Global Sales Save HP's Financial Cookies in the Second Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

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. READ MORE >

NYSE Euronext Trades Mainframes and Unix for Linux and X64
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

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. READ MORE >

Sun Updates VirtualBox with Native Solaris Support
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

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. READ MORE >

HP Ships Insight Dynamics for Managing Physical and Virtual Machines
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

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. READ MORE >