprised it was this cheap: I’m told that investment group Columbus Nova paid $49.99–the list price for “Rock Band 3″–and got the entire company.

There’s more to the story, of course: People familiar with the transaction tell me Harmonix’s buyers also assumed the game company’s liabilities. That includes expensive music rights fees, and responsibility for lots of unsold games and equipment sitting on warehouse shelves.

And I’m told that the deal is structured in a way that will let Viacom net something like $150 million in tax benefits, similar to the AOL/Bebo fire sale last year. Given that Viacom paid $175 million for Harmonix a few years ago, things could be worse.

[UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times reports that Viacom will actually receive a $50 million tax benefit, and offload $100 million in liabilities. That makes more sense, and I've since confirmed it myself. My apology for the error.]

Still, it’s a fire sale price no matter how you look at it. And that can’t be comforting to Harmonix’s remaining employees, who are likely going to be facing a very serious restructuring.

Columbus Nova’s PR reps wouldn’t comment on the sale terms (neither would Viacom) but pointed me to an earlier statement from the company, which said it was “really excited about backing the world-class team that has consistently produced such great games and helping them grow the company and its brands.”

Intel on Monday detailed plans to begin offering a version of its Atom microprocessor–best known as the calculating engine inside millions of low-end portables called netbooks–that the company is packaging along with a different sort of a chip supplied by Altera. The combination is designed for what industry executives call “embedded” applications, a loose term that refers to office equipment, cars, medical devices, industrial machines and just about anything that is not a computer.

Companies designing such products are a key focus for Intel as it tries to diversify beyond PCs. They often need special circuitry to handle chores that aren’t easily carried out by general-purpose microprocessors, like Atom.

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Cisco, the networking giant, is making yet another big step into the consumer space, with the introduction next week of an inexpensive home telepresence product for personal use.

Consumer or Home TelePresence, sources said, might be launched with Comcast (CMCSK) and Verizon (VZ). It is not clear if AT&T is involved.

The cost for a small unit could be as low as $200, but that price would be heavily subsidized. Another source said a $500 price point was also possible with fewer hooks.

The big selling point: The high-definition quality is supposed to be very good. Cisco (CSCO) will use this selling point to contrast it to what will be its big competitor: Internet telephony and video-calling giant Skype.

With it, presumably, people can interact in front of a television set with distant relatives and friends.

Cisco already has a big telepresence business aimed at the corporate meeting market.

But its deployment is complex and requires expensive installation of large pieces of equipment.

Notes Cisco’s Web site:

With Cisco TelePresence:

Scheduling is easy–no IT support required
Launching a meeting is as simple as making a phone call.
In-room controls are intuitive–collaboration applications are plug and play
Participants can meet in many rooms at once-up to 48 locations in one meeting
Users can easily bring in collaboration applications like Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
Existing SD or HD videoconferencing systems can be easily integrated.

Yesterday, BoomTown reported that Cisco will be holding a press event next Wednesday morning in San Francisco.

The invite reads: “Come see a new Cisco consumer experience at an exclusive media event, hosted by Chairman and CEO John Chambers.”

As I wrote, reflecting speculation: “What could the new consumer product be?

Perhaps Cisco has built its own version of Apple (AAPL) TV. Or perhaps a consumer-aimed home version of telepresence?”

It turns out Door #2 was right!

This is all part of Cisco’s ongoing attempt to push into the consumer space, offering a variety of products.

Cisco’s PR spokesperson declined to comment.

Cisco Systems is expected to report strong fourth-quarter earnings later today after the markets close, which should be another boost to the tech market.

The Internet computer-networking equipment maker is being buoyed by a return to spending by customers eager to upgrade after recession pullbacks.

Wall Street expects San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco (CSCO) to earn 42 cents per share with $10.9 billion in revenue. In the same quarter a year ago, its net income was 19 cents per share–adjusted earnings were 31 cents–on $8.5 billion in sales.

Either way, that’s a big improvement.

But analysts also expect Cisco to have an even better outlook for 2011, as spending on Internet infrastructure grows. That includes everything from data centers, to routers and switches, to all kinds of networking equipment.

In other words, CEO John Chambers gets to crow a little bit.

Cisco stock, which has been slightly down recently, closed at $24.31, down 1.9 percent, or 46 cents, yesterday.

Given Google’s mission–to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful–and the telecom costs and peering fees associated with this goal, it was inevitable that the company would look to secure additional network capacity.

But evidently, Google (GOOG) had other ambitions here as well–like deploying its own 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home Internet service.

“We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States,” Google product managers Minny Ingersoll and James Kelly wrote in a company blog post. “We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.”

