HP Wins Place in U.S. Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network Contract

HP Enterprise Services and its NGEN Alliance partners, AT&T Government Solutions Inc., IBM Global Services Federal, Lockheed Martin Services Inc., and Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., have been awarded the U.S. Department of the Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) contract. Valued at $3.45 billion over five years if all options are exercised, the contract covers a broad range of IT services and support for more than 800,000 sailors, Marines, and civilians in the continental United States, Hawaii, and Japan. More

Jefferson Project to Manage Pollution, Invasive Species Threatening Lake George

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, IBM, and the FUND for Lake George have announced The Jefferson Project at Lake George. This three-year, multi-million dollar collaboration with the goal of understanding & managing complex factors including road salt, storm water runoff, and invasive species, threatening this pristine natural ecosystem and economic cornerstone of the New York tourism industry. The partners plan a world-class scientific and technology facility at the lake that will create a new model for predictive preservation and remediation of critical natural systems on Lake George and ultimately around the world. More

South African Underdog Team Walks Away with Student Supercomputing Prize

The Center for High Performance Computing team from South Africa, the first team ever to represent Africa in the Student Cluster Challenge at the International Supercomputing Conference, walked away with first prize in the 2013 competition, held this year in Leipzig. Going in the team was a clear underdog. They lacked competition experience, and they were the youngest of the eight teams, all of them undergrads. And they couldn’t access their cluster until a day after they arrived at ISC, while the other teams were practicing on their systems well in advance. But in the end CHPC earned the coveted “Overall Championship Award”, beating the competition and the odds. Their secret, it turns out, was a set of NVIDIA GPU accelerators. More

SAP Wins Corporate Finance Award

Werner Brandt, CFO, and Matthais Heiden, head of Treasury for SAP AG have received the Corporate Finance Consistency Award of German financial newspaper Börsen-Zeitung. The award honors SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors and Ariba as “outstanding transactions in the past year in corporate strategy & financing”. More

Fusion-io Updates io Turbine Software to Support Flash in Virtual Environments

Fusion-io has announced an update to its io Turbine Software to deliver a major boost to intelligent performance acceleration. With the new update, the optimized software can double VM density for breakthrough performance, control, and choice. io Turbine makes virtualization viable for data-intensive applications, delivering the option of hypervisor caching, virtualization-aware caching in the guest VM, dynamic reallocation of cache memory during live migration of virtual machines in VMware vMotion, and unified management of caching across virtual and physical environments. More

Hortonworks to Release Hadoop Management Packs for Microsoft System Center

Hortonworks has announced management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager that will manage and monitor the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), a 100 percent Open Source data platform powered by Apache Hadoop, for both Windows and Linux deployments. They will allow customers to monitor and manage HDP from System Center Operations Manager alongside existing data center deployments and manage HDP from System Center Virtual Machine Manager in virtual and cloud infrastructure deployments. The management packs are a product of the partnership between Hortonworks and Microsoft. More

Whiptail Welcomes Former EMC Exec as EVP of Worldwide Sales

Flash storage startup Whiptail has announced the appointment of former EMC executive as EVP of Worldwide Sales. Reporting to CEO Dan Crain, Hardy will lead Whiptail’s Field Operations team in driving global expansion of its flash storage solutions. More

IDC Names PwC US a Leader in Enterprise Mobility Consulting Services

IDC has included PwC in the leaders’ quadrant of its MarketScape: Enterprise Mobility Consulting 2013 Vendor Analysis”. The report cites PwC for deep business problem-solving skills, mobility and technical expertise, nearshore and offshore development capabilities, and practical insights from real-world experience. More

Airline Industry on Track for Profitability in 2013, says PwC

Revenue growth in the U.S. airline industry has recovered to pre-recession levels, and the industry overall should achieve profitability in 2013, according to Tailwinds, a report on the airline industry from PwC US. While the industry has become better at managing capacity and generating ancillary revenues, however, it faces rising costs for fuel, labor, and maintenance. To achieve profitability, airlines must focus on operational efficiency and securing new revenue streams, including replacing 50-seat jets with larger planes within the regional airline industry. More

PwC Adds Six Partners in Southern California

PwC US has announced the promotion of six professionals in its Southern California market to partners. They are Marci Castillo, James Levinson, Alison Monahan, Shannon O’Shea, Andy Sofield, and Miho Yokoyama. The promotions are effective July 1. More