Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to Focus on Cloud After Nov. 1 Split

Today’s topics include a date for Hewlett-Packard’s corporate split, a third smartphone from Huawei, Edward Snowden’s comments on congressional approval of the USA Freedom Act and the acquisition of Blue Box Group by IBM.

HP will officially split up into two separate companies on Nov. 1, CEO Meg Whitman confirmed this week during the company’s HP Discover 2015 conference in Las Vegas.

The breakup will create two massive companies. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise—which Whitman will head as CEO—will deal in everything from servers, storage and networking products to cloud infrastructure technologies and services, while HP Inc. will sell PCs and printers. Much of the focus at the show this week has been on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

Huawei just launched its third smartphone in the U.S. market, the $249.99 unlocked P8 Lite. The P8 Lite has a brushed-look plastic rear cover, brushed metal sides, rounded edges in a thin 0.30-inch frame.

The phone is also dual-SIM capable, with one slot offering a dedicated SIM slot and the other one usable either for a SIM or for a microSD card with up to 32GB of additional storage.

President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law on June 2 after the U.S Senate passed the new surveillance bill in a 67-32 vote. With the new act, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act—which enabled the National Security Agency to collect bulk metadata on Americans’ communications—is no more.

However, the Freedom Act gives the NSA six months to phase out the data collection. Instead, there are new provisions to help protect privacy.

In an Amnesty International Webcast, whistleblower Edward Snowden seemed optimistic about what this means for the future of privacy, calling the move “important and historic.” Snowden says the biggest gain isn’t about the law, it’s about the realization that facts and public opinion are now more persuasive than fear.

IBM has acquired Blue Box Group, a Seattle-based managed private cloud provider built on OpenStack. The move accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy by making it easier for customers to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments, Big Blue officials said.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Privately held Blue Box provides businesses with a simple, private cloud as a service platform based on OpenStack.