SiliconBeat

It’s been more than a week since the surprise announcement that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems, and both companies have been more quiet than usual.

Sun announced its most recent quarterly earnings in a press release on Tuesday and posted some financial documents on-line. But it canceled the traditional earnings conference call, in which analysts and others usually hear from top executives about the company’s recent performance. Also breaking with tradition, the press release included no comments from Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Schwartz, who is normally quite voluble in his corporate blog, hasn’t posted anything there since March 18. The company has made some new product announcements, and other Sun bloggers have continued to talk about projects and technical matters, but they have been told to avoid commenting on the sale to Oracle.

It appears the two companies are walking a fine line — trying to reassure customers and employees, without running afoul of legal restrictions or discussing details of a deal that is not yet final.

In a letter to customers and business partners, Oracle president Charles Phillips gave a very broad description of his company’s plans to sell a range of hardware and software in the future. And top executives held a “Town Hall” meeting with Sun employees, although some who attended said few specifics emerged.

The gist seems to be summed up in an FAQ for Sun employees, which the company filed with the SEC today. The statement says the two companies are forming a “joint integration planning team” to confront such issues as how Sun’s products and employees will fit into Oracle’s organization, and what role Sun executives may have in the future.

Until then, the statement said each company will carry on business as usual. “It is premature to discuss specifics at this point,” it said. “As plans begin to take shape, more information will be made available.”

Apparently there are some legal matters to be resolved before veteran EMC executive David Donatelli can go to work for Hewlett-Packard.

Donatelli and his former employer are suing each other over terms of a “non-compete” agreement, an EMC spokesman said today. As we noted yesterday, Donatelli resigned this week from his job as president of the storage vendor’s biggest division, and was named HP’s new executive vice president for enterprise servers, storage and networking.

HP had touted the hiring of Donatelli as part of a broader effort to knit together the company’s various hardware offerings for big data centers, “as the future of computing moves toward converged platforms.”

But HP’s storage products compete with EMC’s. And EMC has a history of working with Cisco, which is now competing with HP in selling both servers and networking gear. So one can see how this could get complicated.

A spokesman at Massachusetts-based EMC confirmed a Reuters report today that Donatelli has filed a lawsuit challenging a “non-competition” clause in his employment agreement with EMC.  These generally restrict key employees from going to work for a competitor, usually for a certain time period after leaving a company’s employment.

EMC then countersued Donatelli to enforce the agreement, according to EMC spokesman Michael Gallant. An HP spokeswoman declined to comment.

The fact that Donatelli filed first suggests he may be confident that he will prevail. And these things have a way of working themselves out.

IBM sued one of its former executives, Mark Papermaster, after he was hired by Apple last fall. But IBM later said it had resolved the dispute when Papermaster agreed to delay starting his new job for six months.

Hewlett-Packard has lured away a top executive from data storage vendor EMC, and put him in charge of HP’s newly realigned data center business, just as competition in that arena is heating up.

David Donatelli, who was president of EMC’s biggest division, will become HP’s new executive vice president for Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. For those counting at  home, HP has only nine other executives with the rank of EVP.

The announcement seems to indicate a new focus on the data center business, just as some other companies are making their presence known in that market. Cisco, the networking company, says it’s going to sell servers. Oracle, the software company, is buying Sun, which makes servers.

As the big tech companies vie to offer an integrated array of data center products – storage, servers, networking and software — HP says its own networking business, known as ProCurve, will be moved alongside the enterprise servers and storage business under Donatelli’s purview.

(ProCurve head Marius Haas will report to Donatelli. HP said the former head of servers and storage, senior vice president Scott Stallard, is retiring after 34 years with the company.)

HP acknowledged the trend in its announcement, saying: “As the future of computing moves toward converged platforms of servers, storage and networking, this combination accelerates the drive for efficiency and innovation.”

Donatelli will report to Ann Livermore, the EVP whose Technology Solutions Group is the major division of HP that sells computers and software to business customers. She also oversees EDS, the giant IT services contractor that HP bought last year.

Apparently, my second Pink Slip 2.0 installment generated a bit of heat among our participants. Here’s a bit of their provocative exchange, which I think shows the different styles different job-hunters are taking out there: Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a month after the close of its fiscal 2009 second quarter, Aviza Technology has determined that “it expects not to meet its previously announced net sales and adjusted net loss guidance,” according to a release the Scotts Valley supplier of chip equipment maker filed Tuesday afternoon.

The company now expects sales for the quarter to be between Read the rest of this entry »

Integrated Silicon Solution, the fabless San Jose chip company that designs devices used in digital consumer electronics, networking, mobile communications, and automobiles, reported a 46 percent drop in sales for its fiscal 2009 second quarter Tuesday, saying that demand weakened some more in all of its markets during the March quarter.

“However, we believe demand has now Read the rest of this entry »

Elise took me to task - gently - for my story on Sunday:  Read the rest of this entry »

This from Kris Rowberry:
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Shares of Xenoport hit a 52-week low Monday, diving $2.62, or 15 percent, to close at $14.76 after the Santa Clara drug maker and its partner, GlaxoSmithKline, reported that a clinical trial of its treatment for neuropathic pain associated with diabetic peripheral neuropathy in adults “did not demonstrate a statistically significant improvement” when compared to a placebo.

In November, Xenoport’s shares got similarly slammed when Read the rest of this entry »

Opti, a former maker of semiconductors that now makes its living licensing its intellectual property, said in a press release Friday that the jury from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled in its favor in the patent infringement trial between it and Apple related to its patent entitled Read the rest of this entry »