Posted 11/06/09 at 10:57:53 AM by Paul Lilly

Around this time last year, the topic of Nvidia included faulty GPUs, which ultimately ended up costing the firm millions of dollars, and stiff competition from a suddenly revitalized ATI. Now it's all about Nvidia's upcoming Fermi graphics and revenue gains.

Ending the third quarter on a positive note, Nvidia reported revenue of $903.2 million. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said that marks an increase of 16 percent over the previous quarter, and is slightly up from this same time last year when the graphics chip maker posted revenue of $897.7 million.

"We continued to make progress in the third quarter with healthy market demand across the board," said Jen-Hsun. "Revenue was up from a year ago, with improvement in each of our PC, professional solutions, and consumer businesses. It's great to see us shipping orders with our Tegra mobile-computing solution, and growing enthusiasm for our Tesla platform for parallel computing in the server and cloud-computing markets."

 Nvidia CFO David White added that the company's GPU business was up almost 25 percent sequentially.

Read More

Posted 11/06/09 at 08:02:36 AM by Paul Lilly

As part of a restructuring effort, Blue Coat Systems said it plans to slash nearly 20 percent of its workforce. The firm will issue about 280 layoffs in all and close its facilities in Riga, Latvia, South Plainfield, New Jersey, and Zoelemeer, Netherlands.

At the same time, Blue Coat announced plans to acquire S7 Software, a services company out of Banglaore, for $5.25 million in cash. The acquisition will also add 65 employees to Blue Coat's workforce.

"The combination of the restructuring program and the acquisition of S7 Software strikes an appropriate balance between profitability and investment for innovation," said Gordon Brooks, senior vice president and chief financial officer. "Together these actions will allow us to invest for future growth while aligning the Company’s cost structure to its current revenue level, which should drive higher and more consistent levels of profitability."

In addition to the layoffs, Blue Coat will relocate an undisclosed number of engineering jobs from its Sunnyvale, California, and Austin, Texas offices to S7's offices in Bangalore and a few other locations. After factoring in S7's employees and a few new hires, Blue Coat's workforce reduction will be closer to 10 percent.

Read More

Posted 11/05/09 at 07:57:09 AM by Paul Lilly

Maybe the economy is recoverying after all, or so analysts are saying after Cisco reported fiscal first-quarter earnings that nudged ahead of expectations and showed strong sequential growth.

The network security firm reported a quarterly profit of $1.8 billion, or 36 cents a share. That's down from last year, when Cisco posted a profit of $2.2 billion, or 42 cents a share, but up from last quarter. Revenue for the first fiscal quarter climbed to $9 billion, which is more than the $8.75 billion analysts had expected.

"Our ability to launch four proposed acquisitions, the ecosystem-shifting coalition with EMC/VMware, and five new products and industry solutions into the Cisco pipeline in the past few months alone underscore this momentum," said John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco. "Our build – buy - partner innovation engine is clearly running on all cylinders, while our operational machine is pulling costs out of the business even as we scale new models for growth. Execution and results over time will demonstrate the long-term impact of this vision and strategy— but a new model of productivity based on collaboration is clearly emerging and we believe this may be the most profound opportunity for businesses in our 25 years as a company."

Cisco has been on a spending spree as of late, having recently agreed to purchase Starent Networks for a cool $2.9 billion and ScanSafe for $183 million.

Read More

Posted 11/05/09 at 07:53:33 AM by Paul Lilly

Panasonic earlier in the week said it had begun a tender offer to take over rival Sanyo for an estimated $4.4 billion, which would create one of the world's largest electronics companies. But before that can happen, China is forcing Panasonic to sell off assets in Japan if its to approve the deal, the Financial Times reports.

The landmark ruling, which is based on anti-trust laws introduced in August of last year, has some concerned over the growing power of Beijing's competition authorities. Those who study competition law say the Chinese demands go further than those of the European Union and make international companies take greater notice of China when considering acquisitions.

