HP News Desk

HP's acquisition of EDS for $13.9BN - announced today - will, the company claims, double sales in its services business (already $16.6BN in fiscal 2007), but that didn't stop HP shares tumbling today on the New York Stock exchange. The price of $25 a share represents a 32.5% premium to the EDS closing price of $18.86 on Friday.  The deal makes HP second to no one but IBM, and is its largest acquisition since acquiring Compaq for $20BN six years ago. Bloomberg notes that the deal is Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd's biggest since taking over in 2005. "When you looked at the maturity and the speed by which we can get to market, this looked extremely attractive to us, particularly on the financial side,'' Hurd is reported by Bloomberg to have said today on a conference call. "We wouldn't do the deal if we didn't think we had an opportunity to improve the operating profit... (more)

HP Thin Client Portfolio Now Certified for VMware View

HP announced that its entire line of thin clients is now certified for VMware View. The certification, which covers the Microsoft Windows CE, Windows XP Embedded and Linux operating systems, includes rigorous testing and quality assurance with VMware View for enhanced reliability and ease of deployment. HP is now offering Linux thin clients certified for VMware View Manager, an enterprise desktop management server that enables IT administrators to provision and control user access. Additionally, HP has claimed it is the only vendor to receive View Manager certification for Window... (more)

HP Only Gets a Piece of Donatelli

A Massachusetts court has decided that the former president of EMC’s storage business, David Donatelli, until a few weeks ago the company’s number two guy in charge of the bulk of its ~$15 billion in revenues, can go to work for HP after all. He just can’t do the job he was hired for. HP hired him to run servers and storage – and because of the noise coming from Cisco’s direction, it threw in networking too. Few people this side of Cisco know more about Cisco’s plans than Donatelli because EMC and Cisco are as thick as thieves. But the judge, which entered an order proposed by EM... (more)

HP Positioned in Leaders Quadrant for Several Strategic Software Markets

HP announced it has been positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant in industry analyst firm Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant reports.(1,2,3) Gartner positioned HP in the leaders quadrant in the IT Event Correlation and Analysis, the PC Life Cycle Configuration Management and the Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets Magic Quadrant reports. According to Gartner, “Leaders” are vendors that are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market. IT Event Co... (more)

HP Goes with Mobile Thin Client

HP is about to put out a novel 1GHz Celeron laptop it calls a mobile thin client, its first, apparently the result of its acquisition of Neoware. Wyse, the other remaining thin client maven, beat HP, now the market leader, to the punch a few months ago and added two more models the other day looking much like HP's. HP's thing, which starts at $725, has no drive or fan or any moving parts at all; it's thoroughly solid-state including the 1GB flash module. Dubbed the XPe-based Compaq 6720t, it connects to a centralized server (or virtual PC or blade PC for that matter) where all the... (more)