Google insists that the purpose of this project is to “experiment and learn” in hope of making Internet access better and faster for everyone. That’s an altruistic goal, but a selfishly altruistic one. By providing Internet speeds of 1Gbps, Google will drive further usage of its various services and the contextual ads it peppers them with. At the same time, the company will humiliate the telcos into improving their own networks and, given Google’s stated focus on “openness and choice,” perhaps even change market dynamics.

But is this plan setting the stage for Google to become a full-fledged network operator? That seems unlikely. Telecom is a low-margin, capital-intensive business. I can’t imagine that it is very attractive to Google, which can’t even be bothered to build out a viable support system for its new Nexus One smartphone business.

Welcome news for long-suffering AT&T (T) subscribers, who recently ranked the carrier dead last in the annual Consumer Reports survey of wireless customer satisfaction. But the carrier’s improvements only apply to cities where additional back-haul connections have been added to support those higher speeds.

Sadly, for New York City and Bay Area residents, neither region qualifies. As AT&T head of operations John Stankey told attendees of a Citigroup (C) conference Tuesday, those cities present particularly challenging density and zoning issues.

“I thought by the time we’d closed 2009 we would be in a better place in New York City than we were,” Stankey said. “But New York City is a little bit of a different animal and it’s a good example of having to scale in this data environment, where not only do we have a lot of capacity issues to deal with but physically there is network equipment and network elements that are needed to be changed out.”

Elaborating, Stankey added, “They just flat-out have hit their capacity levels and we have to replace them with new ones. And as a result of that, those transitions and that work has taken us a little bit longer and it’s been a little dicier than what we had hoped it would be.”

And evidently, the situation is equally dicey in San Francisco.

“Our challenges [in San Francisco] are largely zoning-oriented,” Stankey explained. “It’s a little bit tougher in places in San Francisco to do adjustments to antennas that we need to do in areas like the Financial District, where we had antenna structures that worked really well in a 2G environment. They need to be replaced to support 3G services and it’s just taking time to get the zoning ordinances square to replace those antennas and clean up the portions of the city that we are dealing with.”

Okay. So New York City and San Francisco upgrades are tough going–that’s understandable. They’re both big, tech-savvy markets with high data demands. Still, it’s a travesty that a carrier like AT&T still can’t reliably connect calls in either of them when the company is raking in 80 percent more wireless data revenue than it did in 2007.

In its second quarter–the first with the Pre in its lineup–Sprint (S) lost 991,000 postpaid subscribers. And in its third, reported yesterday, its lost 801,000. So subscriber loss, while unquestionably gruesome, is diminishing.

How much of this is due to Palm’s (PALM) Pre? Not that much, says CL King & Associates analyst Lawrence Harris, who believes the Pre had only a moderate impact on Sprint’s postpaid subscriber base.

“Within postpaid, the number of CDMA-only subscriber losses was about 100,000 in the September quarter, compared to the 200,000 in the June quarter,” Harris wrote in a research note to clients. “At Sprint, the Palm Pre is a CDMA-only postpaid device. The number of Sprint postpaid subscribers upgrading their handsets was slightly higher in the September quarter than in the June quarter at just over 2.0 million.”

According to Harris, “This number provides some indication of the available market for all high-end devices at Sprint. In Palm’s August quarter, 85% of the company’s sales went to Sprint. Given the absence of growth in Sprint’s CDMA postpaid category, it appears likely that most of the Palm Pre sales went to existing Sprint subscribers as opposed to winning customers from other carriers.”

That would seem to be the case. Sprint rivals AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless (VZ) each added subscribers during the second quarter–1.4 million and 1.1 million, respectively. So if the Pre did anything for Sprint, it helped to stem CDMA postpaid losses a bit.

And that’s something, right? After all, there’s no panacea for Sprint’s affliction–well, perhaps there is, but it’s locked up in an exclusivity agreement with AT&T (T). Still, when Sprint last reported earnings, CEO Dan Hesse said the carrier expected to sign up more new customers as the Pre gained wider distribution through retail outlets like Best Buy (BBY) and RadioShack. And that doesn’t really seemed to have happened. Perhaps next quarter after Sprint launches the Pre’s not-quite-cheaper sibling, the Pixi.

UPDATE: A quick addendum. In a research note this morning, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes that while Sprint has reduced subscriber losses a bit, the cost of doing so has been worrisomely high.

