Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) has unveiled software that knits together technology from its data-analysis acquisitions, and announced a PC deal with Google Inc as it seeks to boost sales to business customers and counter slumping demand for PCs.
HP’s analysis product, called Haven, combines capabilities from the acquisitions of Autonomy Corp, Vertica Systems Inc and ArcSight LLC to help customers mine vast amounts of information, HP said in a statement on Tuesday.
“We have stabilized our business,” chief executive officer Meg Whitman said in a keynote address at the company’s Discover conference for customers in Las Vegas. “Hewlett-Packard is here to stay.”
Photo: Bloomberg
The chief executive officer since September 2011, Whitman is accelerating investment in research and development to return the company to growth after seven straight quarters of declining sales.
The company is investing in data-center computer equipment and software in order to rely less on its slumping PC and printing divisions. Haven pits HP against IBM, Oracle, SAP, Teradata and closely held SAS in the big-data market.
Total revenue from hardware, software and services aimed at analyzing big data is projected to rise to US$23.8 billion in 2016 from US$11 billion this year, according to market researcher International Data Corp.
HP also said its resellers would deliver HP PCs and printers bundled together with Google’s business e-mail, word processing and calendar tools.
The move is a way to add value to commodity hardware products, HP senior vice president Ron Coughlin said, as PC demand remained weak.
In a research note released on Tuesday, British banking group Barclays PLC said it remained cautious on the outlook for the PC industry over the next few months, despite better-than-expected notebook shipments from Taiwan last month.
Barclays said that notebook shipments by Taiwanese original design manufacturers (ODM) increased 10 percent sequentially last month, beating the bank’s forecast of 4 percent growth.
Nonetheless, Barclays still expects notebook shipments to grow only 7 percent this month — slower than the 12 percent growth seen last month — and to be flat for the second quarter compared with the previous three months.
“We don’t believe the strength, which is more sell-in than sell-through, will continue into June, as we notice PC companies are not aggressively pushing new PCs for the back-to-school season this year,” Barclays analyst Kirk Yang (楊應超) said in the note.
Based on Barclays’ booth tour at Computex Taipei last week, Yang said he did not see any clear signs of material changes in the updated Windows operating system, Intel Corp’s new chip, or notebooks, tablets and smartphones.
The bank added that large volume shipments of new mainstream and low-end models expected to lift the notebook market would not be seen until September.
“As a result, we remain cautious on the PC outlook in the next few months, until product transitions are completed in the fourth quarter of 2013,” he said.
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