Bladewatch.com

HP.com

• Net revenue of $27.5 billion, down 2% from the prior year and up 4% in constant currency
• GAAP operating profit down 14% to $2.2 billion; GAAP earnings per share $0.67, down from $0.80 a year earlier
• Non-GAAP operating profit up 8% to $3.0 billion; non-GAAP earnings per share $0.91, up from $0.86 a year earlier
• Cash flow from operations of $3.9 billion, up 15% from the prior year
• Record Services profit of $1.3 billion

HP have published their third quarter results, so do check them out, if they’re of interest, it’s always great to see how the different server vendors have done and where they see things going forward.

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IBM

ARMONK, N.Y. - 02 Sep 2009: IDC reported today that IBM (NYSE: IBM) was the top server vendor in 2Q09 with 34.5 percent factory revenue share, outdistancing second-place HP which held 28.5 percent. IBM gained 1.8 points of share in the quarter.

Highlights for IBM included:

• In the Unix segment for 2Q09, IBM gained over seven points of factory revenue share from a year ago and held 41.4 percent of the market. Sun lost 4.4 share points and fell to 27.3 percent, while HP dropped 1.6 points to 24.8 percent.

• In the x86 market, IBM showed the strongest performance in the second quarter, with a 1.4 point increase in factory revenue share from a year ago.

• In Blades, IBM also posted the strongest gain in terms of factory revenue — 3.8 points of share gain, while HP lost 3.3 points of share.

• IBM continued to lead the market for servers costing more than $500,000, holding 60.4 percent factory revenue share with its System z mainframe.

Great news for IBM in terms of server sales and market share, well done to them. It’s interesting to note that they maintain a big market share in the high end market and gained more sales in the blade and x86 market, an interesting read do check it out.

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Dell.com

Q2 FY10 Financial Statement in PDF Format

• Revenue and Earnings Improve Sequentially
• Cash Flow from Operations Exceeds $1 Billion; Operating Expenses Down 14 Percent
• Operating Income 5.2 Percent of Revenue

Dell have announced their quarterly statement showing a reduction in expenses and improvements in income illustrating some interesting commentary regarding their innovation of their enterprise business combined with their sales and activities in the BRIC countries. It’s always good to see the different vendors announcements whether it’s for your own interest in terms of the company commentary or in reference to revenues and market share, do check it out.

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So I attend different press briefings every now and again, and I’ve heard the PR bit, the green bit, which included the ‘Energy Efficient printing’ or green printing. I have to say at the time it wasn’t that I wasn’t impressed it was more a ‘nice thing’ and wondered who’s implemented it. More importantly the thought of having to swipe my card to get that document what an extra amount of effort.

Anyway, Chris was on the phone and mentioned that his organization has deployed it. In essence the following happens.

• Chris presses print on his desktop.
• This sends his job to a shared print server
• Chris walks to the printer (when he’s finished his coffee)
• Swipes his door pass on the printer and the printer then displays “hello Chris, what document do you want printed?”
• Chris then selects his document and presses print.

We discussed it and both like it, (I confess he gave me a demo on Tuesday night before dinner) though I have yet to decide if me being shown energy efficient printing in action is cool or a bit over diligent.

Anyway, the reasons we like it:

• Less wasted paper – people printing stuff and forgetting it.
• Less printing in error jobs  – when you realize what you’ve printed isn’t formatted correctly/margins need reset.
• Fewer toners used as people only print what they have too.
• Chris was talking about it empowering IT to reduce the number of standalone printers – though this will depend on a number of factors.
• Departmental based printing – your department or cost center only pays for the printing it needs to rather than the whole shared printer cartridge purchasing debate. A per unit cost could be billed to the cost center avoiding those “you can’t print on MY printer, it’s MY toner” conversations.

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http://www.dwavesys.com/

D-Wave is pioneering the development of a new class of high performance computing system. These systems are architected around an innovative processor that uses a computational model known as adiabatic quantum computing (AQC). These processors are fabricated using superconducting metals instead of semiconductors and are operated at ultra-low temperatures in a magnetic vacuum. They are designed explicitly to harness quantum mechanical effects to fundamentally and dramatically reduce the time and memory requirements for computation.

A company which has more recently been introduced to me, it will be interesting to see what innovations they can bring to high performance computing solutions? We’ll have to wait and see, as with any innovators out there we award the concept, offer our assistance, appreciation and support to their efforts.

Let’s not forget that re-coding or adjusting the application is not necessarily world ending if we can see specific benefits to performance, the challenge has always been the performance improvements real or perceived, 20% might be 20% but you need to offset that against the longevity of the platform as well as the ‘internal cost’ of updating or re-writing an application.

The prime example I always use is the client that I met years ago, it was £5 million to re-code their application from their main frame to a generic x86 one, or a fixed operating support cost of about £1.5 million which failed about three times a year. However:

• The client (IT) – could tell effectively when it was all getting too much for their server – when it was getting ready for an outage
• The users knew the constraints of the application code, the application and the functionality – it was binary, “it doesn’t do that” – if they recoded what would suddenly needed added in?
  
• Users accepted the service, as long as it worked most of the time, an hour or so downtime wasn’t really significant unless it was during and end of day, and even then they’d be reminded of the upgrade cost and there would be brief pro-longed silence followed by questions when it would be back up.
• It was sustained, stable and expected, (comfortable like my Barbour jacket) – in essence no surprises so to this day, they’re mainframe continues to serve their requirements.
  

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