The two companies had asked the judge essentially to throw out the other side’s complaint and rule in their favor in a pair of dueling filings last month, and made arguments to that effect in late March. Now being heard in a California State Superior Court, the case is going to trial, with no hope for a settlement, Reuters reported.

It all started up in late 2010, when in reaching a settlement of a lawsuit concerning Mark Hurd’s taking a job as co-president of Oracle, HP asked Oracle to include some language that it argues committed it to continue to build software that would support Intel’s exotic Itanium server chip. That chip, you may remember, was, for all intents and purposes, a market failure, and HP was the only vendor worth mentioning that ever made a go of selling servers using it.

In March of last year, Oracle said it would cease developing versions of its software that would work on Itanium-based systems, and argued that Intel had plans to end manufacturing of the Itanium chip. HP was outraged, and Intel said it had no such plans. Oracle was in earnest. HP got its Itanium customers to publicly lobby Oracle to reverse the decision. It didn’t work. So HP sued Oracle last June.

The pretrial arguments have been colorful. Oracle accused HP of being sneaky when it negotiated the Hurd settlement. It later compared HP’s ongoing reliance on Itanium to the movie “Weekend At Bernie’s,” the corpse in the analogy being the Itanium chip, kept alive by HP funding. For HP, the argument is a simple one: Is there an enforceable agreement between it and Oracle, or not?

Oracle argues, among other things, that there is no such agreement in place, and even if there were, HP was, at the time of the agreement, about to hire Léo Apotheker and Ray Lane as its CEO and chairman, two people who, for various reasons, Oracle thoroughly distrusts. Also, Oracle says, for HP, the Itanium business is all about the billions in support and service fees it charges its customers, fees without which HP is “strategically screwed.” And by the way, the uncertainty around Itanium servers is starting to hurt HP for real.

(Image is of this T-shirt)

According to an internal HP memo issued yesterday, Donatelli, who last month took over responsibility for the Global Sales group from Jan Zadak, announced the consolidation of several regional sales teams around the world. Along with those changes were a batch of new or existing executive appointments, all at the senior VP level: Rich Geraffo is the new senior VP and general manager for the Enterprise Group in the Americas; Jim Merritt will run Asia-Pacific and Japan; Peter Ryan will run Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Randy Seidl will run the U.S., and Piau Phang Foo was named to run greater China.

The streamlining, as Donatelli calls it, leaves several people in their current jobs: Geraffo, Merritt, Ryan, Seidl and Foo all had the same title under the old Enterprise, Servers, Storage and Networking Group.

The odd man out appears to be Yves de Talhouët, who was named to run the Enterprise business in Europe last year under former CEO Léo Apotheker; Talhouët will be named to a new position later. In several cases in the past, but not always, this has been a sign that the person is being edged out.

It fits with the changes that CEO Meg Whitman announced in March, to “streamline and simplify” HP and the way it engages with its customers.

This is a group that has seen an awful lot of managerial change. Just a year ago, the group got a big jolt when Thomas E. Hogan, then executive VP for enterprise, left the company and Zadak was brought in.

Here’s Donatelli’s memo:

Dave Donatelli

Executive Vice President and General Manager

HP Enterprise Group

To: HP Enterprise Group Employees

Date: May 1, 2012

HP Enterprise Group Sales
Strategic Alignment

HP Restricted – For Internal Use Only

As you’ve heard from Meg, HP is embarking on a bold plan to make our company better. We are making significant changes to simplify our business to make it easier for our employees to get their work done, easier to sell and ultimately serve our customers better.

Today I am announcing a new Enterprise Group sales structure streamlined to ensure we make decisions faster, increase productivity and become more efficient and effective in our go to market efforts.

Effective immediately, we are consolidating the region and country sales leadership roles across Global Accounts, Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services. The region leadership positions will be as follows:

Rich Geraffo – Senior Vice President and General Manager Enterprise Group Americas

Jim Merritt – Senior Vice President and General Manager Enterprise Group APJ

Peter Ryan – Senior Vice President and General Manager Enterprise Group EMEA

As the U.S. and China are key markets important to our overall success, I would like to announce the following leadership positions:

Randy Seidl – Senior Vice President and General Manager Enterprise Group U.S.

Piau Phang Foo – Senior Vice President and General Manager Enterprise Group Greater China

We will announce Yves de Talhouët’s position in the near future.

In addition, we are undertaking several strategic initiatives to ensure we are maximizing the company’s performance going forward. We will continue to improve our efforts in Supply Chain to respond faster to customer requirements, while at the same time capture additional efficiencies by simplifying our portfolio and rationalizing our approach to deliver high quality products and services to our customers.

While we are making the necessary strategic changes to improve our Enterprise Group business model, we are keeping many of the things we do well in place.

Our regional business unit structure remains the same, as does our front line sales team including business unit Specialists. If you are a sales Specialist today, your job is not changing. Our Account Managers continue to be important in representing one HP face to our customers. It is important that every customer-facing sales position continues selling to customers so that we deliver on our goals for this quarter. For all sales and service teams, it is our highest priority to maintain customer continuity and assurance that HP is the same, trusted advisor that will continue to deliver competitive solutions that uniquely solve our customers’ problems. The more customers we reach, the more customers will buy with the confidence that we are better than the competition.

