Hp News & Articles

No one expected HP’s Q2 results to be anything other than poor, but no one really expected an earnings dive of 32% with a fall-off in revenues of 10 percent. However, CEO Meg Whitman didn’t seem fazed, insisting that the figures were all part of the "multi-year journey" to recovery.

After months of accusation and counter accusation there is finally some move on the HP-Autonomy legal contest with a complaint being officially filed. However, the story took another twist this week as SAP claims that HP tried to off-load Autonomy on it. SAP, it seems, politely refused.

The US$ 10.4 billion acquisition of UK-based Autonomy by US-based HP has been one of the most discussed events in the industry over the past 18 months. Unfortunately, the discussion has focused largely on allegations of corporate malpractices. Now that the acquisition is now a done deal, we decided to find out what exactly HP is going to do with Autonomy in the coming years and spoke to Autonomy General Manager, Robert Youngjohns.

If you’re not clear why IBM figures are so important for the IT industry, then the Q1 figures that have just been released should explain. Despite a good start to the year, its revenues plummeted by 5% as its hardware business took a hammering and it failed to close off a number of multi-million dollar sales.

We knew yesterday’s annual meeting of the HP board was going to be instructive. After the botched Autonomy deal and three CEOs in as many years, observers were watching closely to see what investors would do with their first chance to express their opinions since the whole Autonomy accountancy malpractice claim and counter claim. At the end of the meeting, the board remains in place and it will be business as usual -- for a few weeks anyway.

Enterprise technology vendor HP is teaming up with mobile device provider Samsung to offer HP print functionality within the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 smartphone.

Prime-time television drama doesn’t get better than this. By December last it looked like there was little more to be said about the the HP-Autonomy dispute until the court hearings. But like an IT cornucopia, it just keeps giving. Late last night it was revealed that the Serious Fraud Office that is investigating the scandal in the UK is -- wait for it -- using Autonomy software.

In all the strife around HP, the Autonomy acquisition and the fuss around trying to integrate Autonomy’s principal product IDOL into HP’s portfolio, it is often forgotten that Autonomy had other products. One of them was the augmented reality platform Aurasma, which today enters v2.0.

When HP dropped its TouchPad tablet and focused its consumer products on Android and Windows, the accompanying webOS platform went into limbo. Now, there are reports that LG has bought the OS -- and is readying it for use in a new generation of TV sets. 

 2011 was a crazy year when both HP and RIM threw their iPad-challenging tablets at the market, and then effectively in the trashcan. 2013 has seen both make comebacks, with HP's new Android Slate 7 a more humble competitor. 

 Google's new addition to the Chromebook range boosts it way out of the cheap-and-functional category into the Ultrabook class of sexy and desirable. But will that be enough to boost uptake of Google and partner's Chrome-powered devices?. 

Last month Gartner published its findings on the PC market in the US. There we saw shipments down 5% on the same quarter last year. In Europe, which has been blamed for many of the woes of major US corporations like HP and Dell, the pain is double what it is in the US. Sales over the fourth quarter declined by 11.7%.

Yesterday, we noted in our post on the buyout of Dell by its CEO Michael Dell and Sliver Lake, a technology investment company, that it wouldn't be long before others tried to make hay out of Dell's problems. This morning we see that, in record time, one of the first companies to do so was HP. 

Deal of the year and sign of the times, Dell has announced that it is to go private in a US$ 24.4 billion deal that sees the company partially back in the hands of founder and Chief Executive Michael Dell, and partially in the hands of technology investment firm Silver Lake.

 While HP's Pavilion Chromebook is effectively one of Google's low-spec PCs cased in the usual Pavilion stylings, the message to Microsoft is clear, 'You aren't the only game in town.' And with Chromebook sales on the rise, it could be a smart move as Google's OS gains momentum.