5 Companies That Came To Win This Week
This week's roundup of companies that came to win includes optimism from Oracle on its hardware business, Avago Technologies making a storage push with an acquisition and Google snagging a top software engineer from Microsoft. Also, Apple unveils its new Mac Pro and Unitrends buys PHD Virtual.
Wireless and wired semiconductor manufacturer Avago Technologies is making a major storage push following news Monday that it plans to acquire LSI for $6.6 billion.
According to Avago CEO Hock Tan, the acquisition will allow his company to address opportunities combining data center and mobile data traffic.
The acquisition "significantly increases Avago's scale and balances our end [market] exposure by adding a market leader in enterprise storage to our growing wireless [business]," Tan said.
Wall Street was pleased with the news. Avago shares rose 9.5 percent Monday while LSI's share price jumped 38.3 percent.
A respected engineer and software designer at Microsoft said this week that he was jumping ship and heading to Google. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a top figure in the development of Bing Maps, will work on Machine learning at Google, according to The New York Times
Aguera y Arcas confirmed to the Times that he was indeed leaving Microsoft for Google. He first started working at Microsoft in 2006 after the company acquired his startup, Seadragon Software.
Google and Microsoft have seen their fair share of battles over the years. In 2005, Kai-Fu Lee, Microsoft's former corporate vice president of its Interactive Services Division, left the company for Google. In that case, Microsoft sued Google for breach of contract, and the two companies settled out of court.
Oracle's earnings in the second quarter were mostly better than Wall Street's expectations, and the company saw some growth in its struggling hardware business.
Oracle reported a $2.55 billion profit during the quarter, down slightly from the $2.58 billion it reported in last year's second quarter. Shares were up around 3 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
The company's overall hardware revenue grew 2 percent during the quarter to $71 million. Oracle's cloud business also saw growth in the second quarter, with cloud bookings jumping 35 percent.
Backup, archiving and disaster recovery technology developer Unitrends continued its push into the SMB storage market Wednesday after it signed an agreement acquire PHD Virtual Technologies.
Unitrends CEO Mike Coney said the acquisition will allow Unitrends to better compete against Veeam in virtualized environments and expand geographically.
"[PHD Virtual is] slightly downmarket compared to us," he said. "They compete against Veeam. We also have virtual appliances. But PHD Virtual has a more mature offering and, like us, their technology scales up nicely."
Apple's sleek Mac Pro line got an update Thursday that comes with steep starting price tag of $3,000. However, Apple partners are confident that there is a market for the high-powered machines.
"Apple created its own Mac Pro vacuum over the last couple years and there is a lot of pent-up demand. I've already been hearing from customers interested in kicking the tires of these new Mac Pros. These new systems are 'bad-ass' and I think they will drive traditional upgrades for Apple shops hungry to replace an aging fleet of Mac Pros," said Ben Johnson, president of Liberty Technology, an Apple partner based in Griffon, Ga.
The new Mac Pro is Apple's first update since 2010. It takes up one-eighth the desktop space of its predecessor and features AMD's FirePro D500 GPUs with 3 GB of VRAM.