A daily summary of stories in the areas of Big Data, cloud computing and software-led infrastructure from some of the top news sources on the Web.

Business News

HP’s profit slips 21% as services business stumbles – Computerworld

There aren’t many bright spots in Hewlett-Packard Co.’s quarterly earnings, as even stalwart product lines like PCs and printers are down by single-digit margins, while the enterprise services business slide a sickening 16%. This is HP’s 15^th straight quarter of declining sales. Business Insider has a chart that dramatizes just how weak the results were across the board.

David Vellante was upbeat following last year’s HP Discover event, saying “HP is back.” If so, the news has yet to seep through to the market. These numbers are not a good backdrop for the next Discover, which kicks off in a little more than a week. The press release is at HP Reports Fiscal 2015 Second Quarter Results.

Intel: Windows 10 will not boost PC sales – Business Insider

The PC market continues to decline slowly, and Intel doesn’t see anything turning around that trend any time soon. It’s focused on the data center, where it says sales grew 18% last year and the business is expected to reach $14 billion this year.

Scott McNealy Is Back—As A Startup CEO – Wall Street Journal

He just took on the chief executive job at Wayin, a company that started off as a Pinterest rival but is now focused on helping companies turn social network posts into marketing messages. Wayin has raised $33.5M, no doubt influenced in large part by McNealy’s reputation. Wayin, “can build a running stream of Twitter comments or photos associated with a client’s products to be displayed on websites, in lobby displays or on jumbo screens at sporting venues,” the Journal says.

Product News

VMware doubles node count for EVO:RAIL hyperconvergenceware – The Register

Version 1.2 of EVO:RAIL doubles the number of servers that can be turned into hyper-converged appliances with just software. With support for eight appliances in a cluster and 32 nodes overall, each appliance can now theoretically handle “800 general purpose virtual machines or 2,000 virtual desktop virtual machines per cluster,” the company said.

VMware beta testing database-as-a-service based on SQL Server – The Register

The offering is expected to be positioned initially as a failover for on-premise SQL Server instances, but it could evolve into a full-blown cloud product, says The Register, citing secret documents.

IBM confirms Apple Watch is also an enterprise product – Computerworld

The alliance between Apple and IBM apparently includes the Apple Watch, indicating that the wearable has a role in the enterprise. Apple Watch support is being integrated into applications targeting hospitals, law enforcement and field service engineers. Apple is also said to be interested in building the watch into FDA-approved apps.

H2O.ai Reinvents Machine Learning for Smart Applications with 3.0 Release – H20.ai News

H2O.ai, a provider of open source machine learning for building smarter applications, announces the general availability of H2O 3.0, the latest major release of the company’s flagship software. The new version offers a single integrated and tested platform for enterprise and open-source use, enhanced usability through a new web user interface (UI) with embeddable workflows, elegant APIs, and direct integration for Python and Sparkling Water.

Google reportedly developing ‘Brillo,’ an OS for the Internet of Things – CNET

Not much to go on here. The project is reportedly a lightweight version of Android designed to operate a low power with as little as 32MB of memory. It may be introduced as early as next week at Google I/O.

Trends & Analysis

DevOps: Is it about efficiency or just saving money? – ZDNet

Skeptics says DevOps is just a way of getting one person to do two jobs, but many people think it’s the future of software development. “I think in ten years’ time we are going to look back and think, ‘Why did we do this any differently?'” says Forrester principal analyst Amy DeMartine

Too many platforms may make the Internet of Things a confusing place – VentureBeat

With so many platforms, OSs and protocols, the Internet of things is going to make the choice between Beta and VHS look like child’s play. This story takes a consumer angle, but enterprises will need to deal with this chaos as well. Right now, everyone is jockeying to become the de facto standards in the markets they’ve targeted.

Gartner’s Dismal Predictions for Hadoop Could Be Wrong

Hadoop rivals unite to dispute last week’s downbeat forecast for Hadoop’s immediate future from Gartner. MapR, Cloudera and Hortonworks all say business is growing rapidly, and the president of Think Big, a Teradata company, says he thinks Gartner’s survey methodology might have been screwy.