Wednesday, June 2, 2010

HP Invests in Automation and Cloud; 9000 Jobs Go

HP has announced an expensive restructuring plan that will see 9,000 people lose their jobs.

The industry is currently investing heavily in cloud computing, and HP is no different. The company today announced that it will cut 9,000 jobs and take a $1 billion restructuring charge as it switches to fully automated data centers, which will handle enterprise services. In a news release earlier today, HP said the decision will allow clients to migrate their applications to these new infrastructure platforms, which in turn will result in faster and more efficiently run businesses.
"Over the past 20 months, we focused on integrating EDS and improving profitability," said Tom Iannotti, senior vice president and general manager, HP Enterprise Services. "Now that the integration is largely complete, we have identified significant opportunities to grow and scale the business. These next-generation services will enable our clients to benefit from the combined technology and services leadership that only HP offers."
However, it won't come cheap. The company went on to say that one consequence of the investment will be the elimination 9,000 positions over the next few years. The company will also take a $1 billion charge, again, over a multiyear period, which will be included in its GAAP financial results.
Despite this, HP says once completed, the transformation is expected to generate annual gross savings of roughly $1 billion and net savings after reinvestment of between $500 million and $700 million.

Gigabyte's Super Overclock GTX 470 Unveiled

We just landed at Gigabyte's headquarters early in the morning and got a sneak peek at a special graphics product.
From what we can tell, it's an Nvidia GeForce GTX 470, but it's been considerably beefed up. We're still working on the details, but this one is going to be of the "Super Overclocked" variety.
It's also sporting what we were told a total of 12 power phases, which should help overclockers sustain stable overclocks at higher frequencies. The silicon of the GTX 470, however, will be unchanged, so expect the same 448 CUDA cores and 1280 MB of RAM – but those clocks will be at a higher level.
Stay tuned as we'll have a lot more on this upcoming product soon!