Our Converged Infrastructure and HP Software IT Performance Suite strategies also remain unchanged. Together we have an ambitious goal to transform the industry, from servers, storage, networking and services all the way to the Converged Cloud.

We are undertaking this strategic sales alignment to improve the overall efficiency of our organization so that we

· make it easier for employees to excel in their everyday environments and future careers at HP

· continue to support our sales teams and channel partners to provide the best customer experience that is unique in the industry

· continue to invest in technology innovations to deliver solutions and services that further strengthen our portfolio

· optimize every aspect of our business model to ensure we are building a strong foundation for long term sustainable success

In the coming weeks you will see many announcements supporting the sales alignment. To keep you informed, all announcements will be posted as soon as they become available on the EG Organization Announcement website. I encourage you to check this website regularly for updates and watch for notifications of meetings in your specific region so you can remain up to date on all of the strategic initiatives we have underway.

Thank you for all your hard work to date. I am counting on everyone to deliver an outstanding performance in our second half. Going forward, I am confident this new structure will lay the foundation for long term business success.

Regards,

Dave

HP sued Oracle over what it says is an agreement to continue to create software that will run on HP systems running Intel’s Itanium chip, an agreement that HP argues was struck as part of the settlement that ended a suit stemming from former HP CEO Mark Hurd’s joining Oracle in 2010. Oracle, for its part, has argued that Intel plans to phase out the Itanium chip, a specialized server chip that never saw any real success in the marketplace, in order to focus more on its mainstream Xeon line of server chips and has only been producing them because HP has been paying it to do so.

The pair lobbed dueling filings at each other yesterday. In Oracle’s filing, which is the first of the pair embedded below, its lawyers accuse HP of trying to have the court write the contract it says it never agreed to in the first place: “HP has now been forced to admit that the fuzzy, feel-good language in the Reaffirmation Provision would fail as a porting contract on its own — unless the Court supplies numerous detailed terms inferred from the parties’ course of dealing.”

In the second of the two filings embedded below, HP makes the point that Hurd, once HP’s CEO and now Oracle’s co-president, had previously worked with Intel on Itanium-related matters. The key quote from the introduction:

“When asked point blank at his deposition whether it was misleading for HP not to publicly disclose the ICA [Itanium Collaboration Agreement], Oracle’s Co-President stated definitively: “No.” Thus, to prevail on its false advertising claims, Oracle must establish that its own Co-President was responsible for a fraudulent scheme while he was the CEO at HP, and that Mr. Hurd perjured himself at deposition. Although, and somewhat incredibly, Oracle recently stated on the record in response to this Court’s question that Mr. Hurd was part and parcel of this alleged scheme and pattern of lying, Oracle has no evidence to support this claim against Mr. Hurd. In any case, the fact that Oracle is even going down this path against its current Co-President reveals the absurdity of its entire claim.

Here, you can read them in the original, Oracle’s first:

Oracle Reply Msa 1599529

And now HP’s filing:

HP Reply in Support of Cross Claim MSJ

But there’s no denying the attraction of services like Amazon Web Services or Joyent or Rackspace, where you can spin up and configure a new virtual machine within minutes of figuring out that you need it. So, many companies seek to approximate the experience they would get from a public cloud provider on their own internal infrastructure.

It turns out that a start-up I had never heard of before this week is the most widely deployed platform for running these “private clouds,” and it’s not a bad business. Eucalyptus Systems essentially enables the same functionality on your own servers that you would expect from a cloud provider.

Eucalyptus said today that it has raised a $30 million Series C round of venture capital funding led by Institutional Venture Partners. Steve Harrick, general partner at IVP, will join the Eucalyptus board. Existing investors, including Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates, are also in on the round. The funding brings Eucalyptus’ total capital raised to north of $50 million.

The company has an impressive roster of customers: Sony, Intercontinental Hotels, Raytheon, and the athletic-apparel group Puma. There are also several government customers, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, NASA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense.

In March, Eucalyptus signed a deal with Amazon to allow customers of both to migrate their workloads between the private and public environments. The point here is to give companies the flexibility they need to run their computing workloads in a mixed environment, or move them back and forth as needed. They could also operate them in tandem.

Key to this is a provision of the deal with Amazon that gives Eucalyptus access to Amazon’s APIs. What that means is that you can run processes on your own servers that are fully compatible with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), or its Elastic Compute cloud, known as EC2. “We’ve removed all the hurdles that might have been in the way of moving workloads,” Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos told me. The company has similar deals in place with Wipro Infotech in India and CETC32 in China.

The results could be even better. In a note to clients issued Monday, Chris Whitmore, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Securities, said that while he expects sales to be in line with the consensus, IBM could report earnings that are as much as 10 cents above the consensus. One reason he expects a beat is the services business: Past deals should start paying off, Whitmore says.

You can’t go very far with IBM before you hear the word “analytics.” IBM has this thing about making different bits of the world smarter. Commerce is one thing; cities are another.

