America: OPENWORLD: Oracle, HP team up to reach small businesses
By Shabnam Sigman, Bio-IT World (online)
At Oracle Corp.'s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week, Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Carly Fiorina announced that Oracle and HP would unite their value-added resellers in order to reach more small and medium-size businesses. The initiative aims to expand sales of Oracle's E-Business Suite Special Edition North America on HP ProLiant servers and will enable VARs to deliver pre- tested configurations for up to 50 users.
"(HP is) a partner by strategy, by personality, by choice," Fiorina said of the company's long-standing relationship with Oracle. "If you put HP's Darwin architecture side by side with the Oracle architecture, you would see how similar the two sides are and how our tools and solutions synchronize."
HP and Oracle share 88,000 customers, and HP's servers are the most widely used to run Oracle's data-base, Fiorina said, adding that the companies announced a "new world record - a 10TB data warehouse benchmark using Oracle database 10G, Oracle real application clus-ters, HP UX, and two HP Integrity Superdome servers."
'The main event'
In her keynote address, Fiorina stressed the need for a new approach to information technology. "Everything we've lived through during the past 25 years - including the dot-com boom and the dot-com bust, including the Internet and wireless networks - ... has been a warm-up act. We are now entering the main event of technology ... this is an era where technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.
"The issue is no longer where the information lives. It's actually now all about putting information to work - transforming data from passive to active, from static to dynamic, transforming data into insight."
According to Fiorina, simplicity, manageability, and adaptability are becoming new imperatives in the technology world. She also un-derscored the importance of delivering value horizontally, instead of in vertical silos. "You can look in any industry, any part of government, and what everyone is talking about is the requirement for silos to begin to interact and interope-rate. Silos can't interact and interoperate unless technology does. It's about networking businesses, companies, and employees, and suppliers to customers, and getting those silos to talk to each other."
Her answer to these challenges is "a service-oriented IT environment that is tightly and dynami-cally tied to business requirements, that is managed as a single globally distributed resource, that is po-wered by modular, standards-based components, and that draws on virtualized systems that can scale up or down based on shifting business demands."
America: Users: IBM PC division sale a reflection of the times
By Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld (US online)
IBM Corp.'s decision to sell its PC division to a China-based company prompted a range of reactions Wednesday from technology users, from disappointment to a belief that the move reflects the times and the impact of globalization. The two companies announced Wednesday that China's Lenovo Group Ltd. has agreed to acquire IBM's personal computing division for US$1.25 billion in cash and equity.
Sidney Soberman, director of technology systems at The H.W. Wilson Co., a Bronx, New York-based publishing company, called the sale "an indication of the direction IBM is going: They are getting out of the hardware business."
An IBM laptop user, Soberman said the company's PCs are very durable and, in his experience, never break down. With the purchase, "I would tend to think the quality of the notebooks will decline," he said.
Soberman and other users who commented on the sale are attending the Computer Measurement Group conference, an organization of IT professionals who measure performance and manage systems.
Ike Hunley, a systems programmer at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Florida, was dismayed by the sale, which he called "just more selling off of America ... piece by piece. More likely, it will be more jobs that are gone. It's not going to do anything for citizens here."
"It really is an American icon, and to see that get sold off to a Chinese company is kind of disappointing," said Steven Gedwillo, a resource manager at Omaha Woodmen Life Insurance Society in Omaha. He said he has mixed feelings about the decision.
While IBM was a PC hardware pioneer, Gedwillo said PCs have now become commodities. He called the sale "an indicator of a company that is looking forward."
Rob Enderle, principal of En-derle Group in San Jose, believes the deal will hurt IBM in some markets, especially with federal government customers who may balk at buying from a company whose backers include the Chinese government. "Lenovo is about as far away from a company they would consider buying from as you would get," he said.
But the sale may also create questions for U.S. corporate users about IBM's commitment to its hardware, Enderle said in a telephone interview. "The question is going to be, what goes next?"
In 2002, IBM sold its disk drive business to Hitachi Ltd., and En-derle said he expects Lenovo will try to compete against IBM's Intel-based servers, which it may be able to sell at a lower price.
Daniel Menasce, a professor of computer science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., wasn't surprised by the sale. "The profit margins on PCs is really very slim," he said. "IBM makes its money on selling solutions to its customers."