Should the deal go through, Sanyo is expected to become Panasonic's subsidiary by mid-December, or a year after the two companies first announced the potential takeover.

Read More

Posted 11/04/09 at 12:42:50 PM by Paul Lilly

Microsoft may have been a little conservative earlier this year when it said it would eliminate up to 5,000 jobs in response to falling sales and profits. Now in its third round of layoffs since Janary, the software company plans to cut 800 jobs, which would put the total number somewhere around 5,400 so far.

The first round of layoffs began in January when Microsoft handed out 1,400 pinks slips, and then thousands more in May. But the worst news coming from Redmond is that more layoffs are yet to come

"Today, we are eliminating around 800 positions spread across multiple businesses and locations and have completed our reduction plan sooner than we had anticipated 11 months ago," Microsoft said in a statement. "At the same time, we continue to hire in priority areas, but also understand that continuing to manage our businesses closely, as we always do, can mean additional headcount adjustments."

The "headcount adjustments" come just a little over a week since Microsoft reported declines in revenues and profits.

Read More

Posted 11/04/09 at 08:08:18 AM by Paul Lilly

It's not been a very good year for Novell employees, who never know what the next day will bring. For 100 to 130 workers out of Novell's roughly 3,900 global employees, this week brought more pink slips, CNet reports.

CNet's sources are saying that the Workgroup division saw the most layoffs, but according to Ian Bruce, Novell's public-relations director, the cuts sliced "across the company, both geographically and productwise."

Ironically enough, Linux jobs in general are doing a smashing job and are up 6 percent ince January, according to data from Dice.com. So if there's a silver lining to all this, Novell employees that were let go might not have such a rough spot finding employment elsewhere. In the meantime, they'll have several months of severance pay to tide them over, which is based on the number of years they were with the company, plus other factors.

And what about those who still have employment at Novell? The company also announced it would suspending 401(k) matching contributions.

Read More

Posted 10/30/09 at 08:04:30 AM by Paul Lilly

Security's always a hot topic in the business world, but eWeek.com's list of '10 Essential Things Companies Should Teach Employees About Security" comes particularly well timed. Why? Just recently, McAfee posted a survey suggesting that SMBs are spending less on security as the recession continues to force cuts to the budget, yet cybercrime is on the rise. That being the case, now more than ever the onus falls on employees to take certain precautions.

According to eWeek, companies need to go back to the basics when it comes to educating its staff on safe computing. No. 1 on eWeek's list is the need to remind employees to be weary of email attachments and to only open ones from trusted sources. The importance of creating strong passwords and avoiding shadier sides of the Web also made the list.

One entry that might not have existed five years ago is teaching employees the dangers of social networks. One wrong click can turn into a security nightmare for an IT staff working with a reduced security budget.

What it all boils down to is that workers need to be reminded every once in awhile of the dangers assumed to already be known.

Read More

Posted 10/27/09 at 01:10:38 PM by Paul Lilly

Cisco today announced its intent to acquire ScanSafe, a privately held software-as-a-service (SaaS) Web security outfit based in London and San Francisco.

Under terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $183 million in cash and retention-based incentives for the security firm. ScanSafe's services will be integrated with Cisco AnyConnect VPN client, but that's not all ScanSafe brings to the table. Cisco will also have access to the security firm's global network of carrier-grade data centers and multi-tenant architecture, both of which will help boost Cisco's presence in cloud security products.

"With the acquisition of ScanSafe, Cisco is executing on our vision to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services for advanced security enforcement," said Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit (STBU). "Cisco will provide customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best suits their organization and deliver anytime, anywhere protection against Web-based threats."

Cisco added that it expects Web security to be a $2.3 billion market by 2012, which would explain the company's aggressive spending as of late. Earlier this month, Cisco bid a whoppng $3 billion for Norwegian video conference company Tandberg and agreed to pony up $2.9 billion to acquire wirless equipment maker Starent Networks.

Read More