The CIO should be a change agent, transforming the way business gets done, says Procter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini. – The Great Recession has been jolting companies around the world. Budgets are reduced, employees have experienced layoffs, and the average person still goes to work each day not knowing whether or not their job will still be waiting for them. The past few years have been particularly tough for CIOs. …

read more

Dell ditches 3PAR, iPad gets an update and Google’s Chrome has a makeover. Five fast takes on the week’s hottest developments. – After a heated bidding war with HP over storage firm 3PAR, Dell finally waved the white flag this week, in the latest of a spate of vendor acquisitions that have taken place this year. Meanwhile, the debut of Google’s new VoIP solution meets with resounding success, and the company gives its Chrome …

read more

Please take note that this event has been postponed. A revised media advisory will be issued once the new date has been identified

read more

This past week I spent a few days in San Francisco attending the VMworld 2010 event which included a Wednesday evening concert with the Australian band INXS.

Despite some long lines (or queues) waiting to get into sessions, keynotes or lunch resulting in delays reminiscent of trying to put too many virtual machines (VMs) onto a given number of physical machines (PMs) in the quest to drive up utilization, the overall event was fantastic.

While at the event, I had a chance to meet up with fellow vExpert Eric Siebert whose new book Maximum vSphere made its debut. I was honored when asked by Eric to help out with his chapter on storage, learn more about Erics new book here.

read more

Intel is buying Germany’s Infineon Technologies’ profit-struggling wireless baseband chip business for $1.4 billion cash, roughly three times revenues.
It’ll give the semi giant a piece of Apple’s ARM-based iPhone business and a position in other Atom-free wireless widgets. ARM is the smartphone king, but presumably Intel is going to try to push Atom over the hump using Infineon though it needs more than that.
Intel, which has banged its head against many a wall trying to figure out phones, means to run the operation as a free-standing operation. It sold similar operations like the ARM-based XScale for cheap back in 2006 to focus on its core business, which is now under market pressure.

read more

AccelOps, the three-year-old start-up that monitors data centers, networks and clouds with software delivered either SaaS or as a virtual appliance, has enticed Belgacom ICT, the old Belgian PTT’s pan-European IT arm, into its fold.
Belgacom means to use the stuff for its 200 hosted commercial IT services customers.
AccelOps, which baby-sits service, performance, availability, security and change management, reportedly won a run-off against competitors like Nimsoft and Zenoss. Belgacom reportedly liked the idea that the widgetry was agent-free, multi-tenant as well as multi-site and of course scaled.

read more

As much as information technology has changed in the last 10 years, the next decade promises even more significant change. And as cloud technology becomes more prevalent, IT enterprises will be driven to reconsider the status quo around just about everything we know, including Physical Infrastructure, Virtualization, Automation, Service Management, and Security.
Cloud technology and virtualization of virtually everything means rethinking the economic models around physical infrastructure, the emergence of a new class of providers as well as a greater degree of standardization around virtualized OS & Middleware configurations. In his general session at Cloud Expo Prague, David Milot, Unisys Managing Partner, discussed what you need to consider to ensure your enterprise’s foray into cloud computing successfully and securely meets the needs of your enterprise, today and tomorrow.

read more

Taleo, the SaaS-based talent agency that just put ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on its board, is buying its SaaS strategic partner Learn.com for $125 million cash to expand its cloud offering, thinking it will be “the world’s largest vertical cloud provider.”
It says it will make Taleo the only public vendor to offer software across the four critical components of a talent-optimized organization: recruiting, performance management, compensation management and now learning management, a market estimated to be worth $1 billion in 2011 according to Bersin & Associates.

read more