We know Microsoft for its software chops, but the company is tinkering with some innovative hardware design concepts on the side. A recent Microsoft patent describes a smartphone with a slide-out section that can house one of several modules, including a QWERTY keyboard, a gaming pad, a second display or a battery pack.
If HP does indeed sell off its PC business, it might have to nail its foray into cloud computing to avoid becoming a punchline decades down the road. Without that extra -million-plus in revenue, and billion lighter in the wallet after buying Autonomy, something has to pick up the slack.
Buying Autonomy gives HP an interesting set of capabilities around what Autonomy calls “meaning-based search,” but it doesn’t suddenly put HP on par with Oracle and IBM in terms of being an enterprise software vendor. Gavin Clarke at The Register lays out the case for why it doesn’t. Among his key points are (1) that enterprise search isn’t as lucrative and sticky as ERP or CRM software; (2) that Autonomy only earned 6 million in its most-recent quarter, compared with .59 billion for HP’s PC business; and (3) that IBM already has an established business enterprise search business (as does, I might add, Google).
On top of Autonomy’s core capabilities, its technology that gives context to queries could potentially add make a nice addition to HP’s big data portfolio, which presently consists only of Vertica only. IBM, EMC and even Leo Apotheker’s previous company SAP are making big investments in advanced analytics and big data processing because there’s a lot of money to be made in helping businesses make sense of their data. One health care startup, Apixio, already is doing something similar to what Autonomy does by adding context to medical-record searches. Presently, HP is far behind its peers working hard on Hadoop, predictive analytics, machine learning and other advanced capabilities, but Autonomy could provide a stepping stone to get there if HP is willing to do the work to build from it.
But HP has something that neither Oracle, IBM nor, really, any other large non-Microsoft software have: a complete plan for cloud computing. Like IBM and Oracle, HP has a strong enterprise cloud business in place, complete with converged infrastructure options that package cloud software with high-end hardware configurations. And like IBM, HP has a set of outsourced services that can fall under the cloud umbrella for the purposes of serving large enterprises.
Where HP sets itself apart, though, is with what’s on its roadmap. The company is planning a whole collection of developer-focused cloud services — a la Amazon Web Services — that, it’s rumored, will officially emerge at VMworld later this month. If AWS has proven anything, it’s that there’s big business in public, commodity cloud computing if done right and if it comes from a trusted provider, which HP no doubt would be.
HP’s also a Microsoft Windows Azure Appliance partner, which hints at the possibility of it reselling the Microsoft cloud platform either as a service or as software preloaded on specialized hardware. Already other Microsoft partners Dell and Fujitsu have announced or actually rolled out their own Windows Azure services.
However, HP has been taking its lumps from analysts, investors, the press and just about everyone else since announcing its plans to buy Autonomy while disposing of webOS and its huge PC business. It has to hit a home run in the cloud to avoid falling into an absolute tailspin. Leo Apotheker made a big to-do about its grand cloud plans earlier this year, so unveiling an uninspired set of IaaS, PaaS and cloud-storage services will just add more fuel to the anti-HP fire.
Of course, he also highlighted the importance of webOS in the same speech, so who knows how confident anyone should be about HP’s cloud strategy.
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There are many IT support suppliers, however not all are going to be able to keep your business running so choose carefully. You have probably invested heavily on laptops and software, but if they don’t work together you won’t get the efficiency benefits and will find your staff wasting time.
Ask your IT support company these questions before you sign up:
1. Have you got Microsoft Certification?
Microsoft is such a major provider in the business software market, any IT support company must really know it inside out. Expertise with Microsoft software is proven by their Microsoft Partner certification.
2. Do you offer remote monitoring?
An IT services firm should be monitoring every aspect of your IT system and solving problems before they arise.
3. Do you cover computer peripherals?
There is little purpose in covering just your PCs, notebooks when frequently the root cause is with a network switch or scanner. Frequently these go wrong or cause problems. So make sure your computer engineers are happy to deal with these devices too.
4. IT support pricing – simple or complicated?
You may be quoted a cheap IT support fee to begin with, but what if bills are continuously added to with every support call? Fixed-price IT support firms, although they may be more difficult to locate, are a lot easier for your accountants to deal with and often more cost effective in the long run.
5. Can you talk to me in staight-forward English?
When the going gets tough, so many technical support people lapse into hard to understand technical language. An obvious start is to see if that the answers you receive from this check list are in plain English.
Chorus IT is one of the leading IT services Bristol firms and has been supplying IT services for a decade, so the above has been drawn from our real world experience of supporting our clients’ IT.
Tech review: Microsoft Web Apps are limited free taste of Office
NEW YORK — Last week saw the launch of a free version of Microsoft’s flagship Office software, available online.
Read more on San Jose Mercury News
Tech review: Microsoft Web Apps are limited free taste of Office
NEW YORK — This week saw the launch of a free version of Microsoft’s flagship Office software, available online.
Read more on San Jose Mercury News
There are many objects in Microsoft Access database. One of them is a form, which is another name for screen. They are usually used for entering information into tables. There are various types of forms available, but the most commonly used are the main form and subforms.
You can create the form only after you design your database and relate your tables. There are relationships that main forms and subforms model and these relationships are different for the forms and subforms. For example, one of your customers has a lot of orders. And if the main form would display one record of the customer, the subform would display many orders of that customer.
It is typical to create and display subforms in a grid type format in order to show multiple records. This way, we would display order1, order2 etc. The main form and the subform have to be linked, which is normally done through the table’s primary key for the main form and the table’s foreign key for the subform. If you right click on the subform, you can see its properties. There are properties of link child and link master. In the link master properties you will see the primary key behind the main form, while the link child will display the subform’s foreign key.
It is important to create relationships between the tables in the correct way. This will ensure proper functioning of the main form and subform.
You can also create MS Access multiple subforms that are linked together by common key, even though it might be harder. You should also know that if you enforce the cascading delete and referential integrity between the linking tables, a deleted record in subform will not influence the main form record. But, the reverse process doesn’t work the same way. If you delete a record in the main form, the related record in the subform will be deleted too. So, if you think about it, it is good, because you don’t want to have orders without a related customer record. But at the same time it is ok to have a customer record without orders.
Subforms in MS Access are a very useful way of displaying multiple records stored in your database system. You can also color the gridlines in the subform to give it a more professional look. This option is available in a newest version of Microsoft Access. So, in conclusion, make sure you create relationships between tables before building a subform. And be attentive when deleting records in MS Access subforms.
Microsoft Access is quite complex software and each object and tool in it has its special qualities and details. That is why it requires a special education and training before you can use it successfully.
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