Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, said to unveil new software for tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show next week, will face skeptics who say his company won’t soon narrow Apple Inc.’s iPad lead.

“By the time Microsoft gets it figured out everybody will already own an iPad,” said Keith Goddard, CEO of Capital Advisors Inc. an investing firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that holds Apple shares. “That train has left the station.”

Microsoft will announce a full version of the Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology at the show, which begins in Las Vegas on Jan. 6, two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans said last week.

Allying with ARM is Microsoft’s way of stepping up rivalry with Apple, which has garnered the largest share of the tablet market with its iPad, a touch-screen device introduced in April that handles video, music and computing tasks. The effort may falter unless Ballmer can match the features consumers have come to expect from the iPad, Goddard said.

The new Windows version would be tailored for battery- powered devices, such as tablets and wireless handsets, the people said. Chips based on ARM technology are made by Qualcomm Inc., Texas Instruments Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, declined to comment, pointing instead to remarks by Ballmer in July.

“We’re tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs,” Ballmer told analysts then. He also said, Apple has “sold certainly more than I’d like them to sell.”

IPad Gains Share

Computer makers have unsuccessfully been trying to sell tablet-style computers based on Microsoft’s Windows for about a decade. Before the iPad, tablets made up only about 2 percent of the PC market. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has sold 7.46 million iPads through September. According to analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., it may sell as many at 37.2 million iPads next year.

That indicates that the tablet computer’s share of the PC market may rise to 9.2 percent next year, based on a prediction by research firm IDC for 402.7 million PC shipments in 2011.

Microsoft dropped 23 cents to $28.07 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have declined 7.9 percent this year.

Besides gaining share, Apple has also redefined consumer expectations for what a tablet computer should do, says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Instead of requiring the use of a stylus pen to serve as a computer mouse, the iPad allows people to navigate using their fingers.

‘Square Peg’

“Apple did this year what no one had done in the previous 10 — crack that space between the PC and the phone,” said Gartenberg, who’s based in New York. “Microsoft has been working very hard at putting a square peg in a round hole.”

Still, an introduction at CES gives Microsoft a chance to win over some of the more than 100,000 people expected to attend the premier technology trade show, he said.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft and Ballmer to put a stake in the ground,” said Gartenberg. “Now that Apple cracked the market no one wants to get left behind.”

By adapting its computer operating system for a tablet, Microsoft is taking a different approach from Apple, which used a mobile-phone operating system as the basis for the iPad. Apple’s software enables instant startup, longer battery life, and access to the more than 300,000 applications already developed for the iPhone.

‘Frankentablets’

Microsoft is taking software designed for use with a mouse and keyboard and adapting it to a touch screen, according to the people familiar with the matter. That will require developers to rework PC programs to make them useful on a tablet.

Chips based on ARM technology are used in most smartphones, as well as Apple’s iPad. Still, they don’t crunch numbers and handle other computing tasks as quickly as Intel Corp. chips, which run the majority of PCs.

Loading a full version of Windows onto a tablet powered by a chip designed for mobile phones may result in an unresponsive or slow-moving machine, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Seattle-based research firm. Existing tablets based on Windows are difficult to use, he said.

“Current Windows tablets are what I call Frankentablets — part laptop” and part tablet, he said. “They do neither role well.”

Microsoft should leave Windows in the PC environment, where it works best, and focus instead on scaling up its mobile-phone software to work on the bigger screen of a tablet, Cherry said.

Then There’s Google

Microsoft has sparred with Apple since the birth of the PC. Windows won early rounds, relegating Macintosh computers to less than 10 percent of the market.

Now, it’s also contending with Google Inc., the Mountain View, California-based Internet company behind the Android mobile-phone operating system. Earlier this year, Android surpassed Apple by number of devices running the software in the U.S., according to NPD Group.

Companies such as Dell Inc. and Samsung, which use Microsoft’s software in their PCs, are already working on tablets based on Android as they try to keep from losing ground to Apple.

The longer it takes Microsoft to get an operating system into tablets, the less likely the company can challenge Apple and Google, said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a research firm in Campbell, California.