Then there’s the planet itself: IBM says it wants to generate $20 billion from new initiatives by 2015, and one of those is making things smarter using its analytics technologies. There’s money to be made in taking data that has previously been ignored, finding patterns in it, then gaining helpful insights. Other companies are getting analytics religion, too: Hewlett-Packard spent $12 billion last year to acquire Autonomy, which specializes in analytics software. Meanwhile, Splunk is coming public in an IPO slated for later this year.

I had the chance to talk about all this recently with Mike Rhodin, the senior vice president of IBM’s Software Solutions Group, during a visit to IBM’s headquarters in Armonk, N.Y.

AllThingsD: Mike, we hear a great deal about how important the analytics business is to IBM, to the point that we rarely hear from IBM these days when you don’t talk about analytics. Yet I think people are still getting their heads around what it means. Walk me through how IBM sees this.

Rhodin: The observation we’ve made, and you have to be careful with observations, is that analytics is something that’s becoming embedded in everything else. It used to be a thing. Analytics was initially business intelligence and dashboards, and when you say the word, that’s what many people still think of. They think of a dashboard with statistics and pie charts that kind of show you what’s going on. We think of it different. It’s that plus real-time analytics, statistical models — it’s starting to look at analytics in real time versus the past. The idea is that you instrument your processes and capture the data as it’s occurring, using statistical models to predict potential problems. So you’re going from reporting on past events to predicting future events. It’s that combination that we find very interesting.

What’s a good example?

We’ve done a TV ad on this, so you’ve probably heard of it. But it’s Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. [Also featured in IBM's Centennial film.] We instrumented their data flows, and then we built analytics triggers to look through their data. We’re finding anomalies 24 hours before the doctors and nurses do, simply by instrumenting the physical world, pulling data together, using analytics to gain insight and then using that insight to hopefully get to a better outcome. And that pattern of instrumentation through insight is a repeating pattern of everything we call Smarter Planet.

How did IBM come to see this as so strategically important?

The whole story behind how we put this organization together was driven around an observation we made in 2006 about how the world was going to change. And that we had seen enough examples of this to know that this was real, and it represented a fundamental shift. Some people thought Smarter Planet was simply a marketing campaign, but it’s not. So if you think about Smarter Planet in simple terms, it comes out of the digitization of the physical world, the instrumentation of physical processes that’s going to generate huge amounts of new data, which is going to drive issues around storage, and what to do with all the data, how to analyze it. That pushes you toward real-time analytics and streaming technologies, because with real time, you don’t have to save the data — you want to look for anomalies as they occur. It’s the combination of multiple things happening at once that give you that trigger. So that pattern you see repeating itself throughout the physical world: Smart transportation systems, water systems, intelligent smart-grid systems, health-care systems like the one I described, these are example of real change that are going to occur in parts of the world around us that have been less benefited by information technology in the past. It’s the next big wave of IT spending.

And yet it’s not all about the physical world — you can apply the same patterns to the digital world, too, right? I’ve seen a lot of analytics-related news coming out of IBM that looks at data gathered in the digital realm.

Sure. You’ve seen us do things like sentiment analysis, tracking people’s opinions on the social networks about the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl. Those are just examples of the same pattern of instrumenting, pulling data together and then looking for patterns. We’re doing a ton around retail. Two years ago, I was at my house in Vermont, and I looked at the paper that morning, and saw a story saying that, according to IBM, luxury goods sales were up. And I wondered who at IBM would have put out that press release. And then, a few minutes later, it was my own group. That was after the acquisitions of Coremetrics and Unica. Coremetrics had previously put out these regular reports, and so they became an IBM report. As we went into Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, we had enhanced it so that we not only knew what was being bought, but what device people were using to buy it. So we could track purchases on the iPad versus Android versus Blackberry. And we actually published the statistics on that.

What did Unica bring to the table?

The level of information we’re gaining on instrumenting data sets is pretty dramatic. But it’s not just finding out what people are buying — you can also figure out what people are not buying. So you start to see trends in commerce that can tell you how you’re doing against your competitors. So one thing we can do is help companies figure out why things aren’t selling on their Web sites, so they can think through new tactics and offers they might create to get people buying again. The Unica acquisition comes in as a real-time automation of marketing. You feed real-time information into a marketing management program that automates the marketing of those things. And recently we closed in the acquisition of DemandTec, which can automate the pricing of those offers. So you can see how we’re stringing together a group of things we collectively call Smarter Commerce.

So if, for example, Best Buy and Amazon are going to have a fight over who has the best price on a TV, they can just automate it.

Yeah, they can automate it and just watch it go. It is a very interesting set of dynamics that’s unfolding around us. Commerce was one of those areas that we thought was ripe for transformation. We had some of our own internal technologies with our own e-commerce engine, WebSphere Commerce. But that was really about traditional order-capture e-commerce. Then we started thinking about commerce in a very broad sense. There are a lot of processes that exist between companies that do business with one another, and then helping those companies do business with their customers. So we put together a big process map that showed what products we had that addressed those processes, and where we didn’t have them, we had white boxes. Then we identified companies that did, and started to buy them. And over time, we’ve filled in that map.

Have you filled in the map entirely, or are you going to be buying more companies?

