Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

Apple Blows Doors Off Wall Street's Q1 Earnings Forecast

It was an insanely lucrative fiscal first quarter for Apple, even by its own increasingly ridiculously lofty standards. Apple on Monday reported first-quarter revenue of $46.33 billion, a 73 percent increase from last year's first quarter, and net income of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per share, a 118 percent jump year-over-year.

Apple's first quarter was chock-full of eye-popping stats: The company sold more than 52 million iOS devices -- some 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads -- and pulled in a quarterly profit of more than $13 billion.

Even Mac sales rose 26 percent, no mean feat considering the overall PC market sluggishness. Apple's iCloud, which launched three months ago, already has hit the 85-million-user mark.

HP Lays Out Road Map For Open Sourcing WebOS

HP offered few details when it said in December that it would release webOS under an open-source license, but this week the company came to the table with some concrete details on how it sees things proceeding in the coming months.

HP expects to have completed its open sourcing of webOS in September, and will do so under the Apache 2.0 license, which also is used by Android. In the first step down this road, HP released the source code for Enyo 2.0, its webOS development environment, which allows developers to write applications that run on both mobile devices and PC Web browsers.

Polycom Beefs Up Executive Roster With HP, Cisco Hires

Polycom this week unveiled the hiring of four North America-based area vice presidents and a new vice president of worldwide system engineering to focus on video collaboration, all of whom come from Polycom competitors.

The four new area vice presidents (AVPs) are Greg Prindle, AVP, Enterprise East, who comes from Cisco; Peter Elmgren, AVP, Enterprise West, who comes from Intel; Joe Vranicar, AVP, Enterprise Central, who comes from HP; and Dean Ash, AVP, Enterprise Sales, who comes from Cisco. Polycom also brought in Ashan Willy as vice president of worldwide systems engineering, who will lead the global systems engineering team. Willy comes from Juniper.

It’s the latest example of how Polycom is tweaking its executive software, collaboration and video teams in order to take the fight to Cisco and other smaller video and IP technology vendors.

EMC Profit Rises 14 Percent, CEO Tucci Says He's Staying

Strong indirect sales growth drove EMC to a solid fiscal fourth quarter in which profit jumped 32 percent and revenue 14 percent. EMC's VMware business grew 27 percent during the quarter, while its RSA Information Security business grew 16 percent.

In a development that bodes well for EMC's future, CEO Joe Tucci, who had been expected to step down at the end of the year, has agreed to stay on into 2013.

Intel Bulks Up Computing Muscle With QLogic InfiniBand Deal

In a move aimed at improving its high-performance computing and high-speed networking technology portfolio, Intel this week revealed its intention to acquire QLogic's InfiniBand business for an estimated $125 million in cash.

Intel is looking to raise its profile in the high-performance computing space, and in November unveiled a series of motherboards and chassis targeting this segment. InfiniBand combines server-to-server and server-to-storage data traffic into a single connection and can replace technologies such as server clustering, Fibre Channel or iSCSI, and IP networking.