“Given this late move by Microsoft, it would still be quite an uphill battle,” he said.

Trying to differentiate itself in the hot tablet market, Dell is expected next week to launch the Inspiron Duo, a hybrid device that acts as both a tablet and converts into a clamshell netbook.

The device resembles a netbook. But when the case is opened and the screen is flipped backward, it becomes a high-end netbook with a full QWERTY keyboard, running Windows 7 and a dual-core Intel Atom N550 processor, according to reports. Other features, including RAM and storage, are not yet known.

The 10-inch Inspiron Duo is being targeted as a competitor to the Apple iPad. When the device first appeared at an Intel developer conference in September, a marketing executive said that while tablets are good for entertainment purposes, they aren’t ideal productivity tools. The executive, Dave Zavelson, said the Inspiron Duo would be ideal for both work and entertainment, and then showed off the hidden keyboard, according to CNET.

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Hybrid laptop tablets are not new. Others on the market include Hewlett-Packard’s EliteBook 2740, which acts primarily as a 12-inch laptop running Windows 7 and retails starting at $1,599. Earlier this year, Lenovo announced a 3.8-pound IdeaPad U1 Hybrid, an 11.6-inch $999 laptop that has a retractable multitouch screen with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and runs Windows 7. The Inspiron Duo will also reportedly come with a docking station to provide power and data synchronization.

The Inspiron Duo may be officially announced on Nov. 23, though Dell did not respond to a request for confirmation. Pricing was not available. A YouTube video of the Inspiron Duo said it will be available on Dell.com by the end of the year.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 4 (Reuters) – Dell Inc (DELL) will shift thousands of its employees off Research in Motion Ltd’s (RIM.TO) BlackBerry and over to Dell’s smartphones, the company said on Thursday.

The money-saving switch affects the roughly 25,000 Dell employees who carry a company-issued BlackBerry. Dell employs around 100,000 people worldwide.

Dell is also launching an effort to convince its business customers to switch to the company’s smartphone.

News of the company’s plans was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and confirmed by Dell spokesman David Frink.

Frink said the switch will begin soon, but said it will take some time to complete.

RIM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dell’s BlackBerry users will be shifted over to use the new Dell Venue Pro, which runs on Microsoft’s (MSFT) new Windows Phone 7 software and operates on the network of T-Mobile USA, the U.S. arm of Deutsche Telekom AG (DTEGn).

Dell’s decision to move its employees off BlackBerry may come as little surprise, given its aspirations in the mobile device market. The company has frequently talked about using handheld devices as a gateway to sell and promote a broader suite of services.

Dell formally entered the smartphone market only late last year, and launched its first device in the U.S., the Aero, earlier this year. The Aero runs on Google’s (GOOG) Android software, as does Dell’s new 5-inch tablet, the Streak.

RIM has long been the dominant player in the corporate smartphone market, but has seen its market share erode as companies such as Apple (AAPL) make gains.

In the third quarter, RIM’s global smartphone market share slipped more than 4 percentage points from a year-ago, according to industry tracker IDC. (Reporting by Gabriel Madway; editing by Carol Bishopric)

Boomi’s integration software doesn’t require additional appliances, software or special coding to get the data to flow to customers’ apps, Dell says. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, indicating it was small enough not to be material to Dell. Boomi is privately held.

Dell, as with the other hardware makers, has been pushing to expand into cloud computing. For Dell, the Boomi acquisition has been relatively painless, especially compared with its previous effort to snag cloud-computing company 3Par. In a bruising battle that went on for several rounds, Dell lost out in a bidding war to HP (HPQ), which paid $2.35 billion for 3Par. Dell walked away with a $72 million termination fee.

Dell may have found good use for some of those termination fee funds in acquiring Boomi.

Having customers like you who strive to be greener is what inspires us to continually find better ways to help you achieve more. The efficiencies that come from greener practices, products and services are so often the key to finding those better ways.