“Yes, net subscriber losses were better,” Moffet explains. “But the cost was very high. Post-paid equipment subsidies soared to $139 per subsidized subscriber in Q3 (up 39 percent from last year), as the company recovered just 36 percent of their equipment costs….Yesterday’s results illustrate why it may not be possible for Sprint to have its cake and eat it too. After all the drastic cost cutting, after all the efforts to refresh the product line, after all the price cuts and new pricing plans, Sprint was able to manage only a modest improvement. Not growth, just a slightly slower rate of decline. And that Herculean effort almost broke the bank. The huge costs of even marginally improving gross additions (and the rate of net subscriber loss) crushed margins.”

In its second quarter–the first with the Pre in its lineup–Sprint (S) lost 991,000 postpaid subscribers. And in its third, reported yesterday, its lost 801,000. So subscriber loss, while unquestionably gruesome, is diminishing.

How much of this is due to Palm’s (PALM) Pre? Not that much, says CL King & Associates analyst Lawrence Harris, who believes the Pre had only a moderate impact on Sprint’s postpaid subscriber base.

“Within postpaid, the number of CDMA-only subscriber losses was about 100,000 in the September quarter, compared to the 200,000 in the June quarter,” Harris wrote in a research note to clients. “At Sprint, the Palm Pre is a CDMA-only postpaid device. The number of Sprint postpaid subscribers upgrading their handsets was slightly higher in the September quarter than in the June quarter at just over 2.0 million.”

According to Harris, “This number provides some indication of the available market for all high-end devices at Sprint. In Palm’s August quarter, 85% of the company’s sales went to Sprint. Given the absence of growth in Sprint’s CDMA postpaid category, it appears likely that most of the Palm Pre sales went to existing Sprint subscribers as opposed to winning customers from other carriers.”

That would seem to be the case. Sprint rivals AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless (VZ) each added subscribers during the second quarter–1.4 million and 1.1 million, respectively. So if the Pre did anything for Sprint, it helped to stem CDMA postpaid losses a bit.

And that’s something, right? After all, there’s no panacea for Sprint’s affliction–well, perhaps there is, but it’s locked up in an exclusivity agreement with AT&T (T). Still, when Sprint last reported earnings, CEO Dan Hesse said the carrier expected to sign up more new customers as the Pre gained wider distribution through retail outlets like Best Buy (BBY) and RadioShack. And that doesn’t really seemed to have happened. Perhaps next quarter after Sprint launches the Pre’s not-quite-cheaper sibling, the Pixi.

UPDATE: A quick addendum. In a research note this morning, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes that while Sprint has reduced subscriber losses a bit, the cost of doing so has been worrisomely high.

“Yes, net subscriber losses were better,” Moffet explains. “But the cost was very high. Post-paid equipment subsidies soared to $139 per subsidized subscriber in Q3 (up 39 percent from last year), as the company recovered just 36 percent of their equipment costs….Yesterday’s results illustrate why it may not be possible for Sprint to have its cake and eat it too. After all the drastic cost cutting, after all the efforts to refresh the product line, after all the price cuts and new pricing plans, Sprint was able to manage only a modest improvement. Not growth, just a slightly slower rate of decline. And that Herculean effort almost broke the bank. The huge costs of even marginally improving gross additions (and the rate of net subscriber loss) crushed margins.”

Reporting third-quarter results after market close Thursday, Google (GOOG) topped estimates, posting net income that rose to $1.64 billion, or $5.13 a share, from $1.29 billion, or $4.06 a share in the same period last year. Net revenue for the period ended in September rose nearly one percent to $4.38 billion. Excluding items, earnings for the quarter were $5.89 a share. Consensus estimates had been calling for $5.42 a share and $4.24 billion in net revenue. The chart below shows revenue sources within Google (click to enlarge).

Impressive. Seems paid clicks grew 14 percent compared to the same period last year, and four percent compared to the prior period. Cost per click was down six percent year over year, but up five percent sequentially.

“Google had a strong quarter–we saw seven percent year-over-year revenue growth despite the tough economic conditions,” said CEO Eric Schmidt. “While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future.”

Good to hear. Google’s shares, which have already risen more than 50 percent in the past six months, are on another upward tear. They rose 1.82 percent to $539.27 on the news in after-hours trading.

Earnings call highlights via The Wall Street Journal’s Andrew LaVallee:

4:32: Call starts. The cast is the same as last quarter: Mr. Schmidt, CEO; Patrick Pichette, CFO; Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of product management; and for the first time, Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development. But there’s a twist–they’ll be using Google’s moderator to vet questions with voters. They vote on “the most relevant questions,” which go to the Google execs, the operator says.

4:35: “While there’s obviously a lot of uncertainty about the pace of the economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us,” Schmidt says.

