Chris Preimesberger

EMC’s revenue and profit margin took major hits in the first quarter of 2009, the storage giant reported April 23 in its first-quarter 2009 earnings call.The company reported revenue of $3.15 billion, down 22 percent from the record $4.02 billion it banked in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 9 percent from a year ago. […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.-All a reporter had to do on the final day of the MySQL 2009 Conference here at the Hyatt Regency was walk up to someone wearing a conference badge, request a minute of their time and ask a simple question: “Oracle good, or Oracle bad for MySQL?”The question was generally met with a […]

Oprah Winfrey has come a long, long way from being an unknown actress in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 feature film “The Color Purple” to exerting worldwide influence on such things as book sales, education, health care, self-help-even presidential elections.Winfrey’s support of Barack Obama for president in 2008 may well have delivered enough votes to decide the […]

Virtualization software market leader VMware has managed to stay ahead of a stubborn worldwide recession, reporting in an earnings call April 22 an increase of 7 percent in its overall revenues and a 62 percent increase in net income for the first quarter of 2009.VMware, 84 percent of which is owned by storage giant EMC, […]

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems goes a wee bit deeper than a simple M&A story about an enterprise software company adding a limping enterprise systems maker to its long list of conquests.This deal, should it finalize this summer as planned, will directly impact a number of enterprise IT markets and a huge number of current […]

VMware on April 21 launched vSphere 4, a major update to its ESX Server hypervisor, declaring it to be the first operating system specifically engineered for cloud computing. It is the first major upgrade to the product since 2006.vSphere 4 amounts to a rebuild of VMware’s core virtualization platform. Fundamentally, it combines virtual resources in […]

The $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems emanating from IBM on the other side of the continent was supposed to have happened back on April 6. But some thorny legal issues apparently got in the way, and it was not meant to be.Two weeks later, and for a mere dime more per share, Oracle — […]

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—The Station just returned from spending the middle part of a sunny Silicon Valley Friday at an SD Forum conference on “Shaping the New Age of Application Development” here at TechMart, right across the street from Marriott’s Great America. Not surprisingly, much of the discussion revolved around development for cloud computing—and storage for […]

How the HP-35 Calculator Killed the Slide Rule and Made an IT Giant by Chris Preimesberger 1972: The new HP-35, the world’s first handheld scientific calculator, virtually made the engineering slide rule obsolete. It was HP’s first product to contain both integrated circuits and LEDs. Both technologies had been developed in HP Labs. 1977: HP-01 […]

Looking for an alternative to Microsoft Outlook e-mail software? More new choices seem to be coming into the market every few months.The latest is from the venerable hard-document storage company Iron Mountain, which launched an expansion of its digital archiving platform for e-mail management on April 16.The new package, called the Total Email Management Suite, […]

When it was launched in 1972, a little handheld instrument called the HP-35 Scientific Calculator soon took on a new identity as the Slide Rule Killer.Thirty-seven years and gazillions of calculations later, the thin machine small enough to slip into a shirt pocket has now been recognized as one of the world’s most important technical […]

Bloomberg News reported April 15 that Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers has said his company “probably already would have moved” on buying Sun Microsystems with some of its $34 billion cache of cash if it were seriously interested. However, in a classic “non-denial denial” statement (remember the movie “All the President’s Men”?), Chambers did not […]