Wednesday, November 4, 2009
NetSuite Beats Street by a Penny
Investors expecting NetSuite to break even on a per-share basis for its third quarter were given a pleasant surprise this afternoon when the company beat estimates by a penny.
Investors expecting NetSuite to break even on a per-share basis for its third quarter were given a pleasant surprise this afternoon when the company beat estimates by a penny.
As its recent buying binge–three acquisitions in October, alone–suggests, Cisco’s business is in decent shape these days. Reporting first-quarter results after market close today, the company handily beat Wall Street estimates.
With a handful of new Android handsets arriving at market in the coming weeks, including Motorola’s much anticipated Droid, Palm’s prospects for blowout winter holiday sales are dimming. Earlier this week, analysts at Citigroup and CL King voiced their concerns about the company in the wake of another ugly quarter from carrier partner Sprint. Now, Standard & Poor’s is doing so as well.
Her dreams of heading up the World Bank dashed, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the architect of one of the worst tech mergers in history, has turned her attention to California politics. After months of speculation, she officially announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate today.
When it launched on July 10, 2008, Apple’s iTunes App Store held just 552 apps. Today, Apple tells us, it boasts more than 100,000. Astonishing, really, when you think about it. The App Store isn’t even two years old yet. Nor is the iPhone SDK.
“We are mostly but not all done” with layoffs. So said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in May at the start of a second round of cuts that claimed the livelihoods of some 3,000 employees. Now, six months later, the company is finishing the job. Sources tell TechFlash that Microsoft will make additional job reductions this week–beginning as early as today.
QOTD: Cloudy With a Chance of Workforce Rebalancing 
“We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”
– Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is famous for his admiration of “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu’s sixth-century treatise on battle tactics. And the ancient wisdom has served Ellison well in Oracle’s long-running battle with SAP and its hostile bid for PeopleSoft. But it may get him in trouble when it comes to Oracle’s dealings with the European Commission and its inquiry into the company’s planned acquisition of Sun. The Financial Times reports that Oracle’s refusal to offer any concessions to European antitrust regulators may lead them to issue a formal complaint objecting to the deal.
The long-rumored data center partnership between Cisco, EMC and VMware is at last a reality. The three companies have formed a new joint venture called Acadia. Its purpose: To sell and support V-Block, an integrated data center product that combines Cisco’s Unified Computing System, EMC’s storage equipment, and VMware’s virtualization technology.
They’re swinging the ax over at Nokia Siemens again. The mobile network equipment maker said today that it plans to reduce its 64,000-strong workforce by up to nine percent in a bid to “improve financial performance and return to growth”–something the joint venture has had a hard time doing since it launched in February 2007.
What do you know: China Unicom just coughed up some first weekend sales numbers for the iPhone and…well, they’re not much to look at, despite what I said earlier. The carrier sold just 5,000.
Cisco’s fall acquisition binge continues unabated. Late Monday, the company announced plans to buy the set-top box business of China’s DVN Holdings for up to $44.5 million. This after spending $3 billion on videoconferencing system maker Tandberg, wireless infrastructure outfit Starent Networks and software-as-a-service security vendor ScanSafe–all in quick succession.
Apple’s internationally coveted iPhone finally arrived at market in China last week and by most accounts its debut was uncharacteristically muted. There is “no sign of the sort of sellout reception that greeted the smart phone at its introduction in other countries,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Clearly, the device’s Chinese launch wasn’t the rousing success to which we’ve become accustomed. That said, it probably wasn’t quite the bust it’s been made out to be, either.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”