We’ve publicly said we’re going to spend $20 billion on acquisitions between now and 2015, and we haven’t finished yet. [Since this conversation, IBM has announced plans to acquire Varicent, a compensation and sales performance analytics company.] We’re always looking for good companies, and it’s part of our business model, and we have a stated intention to buy more.

As many readers know, we have been adding to our staff here at AllThingsD, most recently in our new reviews section, with the addition of Lauren Goode earlier this year.

Now Walt Mossberg and I are proud to announce that Mike Isaac is joining our team to cover the social Web and its biggest players, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

He comes to ATD most recently from a staff writer position at Wired, where, among many other things, he spent much of his time writing about Google’s mobile and social efforts.

From 2010 to 2012, his coverage at Wired included the decline and fall of Hewlett-Packard’s mobile empire, Google’s surprise acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and Facebook’s steady trudge toward IPO-hood.

Prior to that, he wrote about the business of tech for Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, with a particular emphasis on start-ups and social. His work has also appeared in Paste magazine, Performer magazine, DNR magazine and the Washington Examiner.

Isaac holds a degree in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and is a former Georgetown University journalism fellow.

He takes over the social beat from Liz Gannes, who will be stepping up our coverage of the many businesses of Google, innovation, venture investing and the start-up scene — especially its bigger companies, from Pinterest to Quora to Dropbox. Gannes, as everyone who follows her knows well, has become a key observer of Silicon Valley and its players, and her insights into the tech scene have become one of our most invaluable offerings.

We’re excited for both of them, and look forward to their stellar work on our site.

We all know how that turned out. Dell first conquered the PC market, and the ultracompetitive environment it created drove several companies out of the market: IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo; Gateway sold itself to Acer; Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq. Other lesser players are all but forgotten.

It’s as if Dell was a victim of the hyperefficient world it created. HP is now the world’s biggest PC maker, followed by China’s Lenovo, with Dell in third place on a global basis, as of last quarter.

PCs — consumer and business PCs — still amount to about half of Dell’s business. But there’s another way to look at Dell, and that’s from the point of view of its enterprise business. I learned this in a recent conversation with Steve Felice, Dell’s chief commercial officer. I also learned that the consumer PC business, for which Dell is still widely known in the U.S., amounts to about one-fifth of its business, while its enterprise lines of business, including commercial PCs, amount to 50 percent.

It’s all part of the long-term transformation that has been underway at Dell for a few years now. The company recently did three acquisitions in as many days, the most significant of which was for Wyse Technology.

That caught my attention. But first I wanted Felice’s reaction to the findings of a J.P. Morgan survey of 100 CIOs, saying that the release of Microsoft’s Windows 8 wouldn’t be much of a catalyst for PC buying at large companies.

(We had a pretty good talk, so, arbitrarily, I left in an eighth question from our exchange.)

AllThingsD: Steve, there’s a survey out from J.P. Morgan recently that says that CIOs from large companies don’t see Windows 8 as the sort of thing that would get them buying PCs again. That, to me, could be interpreted as bad news for Dell. Is it?

Felice: I don’t think so. Operating system changes have never been a catalyst, at least not in the corporate world. Consumers and small businesses take off with it right away. Corporations have rollout schedules, and they stick to them. Some of them are just starting to deploy Windows 7. They do their three-year roll-out schedules, and when it’s time they’ll go to Windows 8. About 55 percent of our business are the larger mid-sized and up public companies. The other 45 percent are small businesses and consumer. We’ll see some buying within that 45 percent. On the others, they will go on their normal schedule.

On the enterprise side, I was just with a bunch of CIOs here, and there are some very common themes about why I think they are going to spend some money. And it’s really to continue a transformation of their own infrastructure, to take advantage of virtualization and cloud computing and bigger pipes to transport information. There is a pretty common theme that there is more opportunity to get more out of assets. There is more optimism around moving away from legacy architectures and into open systems. The whole concept of being more “open to open” is there. We view that as good, because we’re the pure play when it comes to moving to open architectures.

What are the CIOs you talk to worried about these days?

Security. It’s easily in the top three concerns. We think we added to our portfolio two of the best assets out there. One is intended to tell you how to figure out what’s going on in their world. That’s what SecureWorks, a company we acquired recently, does. It analyzes your infrastructure and tells you where your threats are coming from and how to prevent them. And then we just announced the acquisition of SonicWall. They built a nice unified threat-management platform. From my viewpoint, it helps enable the movement to open. Some people are afraid to leave the proprietary world because they think it’s more secure.

Where are you on mobile? I read that you just killed a smartphone model. Where is Dell going on the mobile front?

I would characterize the last couple of years as us experimenting with what form factors and operating environments will work. The good thing is that we’ve never overextended ourselves in mobile, yet we’ve launched a lot of products, and we’ve learned a lot from them. We’ve launched tablets — 5-inch, 7-inch, 10-inch. We’ve launched them in emerging markets first, we’ve launched them in developed markets first. We’ve launched smartphones around the world. So we have an active smartphone that we just launched in China, and one in Japan. We just end-of-lifed one in the U.S., which is what I think you’re referring to. We have a road map of other products that are coming up. We are predominantly a commercial-oriented business that has some consumer business, but the lines are blurring.

