SiliconBeat

It looks like there’s been a resolution of sorts to the dispute over whether a former EMC storage executive can go to work for Hewlett-Packard as head of HP’s newly converged data center hardware business.

David Donatelli will be HP’s new executive vice president for enterprise servers and networking, but he won’t have “storage” in his title for another year.

Last month, HP announced it had hired away Donatelli, who was the longtime president of EMC’s data storage division. HP said Donatelli would fill a new position responsible for its servers, storage and networking business, as part of the company’s strategy for more closely integrating the three hardware segments.

But EMC argued that its contract with Donatelli precluded him from going to work for a competing business for one year. That led a Massachusetts court to issue a temporary order last month, barring Donatelli from taking the new job at HP.

Now the court has said Donatelli can join HP, but with some restrictions. HP said Tuesday that Donatelli will have a slightly shorter title than planned. Senior vice president Dave Roberson will continue to manage HP’s storage division, but he’ll report to another executive vice president, Ann Livermore, instead of Donatelli.

In a brief statement Tuesday, HP said it was “pleased with the court’s recent decision.”

Quantum’s stock price is doing something today we suspect it’s never done before: doubling in value. Granted, when you are talking about movement off a 40-cent-per-share stock price, you need to keep such percentage gains in perspective. And as stock watchers well know, it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish on any given trading day.

The news that is spurring the stock’s rise? The San Jose maker of data storage is offering to refinance some of the debt weighing it down, which was part of the reason the company was placed on a list by Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, of company’s in danger of defaulting on their debt. Our colleague Steve Johnson wrote last Sunday about its fate, along with that of other Silicon Valley companies on the list: chip-maker AMD and smart-phone developer Palm.

But as good as the news was about its renegotiating its debt was the reason it could: Read the rest of this entry »

There’s all sorts of speculation as to why VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene was fired this week. But clearly the move took even close observers by surprise.

Let’s acknowledge something straight up: Greene’s firing was unusually fast and harsh by Silicon Valley standards. And given the naked brutality, I have to wonder if this would have happened if Greene wasn’t a woman? Read the rest of this entry »