Farewell, EDS

Hewlett-Packard erased one of the most storied names in the government and commercial markets this year when it dropped the EDS brand in favor of HP Enterprise Services, Washington Technology reported.

EDS, known originally as Electronic Data Systems, was one of the creators of the market for outsourced IT services, particularly data centers. The name survived for 47 years, including a stint of ownership by General Motors.

But there are a lot of reasons for the change, such as creating a single company culture and presenting a single face to the market.

Dropping the name EDS also signaled that integration of the acquisition was over. It's now time for the billions spent to start paying off.

And that's not going to be easy.

From Paul Boutin's article at VentureBeat, before the World Wide Web, working for Ross Perot’s IT outsourcing firm EDS was one of the most prized and prestigious jobs in tech. EDS, which Perot founded in 1962, defined the outsourcing business and made Perot a hero to both businessmen and techies.

Perot resigned in 1986, but his brash, I-always-win style continued as part of EDS’s professional brand. Perot ran for president as an independent candidate in 1992 and won over an impossible 39 percent of voters in polls, before dropping from the race.

Last year, HP acquired EDS and its 137,000 worldwide employees for $13.9 billion. Now, some of the acquired staffers have told NBC Bay Area reporter Randy McIlwain that HP has slashed salaries from 29 to 47 percent among the people from whom McIlwain got numbers. HP has made several rounds of cuts since the purchase.

Blackberry Holiday Outages

Reaserch in Motion (RIM) just can't seem to catch a break. Just five short days after the BlackBerry Internet Service went down for several hours, North and South American users found themselves again without e-mail. This time, the outage lasted for nearly eight hours and, according to some reports, even caused problems for some European and Asian customers.

In a statement e-mailed to some users and news services, RIM said that "based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger." RIM has issued a fix for the versions believed to have caused the issue -- 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56 -- but the company was careful to explain it was still investigating the root cause.

RIM apologized for the inconvenience, but refused to comment further, leaving plenty of questions unanswered. For one, with outages becoming more and more frequent (Is this the third or fourth in the last two months?), does the company have an actionable plan to prevent future disruptions? Are the recent spate of outages connected in any way? And how does it plan to stave off pressure from Apple and Google when it can't even keep its mobile e-mail service (its supposed strong suit) up and running?

For more information visit RIM, PC World, Canada.com, Wall Street Journal, or PC Magazine.

USAF Confirms Sentinel In Afghanistan

Air Force officials confirmed Dec. 4 the existence of a high-altitude, unmanned aerial vehicle that incorporates stealth design characteristics which has been sighted in Afghanistan in recent years, report David Fulghum and Bill Sweetman in Aviation Week’s Ares blog.

The jet-powered UAV, which features a tailless flying wing with sensor pods built into the surface of each wing, is known as the RQ-170 Sentinel. Several photos purported to show the RQ-170 have been posted on the Web.

“The Air Force “is developing a stealthy unmanned aircraft system to provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed Combat Forces,” Air Force officials said in a statement e-mailed to journalists and reproduced in full text in an article by Stephen Trimble at Flight Global. The RQ-170 was built by Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Program, the officials said.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, as the Advanced Development Program is also known, designed such revolutionary reconnaissance and fighter aircraft as the U-2, SR-71, F-117 and F-22.



For more details, visit Defense Systems.

Cisco Phone In 4-Hour Replacement Arena

Cisco is still extremely keen on the small business market one year after dropping $100 million into a new unit specializing in pitching product to companies with fewer than 100 employees.

To go along with the one-year milestone, the network giant is trotting out a fresh stable of small business-oriented products and upgrades — along with some additional support programs for the army of resellers that Cisco relies upon to reach baby biz customers.

Beginning on the hardware side, Cisco is debuting what it claims to be the industry's first 802.11n dual-band clustering access point built for small businesses (and we suppose those qualifications are specific enough to be true). The clustering kit allows for easier setup and installation of wireless access points when there's multiple units involved, explains Andrew Sage, veep of Cisco's small business worldwide sales.

Earlier incarnations of Cisco's access points require individual configuration for each unit or alternatively, moving to a more expensive, controller-based technology better suited for the mid-to-enterprise, he said. The AP 541N lets users configure just one access point, then add up to 10 other units that draw upon the configuration of the existing access point to expand the network.

The AP 541N has a US list price of $500. The device is currently available in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Next up, Cisco's SPA 525G IP phones are receiving a firmware update that allows easy tele-snooping over its LCD display, plus an instant connection to a company's VoIP network no matter where the phone is plugged in.

New to the SPA 525G is the ability to use the phone to display a live video feed from any Cisco small business security camera. Apparently this function works nicely when attaching a camera at the front door of an office so any phone on the network can get an eyeful of arriving visitors. The phone even has a feature to open a door's deadbolt remotely, said Sage. What haunted house is complete without one?

The IP phone is also being outfitted with integrated VPN technology. The new functionality allows a worker to connect to a company's private branch exchange (PBX) securely over almost any broadband network.

"You can take the phone, plunk it down on a desk, connect it to any broadband connection, and it will find its way back to your main office PBX and become an extension on that PBX system — for all intents and purposes as if you were local to it," said Sage.

Cisco is also rolling out four-hour hardware replacement service and 24-hour technical support that covers all of the company's Small Business Pro products, not just the phones.

For more of this article, visit The Register.