What we’ve learned is to look at the consumer from the commercial side, not the other way around. Some companies who have done well in mobility are all about consumers and entertainment. And looking at the consumer as an individual, without any regard to how they might interact on the professional side of their life. Executives of any company I talk to say these devices are driving them crazy. They don’t know what’s happening to their information, how they get it back, nor how to interact with the other devices that people are bringing into the workplace. Or how to support them and control them. No one is dealing with that. So, generally, you’re going to see Dell think more broadly about the mobile ecosystem. When you next see devices from Dell, you’ll see us thinking more about the security of them, the end-to-end aspects of managing them, from the data center to the end user.

And yet what I’m hearing from a lot of companies is that they’re just adopting iPads, mainly because the bosses have them and love them. This is how Apple is penetrating the enterprise. How is Dell going to compete with that?

It’s unique, no question. And so it’s got some infatuation aspects to it. But then I talk to these customers, and because there isn’t a lot of alternatives, what they’re tolerating is pretty interesting. They say they have one of those products. Then the problems start coming out. First, the office applications don’t work very well, and they have trouble reading PowerPoint decks. And then they can’t wirelessly print easily, and some days they’re not able to get on the network at the office. And I look at that and say, they’re tolerating a lot because they like the form factor. Our conclusion is that there need to be some alternatives.

We’ve got the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, and we take it around and show it to customers, and invariably the decision-maker wants one. And then he says that if he had this, he never would have bothered with the tablet. So we took a consumer-oriented product and put pro support on it, and showed that to CIOs and said that if their executive team used it, they’d get the same support as they would on their Latitude product. So when it breaks, someone will come to the office and fix it, and you don’t have to go stand in line at the Apple store. Then we put image management on it. If you want a corporate image that has to be managed, we’ll do that. Institutions want thin and light devices, but they also want the options to secure and support them. The other thing that is happening, with ARM, you’ll get even more form factors.

Well, let’s talk about the PC, then. People keep talking about the decline of the PC. The research houses keep predicting market declines, and sometimes they materialize and sometimes they don’t. But even so, the numbers — at least globally — are flat to slightly up. Yet when you drill down to different regions, you see very different stories, with different countries growing like crazy. How does Dell see this right now?

This is a weighted math problem. The lowest growth rates are in the developed world, which will remain more of a replacement cycle world. The U.S. is like that because PC penetration is very high. Then you go to India and China, where it’s very low. What’s happening is that the emerging markets, where combined, they will be bigger than the developed world. And they are still growing rapidly, so the math is going to reverse itself. You’ll still see low-single-digit growth rates in the developed world, but healthy growth rates in emerging markets — but the emerging markets will be bigger. We still see double-digit growth in China. Look at Indonesia, there’s 300 million people just starting to buy PCs. As these countries industrialize and get more mature, they just need basic computing.

And how do those markets develop?

It comes back to the first thing I talked about. These countries don’t have the legacy baggage. They’ll grow, they’ll industrialize, they’ll need more infrastructure. And what will they buy? They’ll buy standard servers, storage, and open systems. This is happening in China, and its why we’re No. 1 in servers there.

Do you think people still associate Dell with the PC and don’t give it enough credit for its greater focus on the enterprise?

I’d have to say yes. Some of that is our own doing. We have this very large direct model, and we have a tendency to talk to customers one on one. So we tend not to do a lot of brand advertising. So our consumer advertising is more visible. If you ask people randomly what portion of our business is consumer, they’d say it’s more than half, but in fact it’s only about 20 percent. And if you ask people what portion of our business is servers and storage, they don’t know, but it’s more than 50 percent.

If you combine consumer and commercial PCs, how much is that?

About half is PC, and that’s global. But I think with all the acquisitions we’ve done, and a lot more customer testimonials we’re doing, the perception is changing. We’ve done some targeted testing of campaigns where we say, ‘Do you know that Dell does this?’ The perception of Dell as an enterprise provider skyrocketed. Brazil is an interesting case, because we entered the server and storage market there before the PC market. That’s because the only way to really be successful in Brazil with PCs is to have your own manufacturing there, because of the stiff tariffs. So in Brazil, Dell is thought of as an enterprise company. You’ll see more of a commitment this year to do more brand-oriented advertising around the enterprise.

HP shares surged by more than 7 percent, or $1.69, today to $25.10, mainly on a positive report on the state of its personal computer business from the market research firms Gartner and IDC.

As I noted yesterday, HP saw its share of the global market grow fractionally, according to the reckoning of Gartner, at the expense of Dell, Acer and Asus, while China-based rival Lenovo grew even more. IDC saw similar results, and both research houses were surprised to see the overall market grow in the first quarter of the year where a market decline had been expected.

That was enough to give HP shares a long-awaited jolt. So far in 2012, HP shares have fallen a little less than 3 percent, but that comes on top of the ridiculous 40 percent drop they suffered during 2011.

Much of that decline was suffered on Aug. 19, 2011, a day after the company, under then-CEO Léo Apotheker, missed its quarterly forecasts, spent $12 billion to acquire the British software firm Autonomy and floated an ill-advised plan to spin off the very PC operations that gave investors a rare moment to cheer. Looking back now, it does make for some irony, no?