He adds that Google now has the confidence to invest “heavily” in its future. “It’s all good news from our perspective, at least in looking at the quarter.”

4:37: Says “we want to really get to the perfect search engine” and that many advertisers would like to spend more with Google if the company’s product allow them to do that.

4:38: Schmidt says “we’re open for business in making strategic acquisitions, both large and small.”

4:39: It’s Pichette’s turn. “At a high level, we’re very pleased with our Q3 results,” he says. The quarter benefited from growth in AdSense for content and display initiatives.

4:41: U.S. revenue up 4% to $2.8 billion. U.K. revenue decline affected by foreign exchange as well as ongoing macroeconomic weakness, Pichette says.

4:42: Operating expenses rose from the prior quarter, mostly due to payroll, equipment and facilities-related expenses.

“We believe the worst of the recession is behind us,” he says.

4:44: Brazil was a standout in Latin America, Arora says. We’re beginning to see signs of recovery in Europe and Africa, particularly Spain. In Asia, China performed strongly as an emerging market.

4:46: Looking at the display-advertising business, those have also shown strong results, he says.

On YouTube, new advertisers and partners are helping with monetization efforts. Ninety percent of the top 50 advertisers have run YouTube campaigns with successful results–recent examples include McDonald’s and Hewlett-Packard.

4:47: YouTube has signed deals with all four major record labels and several independent labels. Earlier today, Google announced a partnership with Channel 4 in the U.K., which will bring full-length programming to the video-sharing site.

4:48: Arora adds a personal shout-out to the sales team.

4:50: Rosenberg calls the new AdWords front-end one of the company’s biggest investments of the year. Advertisers have new reports, can run more efficient campaigns and can get new features faster thanks to the platform, he says.

Anyway, now it’s not. The cash-strapped publisher has sold WQXR-FM for $45 million, carving up the asset into two packages for different buyers–local NPR affiliate WNYC and Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Radio, a unit of Univision Communications.

The money will be used to chip away at the paper’s $1 billion debt (the terms of the $250 million loan it took out from billionaire Carlos Slim pretty much require that the paper do that whenever it sells off anything significant). It’s not much, but it may end being more than the paper gets for the Boston Globe, which it bought for $1.1 billion in 1993.

The Times has owned the station since 1944; it sold off its AM sibling to Disney (DIS) in 2006.

The deal involves a swap of licenses and equipment between multiple stations, but that won’t be of interest to you unless you listen to classical music or Spanish-language programming on New York City radio stations. If you do, the details are in the release.

This morning, EMC raised its offer for Data Domain to $2.1 billion from $1.8 billion, an 11 percent increase over its previous all-cash bid. Data Domain’s board had previously recommended that shareholders reject EMC’s $30-a-share cash bid in favor of a $30 cash-and-stock offer from NetApp (NTAP).

Hard to see the board doing so again now that the EMC (EMC) has sweetened the financial end of its proposal and removed some deal-protection provisions with which Data Domain (DDUP) had taken issue. With those gone, EMC’s bid is clearly superior to NetApp’s, CEO Joe Tucci claims, and it would be hard to argue otherwise.

“Over the past several weeks we’ve received strong support from many Data Domain stockholders and customers, validating our belief that EMC is Data Domain’s best choice,” Tucci wrote in a letter to Data Domain’s leadership. “With regulatory requirements now fulfilled, and in light of the clearly superior proposal we submitted to Data Domain’s Board of Directors today, we expect Data Domain to sign our definitive agreement that will deliver superior value in cash to the Data Domain stockholders in as little as two weeks.”

Data Domain has until midnight on July 17 to accept the offer.

UPDATE: NetApp responded to EMC’s announcement with the following statement:

“In response to EMC’s revised, unsolicited offer, the NetApp Board of Directors will carefully weigh its options, keeping in mind both its fiduciary duty to its stockholders and its disciplined acquisition strategy. We will provide an update shortly.”

This morning, EMC raised its offer for Data Domain to $2.1 billion from $1.8 billion, an 11 percent increase over its previous all-cash bid. Data Domain’s board had previously recommended that shareholders reject EMC’s $30-a-share cash bid in favor of a $30 cash-and-stock offer from NetApp (NTAP).

Hard to see the board doing so again now that the EMC (EMC) has sweetened the financial end of its proposal and removed some deal-protection provisions with which Data Domain (DDUP) had taken issue. With those gone, EMC’s bid is clearly superior to NetApp’s, CEO Joe Tucci claims, and it would be hard to argue otherwise.

