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

The HP split by the numbers: 2,800 apps and 75,000 APIs – Computerworld

This story notes that HP has laid off 50,000 people over the last two years. It has 300,000 employees. The company will begin operating as two companies on Aug. 1, giving it some time to iron out rough spots before the formal split happens on Nov. 1. Among the complexities are where to house some 75,000 APIs used by developers and partners, and how to split up the company’s six mega-data centers (which used to be 85 before a big consolidation).

Poised for Rapid Growth, Zentera Systems Raises $4.9 Million Series A Funding – PRNewswire

The three-year-old startup makes infrastructure for rapid deployment of hybrid clouds.

Deep learning startup Nervana raises $20.5M – VentureBeat

It’s raised $24.4M so far for its deep learning service that uses specialty hardware. Nervana wants to democratize deep learning for use in a wide variety of industries. It’s representative of a new breed of companies that has popped up recently as interest in this branch of artificial intelligence has been rejuvenated.

Data science cloud service Plotly raises $5.5M – VentureBeat

Montreal company claims to be “the first-ever data science platform,” and that it will enable mere mortals to produce beautiful visualizations. I dunno; the screen shots look very Tableau-ish.

Product News

IBM Extends Watson Platform Capabilities – Talkin’ Cloud

The new Tradeoff Analytics API enables developers to create applications that filter large amounts of content using weighting factors specified by the developer or user. It’s a way to make Watson more of an application-specific recommendation engine.

Microsoft’s Azure App Service adds web vulnerability scanning from Tinfoil Security – VentureBeat

Microsoft’s cloud development platform will not include vulnerability scanning from Tinfoil at no extra charge.

Trends & Analysis

HP Destroys a Dream Computer to Save It – NYTimes.com

Instead of memristors and a proprietary operating system, the mythical super-machine will now debut with plain old DRAM and Linux. “We way over-associated this with the memristor,” said Martin Fink, HP’s chief technology officer.

Meg Whitman is shopping for acquisitions – Business Insider

After treading carefully in the wake of several disastrous HP acquisitions, Meg Whitman says she’s now ready to wheel and deal. The recent $2.7 billion acquisition of Aruba Networks is evidence of that.

Photo by Patrick Hawks via Flickr