To be sure, HP’s share price has had a better than average week. On days when the Dow was mostly in the red, HP has been one of the few stocks on the board showing green all week.

And frankly an uptick in the PC business, while welcome indeed, isn’t exactly going to fix HP in any fundamental way. At least not yet. PC sales were 31 percent of overall sales in 2011, and declined slightly over the prior year. And while that made HP’s Personal Systems Group the biggest business unit at HP last year — and now combined with printers it’s even bigger — profits both in PCs and in printers are seriously under attack.

The hope lies in the enterprise and in services, and maybe in the cloud. Profit margins in the enterprise business and in the services group were roughly twice what they were in PCs. HP also made a big announcement on the cloud computing front earlier this week that would seem to put it on course to compete with the likes of Amazon in providing computing capacity in a similar for-hire fashion as the Web retailer does with its Web Services unit.

It’s hard to know how profitable that business is for Amazon because it doesn’t disclose its operational size and profit margins and lumps that operation into its $1.4 billion category labeled “other.” However it’s worth noting — as HP surely has — that Amazon’s “other” category grew by 73 percent in 2011 and nearly tripled in size from 2009. There may be a real light at the end of that tunnel yet, but there’s lot’s of work to do.

One early customer is Rob Legato, the visual effects supervisor who won an Academy Award for his work on the Martin Scorsese-directed hit motion picture “Hugo.” Legato will be talking about ioFX with Fusion-io chief scientist and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at a conference in Las Vegas next week.

Fusion does some cool stuff with flash memory. Here’s the part where I roll out the old metaphor that has served me so well: In pretty much any computer, you can think of the processor as a fast-moving, highly efficient, type-A personality, constantly in a hurry, and always waiting impatiently for the rest of the system to give it more work to do. The slowpoke in the deal is the hard drive, which, though it’s already spinning at a super fast rate, just can’t get data to the processor fast enough. So the processor sits around, tapping its foot and looking at its watch, waiting for the other parts of the system that feed it data to work to keep up.

In high-performance computing, where there’s more data to be crunched than in most average computing situations, this is sort of a big deal. You want the processor to be as busy as possible — mainly because the systems are so expensive, and you want to get your money’s worth out of them — but also because jobs get done faster.

So Fusion-io’s stock in trade is a series of insert cards that bring flash memory right up next to the processor. The flash chips grab great big armloads of data and hold on to it, handing it off to the processor in a way that keeps it happy and busy and not impatiently waiting — at least not so much.

We’ve seen the technology brought to bear at places like Credit Suisse, which added Fusion’s flash cards to its trading systems. And its technology is also used in data centers belonging to Facebook and Apple.

On top of that, Fusion has relationships with all the big server vendors: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and SuperMicro all sell systems with Fusion-io on board.

Workstations are essentially heavily tricked-out PCs that are used primarily in two professions: Animation and special-effects work for movies and TV and computer-assisted design and modeling, used by folks who design buildings and cars and planes and pretty much anything else you can think of. They have the same problem that servers have — agitated processors constantly waiting for the rest of the system to catch up with them.

At this point, none of the workstation vendors are offering the card as an option, but if you’ve got a professional workstation — like, say, an Apple Mac Pro, which has three PCI Express slots — you might add one of these cards and speed up your work. In the meantime, the company is working with workstation vendors to get the ioFX insert cards certified. My guess is there will be more than a few visual artists who won’t bother to wait.

Fusion-io shares are up almost 11 percent — or $2.64 — to $27.30, as of 11 am ET; not so much on this news — workstations are kind of a low-volume market — but on an analyst report from Piper Jaffray suggesting that Cisco Systems may be close to a deal to add Fusion-io’s flash technology to its Unified Computing System platform.

The report goes on to suggest that Cisco could, over the next three or four quarters, become one of Fusion’s bigger customers, along with Facebook and Apple, and could account for more than 10 percent of Fusion’s business — which could, in turn, lead to a doubling of revenue this year. For the record, sales were $197.2 million in Fusion’s fiscal 2011. Do the math.

It turns out they did nothing of the kind. In fact, PC sales grew by almost 2 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Perhaps that’s not saying much. Last year, you’ll remember, was nothing less than the second-worst year for sales in the history of the PC industry after 2001 — except at Apple, which, no surprise, turned in its best year for Mac sales ever. Perhaps it might have been more realistic to predict a bounce-off-the-bottom moment.

Anyhow, here’s what Gartner saw and what its analysts think about it:

Europe and the Middle East did better than expected and grew by almost 7 percent. Asia was below expectations and emerging markets slowed down generally.

Also, the hard drive supply problem brought on by the floods in Thailand didn’t cause nearly as many problems as some had expected. As Gartner’s Mikako Kitagawa put it: “In general, the hard-disk drive supply shortage had a limited impact on PC supply during 1Q12. There was a moderate impact on selected markets, such as low-end consumer notebooks and the white-box market in selected regions. Still, low PC demand was able to mask the tight hard drive supply overall.”

So who led the market? Look at the tables. Worldwide market is first:

Lenovo grew the most, boosting its shipments by more than 28 percent, and was strong in the EMEA market, where growth was higher than expected generally. Dell underperformed, Gartner says, and saw declines in Asia year over year.

