Today’s topics include new details on the HP split, connections between separate Google and Cisco lawsuits, the recent availability of two new versions of Mozilla’s Web browsers and a major move from Alcatel-Lucent.
Hewlett-Packard in its Form 10 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission early this month gives greater depth to what Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will look like after the company splits in two on Nov. 1, including what the company will sell, who will be on its executive team, what the potential risks and rewards are for the new company and how its relationship with HP Inc. will work.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will sell a broad array of corporate technology, from servers and networking gear to storage hardware, enterprise software, cloud computing technology and services. Meanwhile, HP Inc. will sell PCs, printers and associated technologies.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week not to hear Google’s appeal of a lower court ruling in the company’s legal battle with Oracle over copyrights and APIs could be a boost to Cisco Systems in its own litigation against Arista Networks. By declining to hear the case, the Supreme Court justices let stand a federal appeals court decision from last year that said that the Java APIs could be copyrighted, but that Google may still have used the APIs legally under fair use.
There are two new versions of Mozilla’s Web browsers for users to try out now, with a stable Firefox 39 release and a beta of Firefox 40 that provides a preview of features still in active development.
With Firefox 39, Mozilla has integrated its Project Silk effort, whose goal is to make the browser scrolling and animation experience smoother for Website rendering. So far, Project Silk has only been integrated into the Apple Mac OS X edition of Firefox 39.
Alcatel-Lucent, which has seen greater competition from Chinese tech vendors such as Huawei Technologies and ZTE in the European networking market, is bringing its network virtualization products to the country’s largest telecommunications operators. The company, which is in the process of being bought by Nokia for $16.6 billion, signed separate deals with China Mobile and China Unicom that will be worth a combined $1.3 billion.