EMC, VMware Host Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors

EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. will hold their 2013 Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors Wednesday, March 13, at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Keynote speakers will include Joe Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO and VMware chairman; Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO; David Goulden, EMC president and COO; and Paul Maritz, EMC chief strategist. The full event will be webcast. More

HP Outpaces Competition with Momentum from Converged Infrastructure

HP has announced that its Converged Infrastructure portfolio is outpacing the competition with benefits delivered to business and government customers worldwide. HP pioneered converged infrastructure in 2009 and has invested in the development of technologies to deliver architectures optimized across servers, storage, networking, security, power, and cooling. Today it has thousands of HP Converged Infrastructure customers who have accelerated time-to-market, improved IT agility, reduce costs, and maximized ROI. Nine hundred of them have used HP Converged Infrastructure to support their move to the cloud with HP CLoudSystem. More

HP Wins Contract to Manage U.S. Immigration Call Centers

HP Enterprise Services has won a task order valued at up to $220.5 million from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to manage call centers for people applying for citizenship or seeking immigration assistance. Under the five-year order, HP will provide Customer Engagement Management Services for the USCIS National Customer Service Center. It will recruit, hire, train, and manage a team of more than 200 contact center professionals in multiple locations. More

France’s Montpellier District Signs IBM to Help Build City of the Future

IBM has signed an agreement with the Montpellier District of France to create an urban living laboratory to design new urban services for residents and support the economic development goals of local leaders. The partners will initially focus on improving information sharing within the district, along with water management, transportation, energy management, and mobile commerce in Montpellier’s EcoCité zone. This area will serve as a living laboratory where technologies can be piloted by local agencies, businesses, and residents. IBM, the Universities of Montpellier 1 and 2, and IDATE, an institution focused on the digital economy, will collect and analyze data and create an open platform to openly share that data. More

Dell Board Special Committee Issues Statement on Corporate Strategic Alternatives

A special committee of Dell’s Board of Directors, consisting solely of independent directors working with independent legal and financial advisors, has issued a statement regarding its evaluation of strategic corporate alternatives. These included continuing with or modifying the company’s existing business plan, conducting a leveraged recapitalization, changing the dividend policy, and potentially selling all or parts of the business. The committee unanimously determined that the sale of the company would be the best alternative for stockholders and agreed to a $13.65 per share transaction that provides a value certainty at a 375 premium above the average price for the 90 days before rumors regarding the transaction surfaced. More

Dell Volunteers Exceed 500,000 Community Service Hours in FY 13

Dell team members have substantially surpassed the annual community service goal of 500,000 hours of volunteer work for FY2012,  close to a 70 percent increase over the prior year. More than half of Dell’s employees globally participated in community service projects. The company has set a goal of 750,000 hours for FY2013, with a focus on skills-based volunteering. more

IDC Study Shows Pirated Software Comes with Major Costs in Malware

Pirated software offers lower prices but comes with a one-in-three chance of malware infection for consumers and a three-in-ten chance for businesses according to an IDC study commissioned by Microsoft Corp. The research shows that these infections will cost consumers 1.5 billion hours an US$22 billion identifying, repairing, and recovering from the impact of malware, while global enterprises will spend US$114 billion dealing with the impacts of malware-induced cyberattacks associated with pirated software. More

Cisco Honors Top “Down Under” Partners with ANZ Partner Insight Awards

Cisco has highlighted excellence within its Australian and New Zealand partner community by announcing the winners of the 2012 Cisco ANZ Partner Insight Awards. In a ceremony in Melbourne, teams and individuals from 15 Cisco ANZ partners were recognized for innovation, leadership, and best practices. more

Ausie Law Firm Harnesses Cisco Video and Collaboration to Upgrade Client Services

Johnson Winter & Slattery, a 60-partner Australian commercial law firm is using Cisco’s latest video and collaboration technology to further enhance its service to clients and enrich the professional development of lawyers and staff. The firm’s IT strategy supports the firm’s objective to represent major corporations in high-value transactions and important advisory, dispute resolution, and regulatory assignments. More

NetApp Targets Big Data, HPC Customers with E-Series Storage Platform

NetApp has announced the new NetApp E5500 storage platform to provide industry-leading performance, efficiency, and reliability for big data and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. The NetApp E5500 is designed to provide industry-leading storage performance with half the footprint and half the operations costs of competitive systems. More