Newsweek recognized us for building sustainability into our supply chain and operations, which ultimately makes it easier and more cost-effective for you to be green. For example, you have helped us divert more than 484 million pounds of equipment from landfills since 2006 through our convenient recycling programs. And our innovative bamboo packaging provides a strong, renewable packaging alternative that you can compost for easy disposal.

Newsweek also recognized our passion for helping you compute more while consuming less. For example, thanks to the energy management features on our OptiPlex™ business computers, Dell customers have saved more than $5 billion in energy costs since 2006.

About the Ranking

The Newsweek Green Rankings grades America’s 500 largest publicly traded companies, as measured by revenue, market capitalization and number of employees, on their environmental performance, policies and reputation as environmentally responsible companies.

Newsweek partnered with three independent organizations to assemble a “green score” for each company. That score is based on three components:

• Environmental impact — based on data compiled by Trucost
• Green policies — derived from data collected by RiskMetrics
• Reputation — based on an opinion survey of corporate social responsibility (CSR) professionals, academics and other environmental experts who subscribe to CorporateRegister.com

CEOs or high-ranking officials in all companies on the Newsweek 500 list were also invited to participate.

“Accuracy and completeness are the touchstones of public company disclosure under the federal securities laws,” Robert Khuzami, director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, said in a statement. “Michael Dell and other senior Dell executives fell short of that standard repeatedly over many years, and today they are held accountable.”

The S.E.C. said that Dell received large special payments from 2002 through 2006 by the computer chip maker Intel for exclusively using Intel chips in Dell computers.

Dell did not disclose to investors that it was receiving these special payments, which were in the form of rebates that allowed the company to reduce its costs of goods sold and made it look more profitable. The S.E.C. said Dell failed to disclose a material piece of information to investors.

Mr. Dell and other executives at the company attributed Dell’s growing profit margin to “cost-cutting measures” and “declining component cost” when it was actually a result of these large payments from Intel, the S.E.C. said.

The S.E.C. said that the company would often seek additional payments from Intel in order to close the gap between its expected results and its earnings targets. In 2004, Kevin Rollins, then Dell’s chief executive, sent an e-mail to Mr. Dell saying that the company had become too dependent on the Intel payments, calling it a strategic “problem.”

“For three quarters now, Intel money has made the quarter,” Mr. Rollins said in the e-mail, which was included in the S.E.C. complaint. Mr. Rollins then said that this was “a bad way to run the railroad.”

But Dell continue taking the Intel payments. On a company conference call a year later, Mr. Rollins attributed the company’s success at meeting Wall Street quarterly estimates to Dell’s execution, failing to mention the Intel payments.

When Dell announced in 2007 that it would start using chips from Advanced Micro Devices in its machines to stay competitive with other computer makers, Intel cut its payments to the company. By then, the Intel payments were equivalent to 76 percent of Dell’s operating income. Dell missed its earnings target that quarter and its stock fell, burning investors who had no idea that the company was receiving money for maintaining this exclusivity arrangement with Intel.

Dell settled the case without admitting or denying the S.E.C.’s allegations.

In the settlement, Mr. Rollins also agreed to pay a $4 million fine, while Dell’s former chief financial officer, James Schneider, agreed to pay $3 million.

Sam Nunn, the presiding director of Dell’s board, said the settlement was in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. He said in a statement that the board had reaffirmed its unanimous support for Mr. Dell.

Under the settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, company Chairman and CEO Michael Dell also agreed to pay a separate $4 million civil penalty.

The settlement culminated a five-year investigation by the agency. While the $100 million fine was far from the largest penalty levied by the SEC, the decision to charge a sitting chief executive of a major company and reach a seven-figure settlement with him is rare. Founder Michael Dell is one of the most prominent figures in the technology industry, credited for revolutionizing the PC market by making the computers cheap and widely accessible.

The SEC had accused Michael Dell, former CEO Kevin Rollins and former Chief Financial Officer James Schneider of playing a role in the company’s alleged violations of disclosure laws. Schneider and two other former executives were charged with taking part in the alleged fraudulent accounting.

