Apple sold 51 million iPhones last quarter, but investors expected sales to top 56 million. Apple Mac Pro: 9 Ways It Wows (Click image for larger view.) Investors punished Apple’s stock in after-hours trading on Monday after the corporate reported record – but less than expected – iPhone sales. Shares were down about 8% about an hour after the corporate issued its earnings statement. Apple reported record quarterly revenue of $57.6 billion and quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion, or $14.50 per diluted share, for its fiscal Q1 2014. While Apple sold 51 million iPhones, a quarterly record, expectations were higher still, at about 56 to 57 million. The corporate sold 47.8 million iPhones within the same quarter a year earlier. “We’re really pleased with our record iPhone and iPad sales, the strong performance of our Mac products and the ongoing growth of iTunes, Software, and Services,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in an announcement. “We like having the foremost... Read More »

Red Hat tries to catch Cloud Foundry by adding .Net and SQL Server capabilities to its open source PaaS project. VMware Vs. Microsoft: 8 Cloud Battle Lines (Click image for larger view and for slideshow.) Red Hat, in a move to lay its OpenShift platform-as-a-service on a more equal footing with Cloud Foundry, now works with Microsoft C#, Microsoft .Net applications, and the Microsoft SQL Server database. One of the compelling aspects of Cloud Foundry, started by VMware as an open source PaaS platform, is its ability to supply development and deployment services to both Linux and Windows applications. Some wary open source users have suggested in online comments that this must mean there are Microsoft moles inside Red Hat, guiding development efforts. But Uhuru Software executives say that isn’t the case. The compatibility is achieved by utilizing code developed by Uhuru that enables an OpenShift server to acknowledge .Net applications and SQL Server dependencies and launch them on a Windows Server. The code might... Read More »

Ready for a wearable that listens for your snoring — or your stomach? Meet audio machine-learning tech. CES 2014: 8 Technologies To Watch (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) You’re jogging down a hectic city street, cranking tunes to your smartphone, oblivious to the realm around you. The intersection ahead looks clear, and you’re ignorant of loud sirens signaling that a speeding ambulance is coming your way. But before disaster strikes, your smartphone shuts off the music and warns you of the coming vehicle. This is only one of many potential uses of real-time acoustic processing, a machine-learning system that analyzes ambient audio to foretell near-future outcomes. Inside the example above it saved a clueless jogger from being squashed like a bug, however the technology has other potential uses too. It would, as an instance, detect when industrial equipment is set to fail, alert deaf people to alarms and other auditory warnings, helping ornithologists analyze bird calls, or even monitor bodily sounds — equivalent... Read More »

Networking customers are digging into the important points of Cisco’s new software-defined networking strategy, but these big-picture questions also deserve consideration. Cisco recently announced its new software-defined networking strategy, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Last week, I wrote about the various drawbacks of the platform, including its complexity and Cisco’s history of software development. Here I outline another questions customers should ask themselves before venturing into Cisco ACI. How does ACI compare with other platforms? All the signs show that Cisco is rallying behind ACI as its flagship SDN product. But we must keep in mind that Cisco also has Dynamic Fabric Automation, the OpenFlow-based Extensible Network Controller, and the Cisco ONE strategy for third-party software integration. Even as, VMware NSX, Nuage Networks, Midokura, and large Switch, to call a number of, even have products that compete directly — many offering similar benefits for lower costs. When discussing Cisco ACI with anyone, the most typical question I hear is, “How does it compare to VMware... Read More »

PaaS enables moving legacy Java and .Net applications to the cloud, brings slider interface to automatically scaling server instances as demand rises and falls. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (Click image for larger view.) Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine, OpenShift, and Cloud Foundry are prominent platform-as-a-service vendors, using cloud techniques to assist developers build cloud apps. But there’s another contender coming at PaaS from contained in the enterprise: Apprenda. Tuesday, Apprenda released the 5.0 version of its PaaS platform, packaged software to present enterprises how to launch PaaS on premises. Considered one of Apprenda’s main differentiators from the opposite PaaS providers is that it doesn’t supply services from a public cloud. Rather, it leaves it as much as customers to launch Apprenda on “any infrastructure that they choose.” There’s nothing stopping someone from using Apprenda on Amazon Web Services. But most customers are running it all alone infrastructure, said Rakesh Malhotra, VP of product, in an interview. In addition, the 5.0 version... Read More »