Paul Shread

Wednesday’s federal government decision to let stand a court ruling that threw out FCC rules requiring local phone companies to share their lines at a discount will likely have far-reaching effects on the telecom sector. For long-distance companies like troubled AT&T – which plans to continue to fight the battle alone – and MCI, the […]

Accenture’s $10 billion Homeland Security contract could be in trouble. The House Appropriations Committee voted 35-16 Wednesday to deny the huge federal IT contract to Accenture because the company is headquartered in Bermuda. Accenture won the contract over rivals Lockheed Martin and Computer Sciences . The spending bill still has to go through both houses […]

EMC took over the leadership position from HP in the external storage systems market in the first quarter, according to IDC, but HP maintained its lead in the total disk storage systems market. Another surprise in IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker for the first quarter was the emergence of iSCSI SANs, which posted […]

Broadcom has unveiled storage management software that one analyst says puts the company at the forefront of vendors addressing storage security concerns. Broadcom says it has enhanced the IT security and virus/worm protection capabilities of its XelCore RAID software stack with new features such as data redundancy, secure backup, and the ability to hide a […]

The next generation of serial storage technologies is moving ahead, with vendors starting to roll out the first Serial ATA II (SATA II) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) products. ARIO Data Networks has followed up on its February release of SATA controllers with its first SATA II and SAS controllers. SATA II doubles SATA’s speed […]

A little pullback and put buyers come out in force – that’s a good sentiment base for the rally to build on. The Nasdaq (first chart below) did a nice job holding 1973 support today. 1960 is below that, and 1993, 2000 and 2040 are resistance. The S&P (second chart) held 1113 support. 1117 is […]

Rising oil prices, terrorism fears and lackluster consumer spending may be holding back the broader economy, but technology spending remains strong. The May issue of CIO Magazine said IT spending projections rose to 7.8%, the highest reading since January. It was the fifth consecutive month of steady readings for the survey, evidence of a “slow […]

Another day of indecision, with the second straight doji star on the Nasdaq (first chart below), as the market digested this week’s big gains and treaded water ahead of the holiday weekend. Given the strength of the recent buying, it’s likely no more than a pause that refreshes. The put-call ratio continues to show skepticism, […]

A bullish outlook from Novellus boosted chip stocks on Friday. Novellus jumped 6% after the chip equipment maker said it expects second-quarter earnings of 25-27 cents a share, well above 21-cent estimates. The company also raised revenue and bookings guidance, and said business is improving steadily. The news sent the chip sector to a 1.5% […]

The biggest earnings blowouts seem to be coming from the most unlikely places lately. Take Tech Data . The computer products distributor soared 11% Thursday after reporting earnings of 59 cents a share, 10 cents ahead of estimates. Competitor Ingram Micro gained 6%. It’s been some time since Tech Data lit the world on fire, […]

Digi-Data Corp. hopes to make a splash in the enterprise-class storage market with RAID products that the company says offer performance and scalability for less. The Columbia, Md.-based company is moving from an OEM model to selling its products through value-added resellers (VARs), in the process taking on big names like IBM , HP , […]

Broadcom has unveiled what it claims are the first 4 Gigabit per second (4 Gbps or 4-Gig) Fibre Channel fabric switches. “I think any new player – and Broadcom is a nobody in storage at the moment – has to do something eye-popping. This announcement … shows that Broadcom wants to play and they are […]