Oracle fiscal Q1 2014 revenues grow by 2% Y-o-Y to $8.38 billion-- below the expectations of analysts hoping for revenues worth $8.48bn, making the quarter the third of consecutive failure to hit Wall Street expectations. 

Net income totals $2.19bn with 7.9% growth. 

Fiscal Q1 2014 has Oracle making 20% of revenues from new software licenses, 53% from license updates and product support, and 15% from hardware. 

The company sees growing revenues in new software licenses and cloud software subscriptions (up by 5% Y-o-Y to $1.7bn), as well as software license updates and product support (7% Y-o-Y growth to $4.43bn). Results remain less rosy when it comes to hardware-- the business unit reports Y-o-Y declines of -14.1% (or -21.2% Q-o-Q) on revenues worth $669 million, the worst performance for the unit since Q3 2010.  Read more...

After months of struggle culminating in the advance-- and eventual retreat-- of hardnosed mega-sholder Carl Icahn, Michael Dell manages achieve his ambition of taking Dell private, winning stockholder approval of the proposal.

"We are going back to our roots, to the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest growing, most successful companies in history," the Dell head honcho writes in an open letter. "We’re unleashing the creativity and confidence that have always been the hallmarks of our culture. We plan to serve you, our customers, with a single-minded purpose and drive the innovations that will help power your dreams."

The Dell privatisation (technically a partnership with investment firm Silver Lake Partners) will be finalised on November 2013, and involves the company paying $13.88 per share for an approximate total of $24.9 billion-- the supposedly all-too-low price that kicked off Carl Icahn and company's war of attrition in the first place.

Cisco boosts its storage capabilities with the $415 million acquisition of  Whiptail, developer of the ACCELLA, INVICTA and WT-1100 enterprise all-flash storage arrays. 

"Whiptail will strengthen Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) strategy and enhance application performance by integrating scalable solid state memory into the UCS's fabric computing architecture," Cisco CEO John Chamber says. 

Some believe the acquisition threatens the partnerships Cisco currently has with EMC, NetApp, VCE and Hitachi Data Systems-- but the company insists the buy is less about storage and more about the integration of Whiptail technology (such as data acceleration) with UCS at the hardware and manageability level to create a unified provisioning and administration management offering.  Read more...

Hardnosed Dell mega-shareholder Carl Icahn gives up the fight against Michael Dell's ambitions of buying the company sharing his name back, and admits war against Dell and the board "would be almost impossible to win."

"The Dell board, like so many boards in this country, reminds me of Clark Gable's last words in "Gone with the Wind,"" Icahn says in a letter to fellow shareholders. "They simply "don't give a damn.""

Dell gives no comment on the story as yet.

In the letter Icahn blames his throwing the towel on procedural issues, such as the August refusal from the Delaware Chancery Court to fast-track a lawsuit against the company. Icahn was hoping the courts (via the upholding of appraisal rights under Delaware law) would force Dell would hold its annual meeting at the same time it was to vote on the buyout deal, giving him a chance to replace the current board with a new set of directors.

In a spot of breaking late-night surprise news Microsoft buys the Nokia Devices & Services division, together with licenses for Nokia patents and mapping services. The price? A cool €5.44 billion.

The acquisition covers both smartphones and feature phone lines (chiefly the Lumia and Asha series), and sees the transfer of 32000 Nokia employees to Microsoft from design, operations, sales, marketing and support teams.

Nokia retains its myriad patents, but grants Microsoft a 10-year non-exclusive license.

"It's a bold step into the future-- a win-win for employees, shareholders and consumers of both companies," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says. "Bringing these great teams together will accelerate Microsoft's share and profits in phones, and strengthen the overall opportunities for both Microsoft and our partners across our entire family of devices and services."

IBM shows off the latest generation of Power processors at the 2013 Hot Chips conference with the Power8 chip, a 12-core processor designed for cloud-based data centre applications. 

Seen in prototype form, the Power8 measures 650 square millimetres (making it slightly bigger than the Power7+) and is built using the 22nm process with coper and silicon-on-insulator technologies. 

Data transfer rates within the chip clock at 230GB per second, with 512KB of cache per core, 96MB on-chip cache and 128MB off-chip L4 cache. 

The 12 cores feature a total of 16 execution cores, with 2 load store units (LSUs), ondition register unit (CRU), branch register unit (BRU) and 2 instruction fetch units (IFUs). It also has 2 fixed-point units (FXUs), 2 vector math units (VMXs), decimal floating unit (DFU) and a cryptographic unit.  Read more...