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, is the world’s third-largest PC maker behind Hewlett-Packard Co. and Taiwan’s Acer Inc. The company’s net income was $441 million in its fiscal first quarter this year, which ran from February through April.

The SEC said the company also failed to disclose to investors large payments it received from Intel Corp. in exchange for not using central processing units made by Intel’s main rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Those payments enabled Dell to meet its quarterly earnings targets, the agency said. After Intel stopped the payments, Dell again misled shareholders by not disclosing the real reason its profits had dropped, according to the SEC.

The company, Michael Dell, Rollins and Schneider falsely portrayed the means by which the company met or surpassed earnings targets from 2001 through 2006, the SEC said in a civil lawsuit. Without the payments from Intel, the agency said, Dell would have missed analysts’ estimates in every quarter during that span.

The company and Michael Dell neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing. But they did agree to refrain from future violations of the securities laws. The company also agreed to improve its disclosure process by hiring an outside consultant and expanding its training of employees.

The presiding director of Dell’s board, former senator Sam Nunn, issued a statement saying the board believes that the settlement is in the best interests of the company, its customers and shareholders. The board “reaffirms its unanimous support for Michael Dell’s continued leadership and the management team in its ongoing commitment to transparent accounting, integrity in financial reporting and strong corporate governance,” Nunn said.
Michael Dell said: “We are pleased to have resolved this matter. We are committed to maintaining clear and accurate reporting of our periodic results, supporting our customers and executing our growth strategy.”

The SEC also named Rollins, Schneider, former regional Vice President of Finance Nicholas Dunning and former Assistant Controller Leslie Jackson in the suit.

Rollins agreed to pay a $4 million civil penalty. Schneider is paying a $3 million penalty as well as $83,096 in restitution and $38,640 in interest. Dunning is paying a $50,000 penalty. In addition, Schneider agreed to a five-year suspension from working as an accountant for a public company; Dunning and Jackson agreed to three-year bars.

The SEC said its investigation of the Dell matter and the possible role of other individuals continues.

“Accuracy and completeness are the touchstones of public company disclosure under the federal securities laws,” SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in a statement. “Michael Dell and other senior Dell executives fell short of that standard repeatedly over many years, and today they are held accountable.”

The company said last Friday that it was getting closer to settling the SEC’s investigation and had proposed settlement terms to the agency’s enforcement staff. Dell already had set aside $100 million to cover the potential cost of the settlement.

The company first disclosed an internal inquiry into its accounting in 2006, and said it was notified in August of that year of the SEC investigation. In 2007, it restated four years of earnings after it found that sales had been overstated by $359 million and income by $92 million.

Dunning’s attorney, F. Joseph Warin, said his client was pleased to have resolved the case.

Dunning was a mid-level manager in Dell’s European operations during the time in question, Warin said in a statement. “Numerous accountants participated in the preparation of Dell’s books and records, and the SEC complaint asserts only that Mr. Dunning, who was not a practicing accountant, was not entirely accurate in his work preparing books and records during his tenure at Dell.”

Shares closed at $138.72 on the New York Stock Exchange, up 88 cents from the previous day’s close.

A spokesman for Armonk-based IBM Corp. confirmed it was the highest that the shares had ever reached.

Such comparisons are adjusted to eliminate the effects of stock splits, in which a company typically splits one share into two.

During the day’s trading, shares rose as high as $138.88. Volume was 6.4 million shares, somewhat higher than average. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones industrial average, of which IBM is a component, dropped 19.07 points to close at 10,948.58.

The closing price gave Big Blue a market capitalization of nearly $175 billion.

The company went public in 1915. It will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2011.

Chief Executive Officer Samuel Palmisano has shifted IBM’s focus more to services and software, which offer high profit margins. Since he became CEO in 2002, IBM shares have risen from around $104, or a gain of about a third.

