Today’s topics include word that Dell and EMC officials are in talks to sell Documentum, Google and Rackspace are collaborating on the next generation OpenPower server, the improvements Fujitsu is making to its entire lineup of Primergy servers and how Microsoft is making its Bing Maps technology more developer-friendly.
Dell, which already is selling its services business for $3 billion and still has its Quest and SonicWall units up for sale, reportedly is now looking to put EMC’s Documentum content management division on the market.
All of this is in an effort to reduce the amount of debt it will take on when it closes its $67 billion acquisition of the data storage vendor this year.
According to unnamed sources who spoke with Bloomberg, Dell and EMC officials are in talks to sell Documentum, a company that EMC bought in 2003 for about $1.7 billion. Spokesmen for both Dell and EMC declined to comment on the report.
In December 2013, IBM officials open-sourced the Power chip architecture and, in partnership with several other tech vendors, launched the OpenPower Foundation.
Now, at the group’s second annual convention in San Jose, California, foundation officials unveiled a broad array of new devices based on the OpenPower architecture.
This includes the news that Google and Rackspace are working together on a next-generation OpenPower system based on future Power9 chips.
Fujitsu announced it was upgrading its entire lineup of dual-socket Primergy servers with new CPU chips that were announced March 31.
The servers include everything from tower and rack systems to blades, nodes for clusters used in high-performance computing environments, and rack models that are optimized for cloud server providers and hosting companies.
The broad product lineup is part of Fujitsu’s larger Business-Centric Computing initiative, which is designed to ensure that customers—from smaller businesses to larger enterprises to service providers—get the right x86 server for their business needs, according to company officials.
Microsoft has released a preview version of its Bing Maps version 8 control, a major update to the company’s mapping platform for Web and mobile applications.
First announced during last week’s Build developer conference in San Francisco, the new Web control and its interactive software development kit offer new tools to help developers incorporate map data into their business intelligence and analytics applications.
Bing Maps V8 includes several new enhancements and capabilities, including a switch to HTML5. The move enables maps to render vector data faster than prior versions of the JavaScript control, providing users with a more responsive app experience.