ShadowRAM: October 23, 2006
He was named CEO of Misys, a U.K.-based software company. Then, Symbol Technologies shuffled his board responsibilities: Lawrie will take over the Symbol audit committee job that was just vacated by George Samenuk, the former McAfee CEO who retired a couple weeks ago amid that company's options-dating scandal. Lawrie's Symbol gig could be temporary, though, as the bar-code and wireless company is being bought by Motorola.
EMC last month extended its OEM deal with Dell for another five years, and EMC CEO Joe Tucci has been all smiles when talking about the direct PC company. Dell sells EMC's Clariion systems.
Interestingly, though, EMC reported that revenue of Clariion hardware and software for its most recent quarter was about $502 million vs. $425 million for the year-ago period. All EMC CFO David Goulden had to say about Dell during EMC's analysts' call was that Dell "was 15 percent of our total revenue and one-third of Clariion revenue this quarter." Tucci was mum. EMC also revealed it will eliminate 1,250 positions at the company following its third-quarter performance.
Lexmark, which also lists Dell as one of its biggest OEM customers, reports earnings this week. We'll be studying the transcript of Lexmark's conference call for insight.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that 65,000 people will be in town for this week's Oracle OpenWorld 2006—or at least that's how many hotel rooms have been reserved in the city by the bay. As in, every hotel room. And the show will be parked in three wings of the Moscone Convention Center. Maybe it's good that the Giants didn't make it this far into the baseball post-season. The Tigers would be commuting from San Jose.
Apple reported (and IDC and Gartner have verified) that Mac sales went through the roof in the third quarter, and Cupertino grew market share by about 32 percent over the past three months. Separately, and over the past few weeks, we've noticed that Apple has put a "Reseller Locator" button on the Apple.com front page—in a place previously reserved for links to the Apple online store or a list of retailers. The folks we spoke to at Apple swear they had no idea when or why that change was made to the portal. The idea that Apple's attention to resellers might increase along with Mac sales isn't outrageous, though.
Symantec ponied up a cool half mil to finance vanity rock performances by RockdotRock, a "hair band" singing about the dangers of Internet fraud. The songs were written with Symantec's ad agency. Our guess is this is no SRO gig.