IBM cuts workers while it hires for cloud computing and Watson initiatives. IBM Predicts Next 5 Life-Changing Tech Innovations (Click image for larger view.) IBM confirmed Thursday that its $1 billion “workforce rebalancing” effort is underway, bringing layoffs to company offices worldwide whilst the corporate is spending billions on new business ventures. Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM announced the rebalancing plan in January after reporting lackluster financial results for 2013. The company’s server business, particularly, was hard hit, suffering an 18.7% year-over-year decline in revenue in 2013 while most other segments were either flat or showed only modest gains. Workers in Burlington, Vt., and Rochester, Minn., were laid off on Thursday, in keeping with Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America union group trying to win collective bargaining rights for IBM employees. The governor of Vermont confirmed the cuts, saying approximately 140 were expected to be laid off. Alliance@IBM has compiled reports of greater than 3,300 layoffs in IBM offices abroad, including 1,500 reportedly let go in Brazil,... Read More »

Dell has promised innovation as a personal company within the post-PC era — but if can customers expect to look it? 10 Best Tablets Of 2013 (click image for larger view) At last December’s Dell World conference, Dell CEO Michael Dell said his company had finally outgrown its PC-maker typecasting to become an end-to-end enterprise services provider. He acknowledged the corporate would continue to conform, but he called for an end to the “transformation” talk that surrounded Dell on the time. That was before many recognized the complete scope of the computer slump, however, that’s still taking its toll at the industry, greater than a year later. It was also before Michael Dell opted to take the corporate private, before the drama that ensued as investors similar to Carl Icahn tried to wrestle away control of the corporate, and before Dell and his partners ultimately gained victory. The last 365 days haven’t unfolded the manner many Dell observers would have guessed last December, in other... Read More »

One lesson so far: While Apple can still command top dollar, Windows tablets only become widely desirable after they drop to Android-level pricing. Microsoft Surface: 10 Best And Worst Changes (click image for larger view) After mostly sitting out the patron Electronic Showcase earlier this month, Microsoft touted its Surface tablets last week on the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in Ny city. But are the devices, that have been frequently out of stock in the course of the holiday season, actually making progress? InformationWeek breaks down the nice and the bad indicators, both for the skin line and Windows tablets usually. The good Throughout 2013, Microsoft highlighted a great number of corporate and institutional Surface deployments. It also established partner programs to construct a 3rd-party community around its Surface products. While initial Surface sales were poor, these efforts helped Microsoft to make a fantastic point: Whether for reasons of manageability or utility, the skin line serves at the least some productivity-minded professionals better than an... Read More »

Windows Azure promises cloud flexibility once IT overcomes Azure’s built-in load balancing constraints. On April 16, 2013, Microsoft opened another chapter in its cloud offering by announcing its Windows Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, designed and priced to compete directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the discharge of this new IaaS platform, Microsoft claims to give customers the facility to head applications easily from traditional on-premises environments into the cloud. This offering has unfolded many exciting possibilities for patrons. They could now deploy new virtual machines quickly or migrate existing ones into Windows Azure. What’s much more promising is the belief of not having to switch the style the applications hosted on these virtual machines work — no application rewriting, no code updates, and no change to how transactional data is stored. Virtually all web applications require a load-balancing mechanism for scale-out and high availability. To handle this requirement, Windows Azure provides a built-in load balancing layer in its architecture. Surely, the sole approach to access... Read More »