Dell CEO Michael Dell told the Wall Street Journal in an e-mail exchange over the weekend that he intends to stay with the company if his multibillion-dollar offer to buy the joint and take it private isn’t approved by the stockholders.

He also said that he won’t support Carl Icahn’s notion of a leverage recapitalization or Icahn’s schemes to put the company deeper in debt or sell off some its assets to pay shareholders an ostensibly higher price.

Michael reiterated that the specter of $13.75 a share that he and private equity house Silver Lake Partners dangled in front of stockholders last week was a “best and final” offer worth $24.6 billion.

It’s a dime better than the $13.65 a share Dell’s board accepted in February.

He justified the uptick on the grounds that he’s asking for a change in the way the shares are counted so any abstentions are discarded.

Currently abstentions count as “no,” a situation he claims Icahn, who was never a Dell stockholder before Michael put his buy-put offer on the table, has been “unfairly” able to use a minority of shares to block the deal that “the majority of the unaffiliated shares voting on the transaction wanted to accept.”

“That’s why we’ve now requested that the standard be changed to allow the will of the majority of the unaffiliated shares voting on the transaction to control the outcome.”

Icahn personally controls about 8% of the votes but other stockholders like Southeastern Asset Management and T Rowe Price are backing his play.

The paper suggests that Michael’s comments may be a signal to stockholders planning to vote against the buy-out that they’d better support Icahn’s proxy fight to gain control of the company too or be prepared to walk away holding stock that’s lost all of its deal-inflated luster.

The same message may be intended for the Dell board’s special committee which has until August 2 to decide to change the rules or not.

Bloomberg reported last week that the committee wants $14 a share to change the rules.

“Given where we are today,” Michael told the Journal, “I believe the challenges we would face as a public company, including a potential proxy fight, would be significant. But I am ready to fight and I am committed to doing what I believe is right for the company.”

The 10-cent price increase is coming from both Michael Dell and Silver Lake on a pro rata basis. It works out to about another $150 million.

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Software defined networking (SDN), as well as moving “beyond the cloud”, are two of the seven technology trends which will change the game for enterprise, according to the latest industry report.

For companies looking to take the next step and move ahead of the competition, establishing a sophisticated digital strategy is paramount. This much we already know of course, but IT consultancy firm Accenture has gone a step further and noted the trends underpinning it – with SDN featuring heavily.

This could be the start of a real paradigm shift. Companies are certainly noticing that simply migrating to the cloud isn’t enough to be a business game changer – it’s what you do with it that counts.

And this is reflected in the Accenture paper. “The value lies in putting the cloud to work,” the report notes, adding: “No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud.

“The technology …

Join us and guests Kim Celestre, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, and Bill Hussey, Manager of Developing Platforms at Bell Media, for this compelling educational webinar on Wednesday, August 21, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Kim will share Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report to show you the specific, hard-dollar results businesses have driven by engaging customer communities with gamification.
Forrester will provide real life data on how companies leveraging gamification have:
Dramatically increased customer retention revenue
Significantly lowered product support costs
Sourced innovative ideas through the community
From Bell Media, you will learn how they drove up registrations and fan engagement, ultimately driving greater value for advertisers and their brand.

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Victor Cruz has actually touched on a few interesting points in his article “Safe Driving in the Cloud: A Black Box for Cars”.
The fact is that car companies have lately shifted their focus towards increasing security for passengers and drivers altogether and that is why they came up with the idea of introducing a black box for cars. This might be a bit strange as many people have said, but the reasons to why they came to this decision are actually very solid.
For instance, when an aircraft crashes, investigators will eventually be able to retrieve the data that was recorded during flight and analyze what actually went wrong. It’s a measure that has helped with designing safer airplanes and as a result, save people’s lives. Now, getting back to the black box itself, the box is not actually black.
It will only be black after the investigators retrieve it from the charred remains. From a statistical point of view, plane crashes are much rarer than car crashes, so why wouldn’t car manufacturers decide to introduce a black box in each and every vehicle they make? After all, it’s a legitimate reason.

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“IBM’s perspective on cloud computing has been about a systematic approach, to saying what’s the impact on the underlying business as a whole and from that perspective saying cloud computing certainly is the way we need to move,” stated Bruce Otte, Director of the IBM SmartCloud Platform and Workload Services, in this interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at our Times Square Studio in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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SolidFire, the Colorado-based all-SSD purveyor, has gotten a $31 million C round led by strategic investor Samsung, which is supplying the 960GB flash drives in its latest storage system.
The round brings SolidFire’s total outside investment to $68 million.
The widgetry, called the SF9010 and the third system out from SolidFire, is supposed to be the largest and fastest SSD storage system to hit the market – at a full-scale 100 nodes – delivering 3.4PB of effective capacity and 7.5 million IOPS in a 1U with dedup and compression.
It’s designed for large-scale public and private cloud infrastructure.
The 9010 is supposed to retire the old canard that flash is more expensive than hard disk storage by reportedly coming in at less than $3 a GB or below $1/IOP to HDD’s upwards of $4 for 60TB-3.4PB.

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Although IBM has its own Platform-as-a-Service, Big Blue is going to integrate the Pivotal Initiative’s open source Cloud Foundry 2.0 PaaS into its Open Cloud architecture as a quick alternative for building, testing and ultimately moving applications to the cloud.
Pivotal of course is the company started recently by EMC and VMware with GE taking a piece.
IBM is joining the Cloud Foundry community to ensure it has an open governance model.
Pivotal is supposed to establish an advisory board of Cloud Foundry users and vendors including IBM. Otherwise it will continue to steward the Cloud Foundry brand and preserve the trademark from direct commercial use in product names.
Pivotal expects to release a branded and supported version of Cloud Foundry in the fourth quarter.

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If you’re doing business in this era, then you’re dealing with a lot of data. That data is everywhere as well, especially if parts of your business are global. Depending on where you’re doing business, the data your business is generating has to adhere to different data rules, especially where disaster recovery and business continuity are concerned.
There are two ways to look at big data: it either means you have a lot of data, or it means that you’re doing a lot of data processing. Often times, you’re doing both.
Often data is considered secondary (and thus not important), generated out of their primary application, and the company is using it to better understand how an application is working. Generally in cases such as this, the emphasis to protect data is not top priority. All businesses in this situation want are service credits towards when the infrastructure supporting data is down.
Meanwhile, others are using data processing as part of their mission-critical, revenue generating work, so the data becomes a goal in its own right. Some businesses that approach data this way are advertising, natural language processing, finance, and healthcare, among other primary forms of data analytics as well as data gathering focused businesses.

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Google Cloud Platform allows the end users to build their website and applications, analyze and store data on the infrastructure powered by Google. 

Google Cloud Platform provides various resources that can be used for specialized purposes. One such resource offered by Google Cloud Platform is Google Compute Engine (GCE) which is an IaaS product. GCE was announced at Google IO by Google in June, 2012.

Google Compute Engine enables any developer or business to use the infrastructure of Google for their applications. GCE possesses several capabilities which make it more economical and easier to use for a wider set of applications. It provides flexible and scalable virtual machine computing capabilities in cloud.  GCE provide you the capability of solving large scale analytic and processing problems on Google’s networking, storage or computing platform. It certainly is a powerful yet cost effective solution focused on workload processing on cloud.

With GCE …