The long-awaited recovery is now under way, but it’s a slow, painful slog that’s short on trust and confidence and long on a drumbeat of numbers that mostly shift from dreadful to less depressing. Twenty-seven months after the recession began, unemployment is stuck at 9.7%. Housing starts are dragging near half-century lows. Consumers are finally spending again, but they’re still too fearful about their jobs and homes to crowd malls and auto lots with the buoyant abandon that heralds a full-rigged revival, the kind Americans are used to.

Amazingly, as consumers struggle, U.S. corporations are staging a nearly unprecedented comeback that’s largely escaping notice. The gargantuan, dispiriting job cuts that seem to dominate the news have also been the spur for an epic resurgence in profits. For 2009, the Fortune 500 lifted earnings 335%, to $391 billion, a $301 billion jump that’s the second largest in the list’s 56-year history, approaching the increase in the robust recovery of 2003. For last year the 500 raised their return on sales from less than 1% to 4%. That’s close to the list’s 4.7% historical average.

Hence, the 500′s profits virtually returned to normal after years of extremes — bubbles in 2006 and 2007, collapse in 2008 — despite a feeble overall recovery that’s far from normal. This year’s list — reminder: the Fortune 500 ranks U.S. companies by revenue — is packed with changes that reflect and spotlight the trends reshaping corporate America. The homebuilders that occupied 14 places in 2007 and three last year, including Centex and Pulte, have all disappeared, casualties of shrinking sales. No fewer than nine newcomers from recession-resistant health care joined in 2009, among them drugmakers Genzyme (sales: $4.5 billion) and Allergan ($4.5 billion).

The fall in commodity prices removed half-a-dozen energy production, oil refining, and pipeline companies, and bumped last year’s No. 1, Exxon Mobil ($285 billion), into second place, far behind the new leader, Wal-Mart ($408 billion). The collapse in car sales pushed General Motors ($105 billion) from sixth to 15th place, the first time in the list’s history that GM didn’t make the top 10.

The rebound comes chiefly from three sectors: financial services, consumer cyclicals — items ranging from toys to furniture — and health care. In 2009 banks, securities firms, and insurance companies lowered their combined losses from a staggering $213 billion to just $20 billion. Buoyed by a government bailout, AIG swung from a loss of $99 billion in 2008 — a Fortune 500 record — to a deficit of $11 billion last year. The combined losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shrank by $15 billion to a still-huge $94 billion, as write-downs continued on subprime mortgages. By contrast, the banks and brokers, including J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs, rebounded from losses of $8.7 billion to $38 billion in profits. Write-downs on toxic securities receded, and investment-banking profits jumped, helping offset losses on credit cards and mortgages. J.P. Morgan Chase doubled earnings to $12 billion, thanks chiefly to big gains in fixed-income trading.

In consumer cyclicals, a category that could be labeled “things you’d like to buy but can put off,” companies suffered losses of $42 billion in 2008. Casino operators, electronics retailers, and auto-parts suppliers saw revenues fall faster than they could slash costs. That trend reversed in 2009. Wal-Mart managed to lift revenues, on top of a big increase in 2008, by attracting bargain-hungry customers from competitors with remodeled stores and inexpensive private-label goods, offering everything from frozen pizza to patio furniture in one stop. A single trip also meant less spending on gas. Result: Earnings surged 7.0% to $14.3 billion.

The 500′s most exceptional study in ingenuity may be Mattel, the world’s largest toymaker. In late 2008, Mattel foresaw that sales would plunge in 2009 and introduced a clench-jawed cost-cutting campaign called Global Cost Leadership. Mattel pared its professional workforce by 10%, or 1,000 employees; paid down debt to lower interest costs by $10 million; and reduced overhead by $132 million. Its revenues did drop by $487 million, or 8%. But costs fell much more, by a remarkable $669 million before tax. Mattel booked a net income increase of $149 million, or 39%.

The star of 2009 is undoubtedly health care. The sector’s earnings jumped to an all-time high of $92 billion, placing it second behind tech at $94 billion. Health-care earnings rose by $23 billion, or 33%.

