Hitachi Acquires Software Assets From Nortel Networks

Hitachi Ltd, the Tokyo-headquartered electronics company has acquired software assets from Nortel Networks and group companies. The cost of the deal is put to USD 10 million.

The software assets are the Serving GPRS Support Node on Advance Telecommuting Architecture (ATCA), Gateway GPRS Support Node on ATCA, Mobility Manager Element, AGW Serving Gateway, AGW Packet Data Gateway. Besides these, the company has also taken in possession all relevant non-patent intellectual property, equipment, other related tangible assets, a non-exclusive license of certain relevant patents, etc.

Besides Nortel Networks Ltd, other group companies involved in the deal were Nortel Networks Inc and Nortel Networks Technology Corporation.

Hitachi plans to strengthen its Long Term Evolution (LTE) equipment with the help of this acquisition. The company expects the LTE market to expand worldwide, and the standard was established as recently as in March 2009 by 3GPP, an international body that sets industry standards. The demand is mainly in broadband-intensive communications in the mobile communications field, including mobile phones and data card devices for PCs. Applications that necessitate large-volume file transfers, music and video streaming services are the ones that drive LTE. This purchase will give Hitachi a quick head-start.

Read about the latest inorganic growth achieved by Hitachi Ltd, here.

Adobe Reports Q4 2009 Results

San Jose, California-headquartered Adobe Incorporated has reported the results of its financial performance for the fourth quarter ending November 27, 2009.

Q4 2009 saw Adobe touching revenue of USD 757.3 million, which is less than the USD 915.3 million it reported for the same quarter in 2008. However, Q4 2009 revenue is better than Q3 2009 revenue of USD 697.5 million.

Q4 2009 also saw the company’s GAAP operating income reaching USD 153.6 million, which is substantially less than the USD 273.2 million it enjoyed in Q4 2008. Translated, this yields a net GAAP loss of USD 32.0 million, which does not compare favorably with the net income of USD 245.9 million of Q4 2008.

Adobe’s total revenue for the fiscal year of 2009 was USD 2.946 billion, compared to the total revenue of USD 3.580 billion revenue it earned in fiscal year 2008. The company acquired Omniture, Inc in Q4 2009, at a cost of USD 1.8 billion on a fully-diluted equity-value basis. The company had acquired all of the outstanding common stock of Omniture for USD 21.50 per share in cash.

Looking forward, Adobe is aiming at USD 800-850 million for Q1 2010.

Read more about the latest financial statements of IT biggie Adobe, here.

New USB Standard Gets New Backers

Lake Forest, California-headquartered Western Digital Corporation and Kawasaki, Japan-based NEC Electronics Corporation have together announced a collaborative effort to promote the new SuperSpeed Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 standard.

The new standard is to be used in a wide range of electronic devices including PCs, PC peripherals and digital appliances. USB 3.0 is designed to handle data transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps, which makes it ten times faster than the present USB 2.0. New, external hard disk drives have already begun to appear in the market that can leverage this level of data transfer rates.

WD and NEC have planned to jointly develop a USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) driver which can break the performance barriers of the older Bulk Only Transfer (BOT) protocol which comes with USB 2.0. The UASP driver will be used with NEC’s USB 3.0 xHCI host controller, which has already been introduced in the market.

The new UASP driver will be promoted by NEC by offering its licensing program to only those LSI vendors who commit to developing UASP-based LSI devices.

For the consumer, this can only mean better performance.

Read more about the new standards being set in the data transfer realm, here.

Seagate Launches Thinnest Hard Disk Drive

Scotts Valley, California-headquartered Seagate Technology LLC has announced the launch of what it terms is the world’s thinnest hard disk drive. The new storage device is called “Momentus Thin”.

Momentus Thin measures 7 mm (H) X 70.1 mm (W) X 100.55 mm (L), and weighs 92 grams typically, making it 25% slimmer than the traditional 2.5 inch laptop hard drives which measure 9.5 mm. The drive is targeted for ultra-portable and entry-level laptops, high-end netbooks, backup devices and consumer electronics. It is being positioned as a more affordable alternative to the solid-state and 1.8 inch hard drives.

The storage device comes in two capacities: 250GB and 160GB, with an 8MB cache. The drive works on serial ATA architecture with a 3GB/second interface and 5400 RPM spin speed. The average latency of the drive is 5.6 msec, with a random read seek time of 14 msec. The company estimates its annual failure rate to 0.48, and the probability of unrecoverable read errors to 1 in 10^14. The average seek power of 1.54 watts draws less energy from the batteries of the laptop / netbook.

Read more about the latest, the fastest and the slimmest introduction in the storage world, here.

New Solutions From HP For Mission Critical Environments

Palo Alto, California-headquartered HP has upgraded its “NonStop” system offering with a new set of features.

When it was introduced in 1974, Tandem Computer’s NonStop system was the first fault-tolerant system in the world. The system was offered as a solution with not one single point of failure. The solution immediately became a hot favorite of industries such as banking, telecom, government and healthcare because of the high degree of reliability. In 2002, after the HP-Compaq merger, NonStop System came into HP’s fold.

The company has brought out some new enhancements to the NonStop portfolio: The BladeCluster Express 1.2 enables managing enterprise data center systems that are spread over large geographies. The SOAP 4.0 software integrates with open source software such as Spring, Apache Axis 2, MyFaces and Hibernate to aggregate “islands” of information across an enterprise. The SQL 2.3 database now provides simplified software programming and better application capacity, according to the company release.

The servers from HP are deployed in heterogeneous operating environments such as multiple flavors of Unix, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and the like.

Read more about the latest offerings from HP for customers with mission critical functionalities, here.

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