http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tugindex.html Description Hot on the heels of its proposed $13.9 billion acquisition of services pioneer and giant Electronic Data Systems last week, Hewlett-Packard duly reported its financials to Wall Street for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 ended April 30. And as it hinted a week ago, the numbers were a bit better than expected, with overall sales up 9.7 percent to $25.7 billion and net earnings rising by 15.9 percent to $2.06 billion. Thanks to share buybacks, HP was able to boost earnings per share by 23.1 percent to 80 cents a pop. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story01.html As many a company has found out in recent years, merging with competitors in adjacent markets is a great way to build out the revenue stream and, if they execute well, even moreso for the profit stream if cost synergies can be identified and cuts made. When the very brick-and-mortar yet heavily computerized New York Stock Exchange bought the Archipelago online stock exchange in 2006, it was positioning itself for a more electronic future. And in 2007, the merger of the NYSE and Euronext exchanges brought together the two largest exchanges in America and Europe. It also created a mess in the data centers. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story02.html Server and operating system maker Sun Microsystems is probably best known for its Solaris Unix, even though its Java programming language is probably more well known than Sun itself--and not necessarily connected with Sun in the minds of end users, now that I think about it. Ditto for OpenOffice. And that will probably hold true for the company's recently acquired VirtualBox PC and server virtualization hypervisor, too, which Sun is building out after acquiring the program in February. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story03.html After a short beta program that has been running since March, Hewlett-Packard has launched a set of virtualization-aware management tools called Insight Dynamics-VSE that can manage physical and virtual machines in a consistent way across many hypervisors and their operating systems and across its Integrity, ProLiant, and BladeSystem product lines. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story04.html A few weeks ago, I was admonished by a loyal reader of this newsletter that the rebranding of the System i and i5/OS platform was far from over. That while those of us in the i-ntelligentsia (that's my pun, not his, and I don't actually like it), by which I mean members of the reseller community, those in the press and analyst community, and those who sell applications for the i platform, may be up to speed with and maybe in some cases on page with what IBM has done, as for the actual customer base, this whole name game was far from over for the i crowd. Best I can figure, AIX shops and resellers really don't care. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story05.html When something bad finally happens, at least you don't have to be anxious about it any more. But that's about the only good thing about bad things happening. While anxiety is no fun, it is safe to say that IT managers and the bean counters who control their budgets much prefer that to the kind of panic that grips a national economy or even the global economy. When businesses are anxious, they cut IT spending back. In the case of 2008, so far that seems to mean slower growth, not actual decline. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story06.html The consultants at Aberdeen Group, now a division of market researcher and mail list builder Harte-Hanks, have just finished up a massive research project to put together the Annual State of the Market Report for the information technology sector. As part of the report, Aberdeen's experts have used customer input to create a ranking of the top 100 most influential technology companies. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story07.html When the iSeries and System i product lines were distinct from the pSeries and System p lines, IBM was perfectly happy to roll some extra goodies into 570 and 595 configurations to sweeten the deal. But the Power Systems convergence means unbundling the parts of a configuration and giving them prices, which means the i marketing folks need to roll those goodies into a separate package--because they certainly still want to sweeten the deals. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story08.html Database and enterprise application software maker Oracle continued its acquisition binge last week, acquiring a relatively unknown but important and fast-growing niche player in the insurance sector called AdminServer. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story09.html SunGard's disaster recovery business got a boost last week when it announced plans to buy Strohl Systems, a provider of business continuity planning (BCP) software and services that, like SunGard, is based in Pennsylvania. http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug052208-story10.html