Last April, Dave Donatelli shocked the storage world by defecting from EMC to join HP. EMC's savvy lawyers locked him into his non-compete for a year. What a difference a year makes.... At the time of Donatelli's move, I wrote: So HP just put a storage person in charge of servers and networking. Finally, HP makes a management move that acknowledges storage spending accounts for half of people’s hardware budgets! But there’s more to this chess match than storage and HP just moved a pawn on the board. The question is what can the Rook now see that it couldn’t before? It's becoming more clear. Donatelli wasn't hired just because he's a storage guy. There's a bigger picture that involves building out what folks in the Wikibon commun

As part of our continuous coverage of the Dell, 3PAR, and now HP, I've done some digging around over the past week talking with dozens of sources on this deal.  We've been all over this 3PAR story and I broke the news that Frank Quattrone was leading the M&A for 3Par. 3PAR is apparently giving Dell three business days to negotiate an amendment to its merger offer.  Dell had offered $1.15bn for the firm but the deal was countered by HP.  3PAR's board is now evaluating the HP offer. According to public filing with the SEC, 3PAR intends to engage in discussions with HP regarding its unsolicited acquisition proposal, and share non-public information with HP regarding 3PAR, in order to more fully evaluate HPs proposal. Is t

Recently, Clearspring Technologies [disclosure: I used to work there.] publicly announced its new direction as an audience buying platform, leveraging the widespread distribution of its AddThis social sharing tool to aggregate intent-oriented data from keyword searches performed by web users (AddThis accomplishes this by capturing search query information contained in the referring URL string when a visitor lands on a web page where the tool is embedded). Search re-targeting has become a big driver in the growth of data-augmented display ad campaigns this year as advertisers look to find consumers that exhibit particular characteristics across the web versus targeting visitors to a particular website based on traditional geographic and demo

Judging by a new Microsoft patent uncovered by Manan Kakkar, DCE or “Direct Computing Experience” could be bringing the long awaited “instant on” feature to Windows 8 machines. The patent describes a simple system of press a button, see a splash screen and them play your media, much as we see in other systems such as Splashtop. What makes this interesting, beyond the obvious joy of being able to instantly access your media or watch a movie without having to log on, is the emphasis on sandboxing in the patent, which shows that Microsoft is approaching this with security very much at the forefront of their minds. Sandboxing will be a feature in Windows Phone 7, and it’s good that they’ll be bringing this extra security feature

Industry analyst and Wikibon.org founder Dave Vellante wrote an indepth analysis on the history of 3Par.  Dave goes into detail on the history of 3PAR and the reasons why they were so attractive to Dell.  Dave's report is editable on his research wiki at wikibon.org so anyone can come in an make edits or add to it. Here is a snapshot of Dave's report. {Editors Note: I made some edits to condense Dave's post but his analysis and  his full analysis / post is here - it's a wiki and can be edited for additional comments} At a board meeting in Mid-2010, David Scott, 3PAR’s CEO was grilled. It appeared the worst economic disaster since the great depression was over and the directors wanted to know when and how the company would h

By Ben Horowitz Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008 during which it advised them to “Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.” (You can see the presentation here.) The presentation catalyzed a movement. Start-ups everywhere adopted a lean, low-burn, low-investment model. To this day, companies seeking funding at our venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, proudly proclaim in their pitch decks that they are raising tiny amounts of capital so they can run lean. On the one hand, it is a fact that capital invest

Talk about all the luck. Robert Scoble takes an airplane ride somewhere and ends up scoring a couple hours with Eric Waldman who just happened to be sitting next to Scoble in the airplane. So who’s Eric Waldman? Well, Eric handles the licensing for Bing Maps and during the flight he shared some really cool information with Robert. Information like how Microsoft will be be flying planes over every square inch of the United States over the next 18 months to bring new high quality images to Bing Maps. Apparently they are already 10% done a project that took ten years to complete the last time an All USA flight imaging exercise took place. We talked for the next couple of hours about the industry, and what he sees as the good things an

I saw some great discussion on Facebook answers by Mark Zuckerberg and Shervin Pishevar (two respected gurus). I had to weight in since this is an area that I've been research and developing products for close to a decade. It's a great discussion that can provide a roadmap to the future. The world is changing and it's very disruptive across both technical platforms and business models. The discussion is What is Social Networking (implicitly the discussion in about the future). Here is great commentary by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network, and me John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com. What is Social Networking? Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook weights in: I think tha

Sean P. Aune and I both spotted a couple of posts around the web today pointing to the fact that the Kindle, immediately following the new affordable pricing model, has sold out completely. Sean and I have been particularly attuned to significant pricing changes in the digital reader markets because we’ve long held that the first organization to get a device priced close to the $100 mark will win. I’ve been spending the last hour or so searching my video archives for proof that we’ve said this publicly, but since so much of what Sean and I were saying publicly at the time was on Mashable (and their search functionality leaves something to be desired), I’ve only just now found the video I was looking for (turned out, it was on my pe

Is Oracle going hard at Private Cloud? Yes they are. I just confirmed that Oracle has done a deal with QLogic for FCoE in their stack and will be branding it Oracle.  According to the QLogic earnings call its CNAs will be used in Oracle SPARC M Series servers, Oracle SPARC T Series servers and Oracle x64 platforms. These QLogic-sourced CNAs are branded as Oracle 10GE FCoE PCIe Converged Network Adapters, and mean that QLogic FCoE technology is playing a key role in the Oracle integrated product stack, providing connectivity for virtualized data centers. QLogic now has technology that is part of Oracle’s vision for next generation data centers—providing a fully integrated product stack from application to disk. Oracle Play