“Over the past several weeks we’ve received strong support from many Data Domain stockholders and customers, validating our belief that EMC is Data Domain’s best choice,” Tucci wrote in a letter to Data Domain’s leadership. “With regulatory requirements now fulfilled, and in light of the clearly superior proposal we submitted to Data Domain’s Board of Directors today, we expect Data Domain to sign our definitive agreement that will deliver superior value in cash to the Data Domain stockholders in as little as two weeks.”

Data Domain has until midnight on July 17 to accept the offer.

UPDATE: NetApp responded to EMC’s announcement with the following statement:

“In response to EMC’s revised, unsolicited offer, the NetApp Board of Directors will carefully weigh its options, keeping in mind both its fiduciary duty to its stockholders and its disciplined acquisition strategy. We will provide an update shortly.”

On Monday the company once again said its bid for the data storage equipment maker Data Domain is “superior” to a competing offer from NetApp. This, despite the fact that Data Domain earlier in the day issued a statement recommending that shareholders reject EMC’s $30-a-share cash bid and instead accept a $30 cash-and-stock offer from NetApp.

“Our Board is committed to enhancing stockholder value and, after careful review with our outside advisors, determined that the $30 per share EMC Offer is not in the best interests of our stockholders at this time,” said Frank Slootman, president and CEO of Data Domain.

Why not? Well, among other things Data Domain hasn’t been able to discuss EMC’s offer because EMC hasn’t yet accepted the confidentiality and standstill agreement that would allow it to do so. For another, Data Domain must pay a $57 million termination fee if it should abandon its deal with NetApp–and that’s on top of a host of other considerable transaction expenses.

That’s understandable, I suppose. Still, it’s difficult to see why Data Domain insists that EMC’s all-cash offer is worth less than NetApp’s cash-and-paper bid. Unless it’s doing so to force EMC’s hand deeper into its wallet. And, indeed, that may be exactly what’s happening here. Sources say. EMC (EMC) could raise its offer to as much as $35 per share to win Data Domain (DDUP) or force NetApp (NTAP) to pay more than it can afford for it. “EMC is in the win-win box and NetApp is in the lose-lose box,” a source close to the company told Reuters. “EMC can pay more than NetApp can in a reasonable range. If NetApp wants to pay at an unreasonable range, that’s good for EMC.”

Ugly, even more so considering this is the company’s ninth consecutive quarterly loss since it was created in 2006.

“While expected, given seasonality and tough market conditions, we are not pleased with the operating loss incurred in the first quarter,” said CEO Ben Verwaayen. “Our guidance for the year remains unchanged and we are taking appropriate actions….There’s lots of work we still need to do.”

Now we know why Ericsson declined to offer a specific business outlook for 2009 when it last reported earnings. That said, the company seems to believe that the effects of global recession on its business are limited so far. Investments in wireless networks apparently continue apace, econalypse be damned.

“I think we have had a decent start of the year,” CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said during a conference call with analysts. “We continue to gain market share. We had several strategic wins, we’re doing good in managed–both networks and managed services. There are some but still limited effects from the economic recession and still I think this is not the time to be too precise and predicting but realize that this is a very unusual time.”

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However, UTStarcom said that if it reaches its projected 2009 sales target and contains expenses and cash used in operations to the levels contemplated in its 2009 financial plan, it should have sufficient liquidity to finance its working capital and cap ex requirements for the next 12 months.

But here’s the thing. The telecom equipment company declined to actually provide 2009 financial guidance due to the current economic climate. So that’s nice: The company is in deep trouble, and it has a plan to get out. But it isn’t interested in telling you what it is, because the economy is bad… right?

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Grim news for the once-darling tech company, which was worth about $250 billion.

Its market value today: about $275 million.

This latest swing of the ax brings total job cuts at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) to about 22,500 since the 2006 merger that created it. And though the company will be leaner and meaner for it, that new found agility won’t count for much without a shift in business strategy bold enough to reverse the brutal reduction in market share and market capitalization Alcatel-Lucent has suffered. And an oblique and, frankly, baffling mention of Web 2.0, does not a business strategy make.

Alcatel-Lucent’s plan is to “combine the trusted capabilities of the network environment with the creative communications services of the Web (Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond).” What the hell does that mean?

This latest swing of the ax brings total job cuts at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) to about 22,500 since the 2006 merger that created it. And though the company will be leaner and meaner for it, that new found agility won’t count for much without a shift in business strategy bold enough to reverse the brutal reduction in market share and market capitalization Alcatel-Lucent has suffered. And an oblique and, frankly, baffling mention of Web 2.0, does not a business strategy make.

Alcatel-Lucent’s plan is to “combine the trusted capabilities of the network environment with the creative communications services of the Web (Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and beyond).” What the hell does that mean?