5 Companies That Came To Win This Week

Microsoft, At Last, Offers Office For The iPhone

Microsoft is offering its Office application suite for iPhone users, the company said Friday, finally offering a version of the popular software for a platform other than Windows.

The move is something of a gamble for Microsoft, which has struggled to gain traction in the tablet computer and smartphone markets against Apple and products running Google's Android mobile operating system. While making Office available for the iPhone will expand the potential market for the application suite, it could give consumers another reason to choose the iPhone over Windows-based smartphones.

The new Office Mobile for iPhone is available free to Office 365 Home Premium and Office 365 ProPlus subscribers. Office 365, launched two years ago, is the cloud version of the Microsoft Office application suite.

HP To Bundle Google Apps For Business

In a gutsy move, Hewlett-Packard this week said it would bundle Google Apps for Business with its small-business PCs and printers. The new HP SMB IT in a Box packages are a sign of HP's growing embrace of cloud computing and Google's efforts to expand in the business world.

HP SMB IT in a Box, scheduled to ship in July, bundles HP's PCs, printers, management console, administration technology and customer support with Google Apps for Business, which includes Gmail, IM, Calendar, Drive, Docs and other applications.

The announcement was one of a number of aggressive moves made by the company this week during its Discover conference in Las Vegas. Another example was the news that SaaS application company Workday had moved its cloud services from Amazon to HP's public cloud service.

Red Hat Challenges VMware In Cloud Computing And Virtualization

Red Hat may be best known for its Linux software. But this week the company continued to expand its product line by launching the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure package, incorporating the company's distribution of Open Stack, and a commercial release of its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service software.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure competes head-to-head with VMware's vCloud Suite. Red Hat has already challenged VMware with its Red Hat Enterterprise Virtualization product -- and this week enhanced that product to the point where its "pretty competitive with [VMware's] vSphere," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat president of products and technologies, speaking at the company's Summit conference.

The new offerings, combined with other Red Hat products like the JBoss middleware and Red Hat Storage, means that Red Hat has become a supplier of a complete line of IT infrastructure products -- not just a one-trick Linux pony.

Apple Shows Off New Mac Pro, Macbook Air

Apple's iPad tablets and iPhone smartphones have gotten most of the attention in recent years. But once in a while we're reminded that Apple also makes a pretty good business with its Mac desktop and laptop computers. After all, the company sold 4 million of them in its second quarter.

This week Apple unveiled its new Mac Pro desktop computer at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Sure, it boasts 7 teraflops of computing power and processing speeds two-and-a-half times faster than the current generation Mac Pro. But with its cylindrical design and all-black chassis, Apple showed it hasn't lost its sense of style.

The new Macbook Air runs on Intel's fourth-generation Core processors and features Intel HD Graphics 5000 for 40 percent better graphics performance. But its big selling point is the promise of all-day battery life (12 hours for the 13-inch model and nine hours for the 11-inch model).

Gigamon Goes Public, Raises $128 Million

Expectations were high for Gigamon's IPO this week. But when the networking software developer raised $128 million through the sale of 6.8 million shares, Wall Street took notice. The IPO gives the company a fully diluted market capitalization of more than $600 million.

Milpitas, Calif.-based Gigamon develops software tools for monitoring and managing network traffic for both physical and virtualized networks. The company generated $97 million in revenue in fiscal 2012, up from $68 million in fiscal 2011.