HP will not make a smartphone on 2013, Meg Whitman says at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2012-- instead, the company is "more concerned about the pads."

Next year, HP hopes to become a force in tablets-- but not within the consumer market. Instead, the company will concentrate on the (perhaps) more lucrative enterprise market.

"The longer we go without a business-compatible Microsoft solution, the bigger the effort to force the iPad into businesses," Whitman says. She also suggests the Surface is not the most ideal for enterprise, meaning it won't compete with HP offerings such as the recently revealed ElitePad 900.

The HP CEO also says the company will remain committed to staying in the PC business, confirming the first big decision (one involving a 30-day review by a team of 100) taken when she replaced her predecessor, Leo Apotheker. Read more...

VMware records a -11.7% Y-o-Y drop in profits reaching $156.8 million in Q3 2012 while revenues grow by 20.4% Y-o-Y to $1.13 billion as European economic conditions remain fairly weak. 

License sales revenues total $491m with 11% Y-o-Y growth. Services revenues grow by 29% Y-o-Y to $643m. 

Two big purchases mark Q3 2012 for VMware-- software-defined networking (SDN) startup Nicira (worth $1.12bn) and DynamicOps. 

"The excitement around Nicira validates our approach to the software-defined data center," CEO Carl Eschenbach remarks. Nicira SDN technology Read more...

The usually secretive Google has a sudden change of heart when it comes to data centres-- with "On Where the Internet Lives," an online gallery providing a tour of the insides of the Google server halls. 

"Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtual visit," technical infrastructure VP Urs Hölzle writes on the Google Official Blog. 

The extensive photo set, with photography by Connie Zhou, covers not only the Google facilities in the US, but also the server halls (and innovative water cooling systems) in Hamina, Finland and St. Ghislain, Belgium. The pictures reveal not only racks of server equipment, but also brightly coloured piping, a guard or three, yellow Google bicycles (for employees to traverse massive floors) and dramatic vistas outside the halls.  Read more...

IBM blames the drop in income during Q3 2012 on tighter IT budgets, as businesses and governments continue to hold back on spending as economic uncertainty persists over Europe and beyond. 

Total Q3 2012 IBM sales drop by -5.4% Y-o-Y (exceeding Wall Street expectations of losses reaching -3%) to $24.75 billion, with every company segment taking a hit in revenues. EMEA revenues for Q3 2012 drop by -9% to $7.2bn. 

The company also admits a number of big software deals in emerging markets slipped into Q4 2012, while hardware sales declined due to the Read more...