The Fortune 500′s remarkable response is yet another chapter in the saga of a list that’s gone from boom to bust to almost normal, all in the space of three short years. Never has getting to “almost normal” been a bigger achievement.
From:www.fortune.com

The background to this is the continuing and dramatic rise in the amount of semi- and unstructured information. This leads to a sheer storage capacity problem and to infrastructure problems, particularly when organisations need to respond to sudden and unpredictable changes in IT demand.

Dell is responding to that by increasing the ability for its customers to virtualise their IT environments, manage them more efficiently with infrastructure products, and equip their data centres with both servers and storage better suited to what it calls the virtual era.

The Reg covers the server, cloud and infrastructure parts of today’s Dell announcement set elsewhere; here we concentrate on the storage which focuses on the efficient storage of billions of files and objects.

Dell is introducing three new storage product sets: the DX object store; DD deduplication systems; and the NS unified file and block storage systems Both the DX and NS products are OEM’d from EMC whereas the DX is not. It appears that Dell decided not to take EMC’s Centera object storage product set.

DX Object Storage Platform
Paul Prince, a director in Dell’s chief technology officer’s organisation, said this was like iSCSI. There Dell saw a strongly growing market and decided it needed its own IP. Consequently it went out and bought EqualLogic.

Dell thinks that the growth in unstructured data will mean that potentially billions of files need to be stored in a searchable address space and that object storage is the best way to do that. It says DX customers will be able to access, store and distribute the billions of files or other digital content, from archiving all the way to the cloud.

The DX Object Storage Platform is a coming product and details are somewhat scarce. We know that it is based on one or more Cluster Services Node (CSN) management front end connected by 1GBitE to DX6012s storage nodes which can be added and added to build multi-petabyte storage capabilities with no architectural limit on the number of nodes.

The base DX technology components come from unidentified partners; Caringo thought to be one, with Dell taking the best of breed parts and integrating them to produce its own object storage technology. Data is stored with metadata which is used to automatically manage the length and location of content storage. The company did not say if it was used hash addressing to do this.

The CSN boxes store an index or map of all the objects in the storage nodes and they store the objects in a single flat and potentially enormous address space. They are 2U enclosures with a single X86 CPU, six hard drives offering up to 6TB max capacity, 12GB of RAM, and 4 1GbitE ports. They have redundant power supplies and an iDRAC Express management card.

These CSNs have the centralised management interface, carry out network services and contain a content router

The DX6012s SNs also come in 2U enclosures, this time with up to 12 hard drives offering 3,6, 12 or 24TB of capacity. There is a single X86 CPU and 3, 6, 12 or 24GB of RAM plus two 2GbitE ports and redundant power supplies.

The nodes are self-managing and carry out load-balancing, storage optimisation and power conservation. They also carry out background data integrity health checks on their stored content, both original data and replicas.

The DX 6000 has policy-based replication to geographically separate sites, with policies driven by administrator-defined object metadata. Multiple replication and distribution topologies are supported such as 1:1, 1:Many, Many:1, Many:Many.

Dell says the DX system will feature automated, policy-based retention and deletion and be affordable. It will offer various data types: immutable, mutable, and conditional mutable.

The DX is claimed to be highly expandable through a peer-scaling design. There will be multiple options for scaling capacity. It will also, Dell claims, be possible to seamlessly add future storage technologies.

This is likely to be made possible by the storage nodes having standard interfaces to the management nodes. Dell did confirm that SATA drives will be used in the storage nodes but said that other drive types or storage tiers, such as Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) would be available as well.

The interconnect between the storage and management nodes was not identified and nor was the general speeds and feeds type information. Dell says that setup will use wizards and will not require LUNs or RAID groups. The hardware is industry-standard, and it’s the DX software where the value and IP lies.

It’s likely that some kind of data moving function across storage tiers will be provided.

Dell is working to build an eco-system of horizontal and vertical software suppliers to provide data ingest and access capabilities that use the DX as their object storage platform. The base protocol is HTTP and Dell is making its DX APIs available in a Software Development Kit (SDK) to partners, such as Acuo, Bridgehead, CommVault, EMC, Iron Mountain, Symantec and others.
From: Channel & Register