CEO repositions HP for the cloud
Grazed from NewsObserver.com Author: Aaron Ricadela.
Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman, in her drive to boost profitability, took another step toward dismantling the computing empire former CEO Mark Hurd built with $24.3 billion in acquisitions.
The company is writing down the value of its enterprise-services business by $8 billion and shuffling management at the top of the division, Hewlett-Packard said Wednesday. That follows an announcement in May that Whitman is eliminating 27,000 jobs, many of them from that unit. The write-down reflects the dwindling value of Electronic Data Systems, bought by Hurd for $13.2 billion in 2008. The deal pushed Hewlett-Packard into the low-margin business of information-technology outsourcing, handled more efficiently by rivals such as Wipro Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services. It left the company ill-equipped for the shift toward cloud computing, making it a laggard in services that help clients deliver software over the Internet…


Nobody likes to find themselves locked into a particular vendor, and that’s doubly true when it comes to cloud computing.
Online retailer and auction site eBay this week announced that it has been using Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) within the OpenStack open source environment to run some of its research and development operations. The move is one of the first by a high-profile company to build a cloud service using OpenStack.