News

• Ellison, Phillips, McDermott to take stand in Oracle-SAP retrial

  During the upcoming retrial of Oracle's corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP, the companies plan to call a star-studded array of tech executives as witnesses including CEO Larry Ellison, former Oracle co-president and current Infor CEO Charles Phillips and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, according to court documents filed Thursday.

• UPDATED: HP slashes 27,000 jobs as part of restructuring program

  It's official. Hewlett-Packard will cut 27,000 employees as part of its long-term restructuring plan, the company said when it announced quarterly financial results.

• Analysis: HP's layoff plans and what they mean

  You gotta love Silicon Valley. The Facebook IPO is creating dozens and dozens of new millionaires. Apple, thanks to the iPhone and iPad, has seen its employment nearly double in two years.

• HP plans massive layoff, say reports

  The last time Hewlett-Packard Co. announced a layoff of 25,000 people, it was on the same day that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the stock market nose-dived. That was in September 2008.

• Microsoft reprises free Xbox back-to-school PC promo

  Microsoft will repeat last year's back-to-school promotion, kicking off the deal Sunday with an offer of a free Xbox 360 game console to eligible U.S. students who buy a new Windows 7 PC.

• HP expands Cloud services beta

  Preparing for its entry into the market for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), Hewlett-Packard has launched a second beta program of Cloud computing services it plans to offer commercially.

• Potential bidding war emerges for Quest Software

  A number of parties have submitted bids to acquire Quest Software, which announced in March that it was going private via a US$2 billion stock buyback in partnership with equity firm Insight Venture Partners.

• HP tries to beat Ultrabook pricing with thin-and-light Sleekbooks

  Hewlett-Packard announced new Envy Ultrabooks on Wednesday, but also a new aggressively priced thin-and-light brand of laptops called Envy Sleekbooks, which boast starting prices that are US$150 lower than ultrabooks.

• HP announces 'world's first' portable multifunction printer

  Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced the OfficeJet 150 Mobile All-in-One portable printer, which the company called the world's first mobile multifunction device that can "print, copy and scan on the go."

• Tibco adds Hadoop support to its Spotfire in-memory analytics

  Tibco has brought its Spotfire in-memory analytics software into the burgeoning ecosystem around Hadoop, an open-source framework for processing large sets of information, the company announced Tuesday.

• Facebook's open-source data-center project gains strength

  Facebook's year-old project to develop open-source hardware designs with the aim to build efficient data centers gained momentum on Wednesday, with some top technology companies joining the effort and introducing server designs.

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  Hitachi-LG Data Storage exec pleads guilty to price-fixing

  An executive with Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) has agreed to plead guilty and serve time in a U.S. prison for his participation in a series of conspiracies to rig bids for the sale of optical disk drives to Hewlett-Packard, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

• AT&T, Google among top lobbying spenders in first quarter

  AT&T spent nearly US$7.1 million on lobbying the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama's administration in the first quarter of 2012, making it the leading corporate spender on lobbying, with Google, Comcast and Verizon Communications also making the top five.

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  HP: Oracle executives believed Sun acquisition was a mistake

  Oracle decided on an aggressive strategy against Hewlett-Packard's Itanium servers after sales of competing Sun's Sparc servers had been in a free fall, and Oracle's executives stated internally that the company's 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems was a mistake, HP said in a filing Monday in its dispute with Oracle over the porting of its software to the Itanium platform.

• Rackspace launches new OpenStack-based cloud portfolio

  Rackspace has unveiled an "early access" limited-availability edition of its updated public cloud environment, built on the open source cloud platform OpenStack. Dubbed simply Rackspace Cloud, its features include cloud servers, databases, block storage, networks, and monitoring, as well as a new control panel.