And now the U.S. market:

Overall, as you can see, the market declined by 3.5 percent. Dell’s share fell by nearly 4 percent, while HP and Apple grew. Acer’s share fell by an eye-popping 25 percent and change.

Not a bounce, at least not as far as the U.S. is concerned.

Obviously, that’s not the part that surprises me. But here is the bit that did: When you add up all those expenses over a server’s lifetime, labor costs amount to about 70 percent of the total, according to IBM. If you had asked me, I would have guessed the cost of power would outweigh the cost of ongoing labor. Silly me.

I talked with IBM’s Steve Mills about this earlier this week. He’s Big Blue’s senior vice president and group executive for Software and Systems. It’s not uncommon, he says, for a company to take weeks or even a month between a server’s arrival and its deployment.

IBM today announced a hardware system it calls PureSystems that can cut that deployment time to hours and reduce the lifetime labor cost associated with the server by about one-third.

Basically what IBM is doing here is bringing to bear its expertise in services. Having done so well running IT services for a few thousand different companies, it has learned a thing or two about efficiency.

And it makes perfect sense when you consider that much of IBM’s $107 billion in revenue is derived from its services business. Now it’s taking some of that learning and applying it to its hardware and software business, which accounts for about 40 percent of sales.

The key feature, Mills told me, is something called the Flex Systems Manager, which is some IBM-made software that automates a lot of the set-up and maintenance work that traditionally has to be done more or less manually by one or a team of IT managers. “The purpose of the code is to do discovery. … Can I locate every piece of hardware in the frame? What are the rules for configuring it? Can I locate all the software I need and what are the rules for configuring that?” Mills told me.

All that data has been gathered into a single screen that makes the relevant information available at a glance. Mills says the system can be up and running within four hours of arriving at a company’s loading dock. That’s a bold claim.

It’s all based around patterns that IBM has seen over and over again for different types of deployments and configuration options. See them often enough and you can develop software scripts that take a great deal of the manual labor out of the process.

Sometimes companies have their own unique or wonky business processes that even someone as experienced as IBM hasn’t seen before. If that’s the case, a company can craft its own pattern and translate that into software that can automate a process that’s unique to its business or internal rules.

IBM has also teamed up with 125 independent software vendors or ISVs to develop their own patterns that clients can quickly download in order to get up and running. (IBM put out a video on that, which I’ve taken the liberty of embedding below.)

It’s also pretty diverse from a computing standpoint. IBM being IBM, the system has different hardware options, including processors from Intel or its own Power line of chips. There are also three OS options: Windows, Linux and AIX, IBM’s proprietary flavor of Unix. There’s also a wide choice of virtual machine managers: VMWare, KVM, Microsoft’s HyperV and IBM’s own PowerVM.

In the end, the point is to allow a company’s employees to spend more time working on their key lines of business and less time making the computers run properly, which is at its most basic level the IT shop’s highest mission.

But, admittedly, my last mouse was a low-tech, corporate-issued, clunky thing. So I’ve been exploring a whole new world of mice. Many modern mice have taken cues from Apple’s wireless Magic Mouse, which has a multi-touch surface for easy swiping through functions like scrolling up and down a Web page or document, or minimizing and maximizing browser windows with a simple flick of your fingers.

For the past five days, I’ve been playing with three mice that are compatible with Windows 7 computers: Microsoft’s Touch Mouse, Logitech’s new m600 Touch Mouse and HP’s X5000 wireless mouse with touch scrolling. While HP’s mouse comes at the much more reasonable price of $40, it isn’t a full multi-touch mouse and is bulkier than the others. The entrants from Microsoft and Logitech are pricey — $79.95 and $70, respectively — but have multi-touch capabilities and sleeker designs.

All three mice are easy to set up. In each case, I turned on the mouse and just plugged its USB adapter into my laptop, which the machine quickly recognized.

The Microsoft Touch Mouse was my favorite in terms of design. Some new mice on the market have funky shapes, high arcs, or are almost flat. I found that the Touch Mouse was a nice blend of modern tech appeal with a curved mouse feel.

The Touch Mouse measures 2.4 inches in width and 4.7 inches in length — roughly the size of an iPhone. It was longer than the other two mice I tested, but I liked the extra real estate under my fingers. It has tiny laser-etched marks on its front half, to create a little more traction. There’s also a limited edition “artist” version of the mouse, which is white and has a calligraphy-like design.

Since it’s a multi-touch mouse, that means a one-finger swipe on the surface works like an old-school scrollwheel for navigating up and down a document or Web page. Swiping two fingers down minimizes a Web-browsing window. For people like me who are used to two-finger swiping on a laptop trackpad to move up and down a page, this can take some getting used to.

A three-finger swipe presented all of my Web browsers and open apps in a Windows instant-viewer format on the desktop. Also, swiping two fingers from side to side “snapped” my current window to the side and allowed me to open up another window next to it.

One tiny part of the Touch Mouse I found to be useful: It has storage space on the underside of the mouse for the USB connector, which frequent travelers will appreciate. It’s easy to lose these mouse connectors, especially if your bag of gadgets, wires and dongles looks like mine.

