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Toni Sacconaghi, the Sanford C. Bernstein analyst who has for years been unimpressed with Sun Microsystems' attempts to improve its business, awarded the company a more optimistic business rating.

Sacconaghi raised his rating for Sun from "under-perform" to "market perform" in a report Tuesday. Granted, part of the reason was that Sun's stock has slipped well below $4 per share--it closed at $3.82 on Monday--but Sacconaghi also said the upgrade was because of his belief that "positive change is afoot at Sun."

The stock price slip now indicates the market has absorbed … Read more

Persistent rumors in recent months that Scott McNealy may step down as Sun Microsystems' chief executive returned in force Thursday, as reports of the possibility appeared in the Wall Street Journal and San Francisco Chronicle.

The stories came as computing industry sources reported in recent months that major changes could be in the works at Sun, in particular with the return of Chief Financial Officer Mike Lehman. Lehman has said that he'll reveal and begin a new Sun strategy in July and that he's "taking a fresh look at everything." Some expect deep layoffs.

One former … Read more

Several StorageTek executives have departed since Sun Microsystems acquired the tape storage specialist last year, according to an article in Computer Business Review.

Among them are Randy Kerns, vice president of strategy and planning; David Harrison, former StorageTek vice president of worldwide operations; Brenda Zawatski, vice president of information lifecycle management; and Thomas Despres, general manager of StorageTek's main manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico. Kathleen Holmgren, a longtime Sun executive who was vice president of disk products, also is departing, and two more vice presidents are expected to follow suit, the report said.

In a response to the report, … Read more

Supercomputing is on the verge of a new era of interactivity, and an IBM thinker forecasts that the change will have wide repercussions among those accustomed to submitting processing jobs and returning days or even months later for results.

"A petroleum engineer might accelerate the discovery process by quickly trying different kinds of analysis and visualization to pinpoint a potential oil field. Automotive engineers could continuously refine their designs to achieve a balance of aesthetics, safety and economics, much the way we keep formatting and reformatting documents until satisfied with the result," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who has led … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Hewlett-Packard and Intel were pleased when Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison made a video appearance to help tout Itanium servers before mutual customers.

But there was much whispering and hubbub when the audience noticed the Compaq logo on his chest. The logo was retired for all but a few PC products after HP acquired its rival in 2002. Even HP and Intel CEOs Mark Hurd and Paul Otellini suppressed a chuckle as they watched from the stage at HP headquarters here.

It's likely Ellison can't plead ignorance for his branding faux pas. In a January … Read more

Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy has offered HP another thorny olive branch, this time to merge the HP-UX version of Unix with Sun's Solaris. The latter runs on x86 computers such as HP's ProLiant line and Sun's "Galaxy" line of x86 servers, but HP-UX runs only on HP's PA-RISC-based 9000 line, which the company is phasing out, and on its Itanium-based Integrity line, which is catching on more slowly and in a smaller market than originally planned.

"With the end of PA-RISC systems, and HP-UX now only available on Itanium, we're … Read more

Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy has offered HP another thorny olive branch, this time to merge the HP-UX version of Unix with Sun's Solaris. The latter runs on x86 computers such as HP's ProLiant line and Sun's "Galaxy" line of x86 servers, but HP-UX runs only on HP's PA-RISC-based 9000 line, which the company is phasing out, and on its Itanium-based Integrity line, which is catching on more slowly and in a smaller market than originally planned.

"With the end of PA-RISC systems, and HP-UX now only available on Itanium, we're … Read more

Mark Hurd and Paul Otellini, the respective chief executives of Hewlett-Packard and Intel, are joining mutual customers on March 2 in Palo Alto, Calif., to discuss work to further their alliance around the Itanium processor.

According to an advertisement for the event, which HP will Webcast, the two executives will "take the challenges of enterprise computing head-on." A video appearance by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison hints that there may be news addressing some of the software hurdles that have hobbled Itanium's arrival in the marketplace.

HP initiated the Itanium project in the late 1980s, then signed a … Read more

Sun Microsystems programmers have released the first version of OpenSolaris that runs on the Xen multi-operating system foundation.

On Monday, Solaris programmers called the OpenSolaris Xen version "pre-alpha" software "not for the faint of heart." But that's a good thing, according to Tim Marsland, a Solaris leader. "We believe that some developers want to participate during the development process, and now this project can open its doors to that kind of participation," he said on his blog.

Xen is a software foundation that lets a computer using x86 processors such as Intel's … Read more