In terms of battery life, Microsoft says the mouse will run for three to six months, depending on usage habits. It uses two AA batteries.

The Touch Mouse, as with the others I reviewed, is meant to be compatible only with Microsoft Windows. But this isn’t entirely true — my Mac laptop recognized each mouse’s USB connector as a keyboard accessory, and I could still move the cursor with each mouse. I was also able to use the touch surfaces of the mice — or in the case of the HP mouse, the touch strip — to swipe up and down pages on the screen. In the case of the Touch Mouse, functionality on the Mac was limited. For example, I could swipe up and down, but not snap my windows to the side.

Microsoft has also said the Touch Mouse will be compatible with Windows 8, the upcoming operating system that is expected to launch by the end of this year. The mouse’s horizontal scrolling function is actually meant to cater to the new Windows 8 interface.

Logitech’s Touch Mouse M600 is flatter than Microsoft’s Touch Mouse, measuring 2.52 by 4.41 inches, and is smoother to the touch. Its shape and glossy shell reminded me a bit of a giant bug. It’s mostly black, with a gray bottom half, and has barely perceptible squiggly designs along the edges of it, along with a Logitech logo, giving it a somewhat toylike appearance.

The M600’s swiping functions were pretty basic, and it doesn’t offer as many functions as the Touch Mouse. Whether I was using one finger, two or three, the M600 scrolled up and down the page I was on. I found these movements to be pretty smooth. I also felt like I could navigate my cursor more quickly with the M600, probably because it’s slightly lighter weight than the Touch Mouse.

The M600 does have one feature I really liked: Side-to-side swiping for Web browsing. Swiping my finger to the left brought me back to the previous Web page I was on; swiping to the right pushed me ahead to the next page.

The M600 also comes with a unifying USB dongle, which allows users to connect up to five other Logitech devices to the same tiny adapter.

As with the Microsoft Touch Mouse, the M600 should last for three to six months, depending on how many batteries you use. Logitech says two AA batteries will get you closer to six months.

The HP X5000 is the fattest mouse of the three, with the highest curve. Bulkiness aside, it’s got a smooth, tear-shaped plastic top, and its sides have a velvety feel.

The X5000 isn’t a multi-touch mouse. Instead, it’s got a touch-sensitive strip built into the mouse, right where a scroll wheel would be on an older mouse model. It also comes with the traditional right-side, left-side clicking functionality, which some users might appreciate. The tiny touch strip felt a little limited compared to the full-touch surfaces I’d been playing with on the other mice, but I did like the split clicking function.

The mouse also boasts a button that’s supposed to allow you to upload photos to Facebook with one click. In order for this to work, I had to install the software that came with the mouse, and allow the HP mouse’s app access to my Facebook account. Next, I had to open up a photo file on my computer, use the mouse’s Facebook-specific button to draw a square around my photo and create a preview file, and then indicate that I wanted to upload that photo to Facebook. The first time I tried this, the photo didn’t upload.

In my test, the whole experience really wasn’t as simple as “one click.” And while some users might like easy access to Facebook, the idea that distraction is one click away didn’t appeal to me. Maybe I’m just using Facebook less these days, or am more selective about the photos I upload to the site, but I’d welcome another productivity function over the Facebook button.

One of the X5000’s upsides is that it claims a super long battery life of 24 months with two AA batteries. And the USB dongle that comes with the HP X5000, like the Logitech mouse, will allow you to wirelessly connect up to four other HP devices to your laptop.

When it comes to these three mice, I found you get what you pay for. The Microsoft Touch Mouse was my top pick out of the three; Logitech’s M600 mouse is a very close second, and users who like a flatter, smoother design might prefer that one; and HP’s X5000 mouse falls short of what a modern mouse should be.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120409/searching-for-a-mighty-mouse-here-are-three-options/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20120405/it-spending-this-year-almost-four-triiilllion-dollars/ http://allthingsd.com/20120405/it-spending-this-year-almost-four-triiilllion-dollars/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:40:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=193546 The growth rate in global spending on information technology is slowing down a bit, but, well, it’s still growing, and will total $3.7 trillion, according to the latest forecast on the topic by the tech research house Gartner.

It’s not so much about any shifts in sentiment or intention for spending among large companies, it’s just that the dollar is currently strong against other currencies, so U.S.-domiciled companies are in a weaker position when selling to customers in other countries. When accounting for that discrepancy, Gartner says it expects overall growth in spending of 2.5 percent, but on a constant currency basis, the digits would be transposed for a healthier 5.2 percent.

Spending by governments will likely contract, thanks in no small part to the austerity measures being put in place in the euro zone.

The highest rate of growth will be in the telecommunications equipment sector, which will grow by nearly 7 percent, Gartner says. A lot of that is thanks to mobile going to mobile, but also to speeding up networks. See the rest of the segments and their expected rates of growth in the table I screengrabbed from the press release, below:

Earlier this week, Gartner singled out IT spending in emerging economies, which it said will amount to an impressive trillion and change by itself. And last week we got a glance at the sentiment from 100 CIOs at large enterprises, courtesy of J.P. Morgan, indicating that growth is likely to tick upward this year. Up is good.

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