Story 2014-09-23

Microsoft staff cuts extend to Silicon Valley research lab

by
in microsoft on (#2SVB)
story imageAs Satya Nadella's axe continues to fall at Microsoft,
the corporation's Silicon Valley research lab has been the next to succumb to the severe round of staff reductions ongoing this year.
In a move that appears to reflect a new level of urgency to Nadella's consolidation plans, the Redmond giant has closed one of its flagship engineering facilities and released dozens of world-class scientists into the job market - and the welcoming arms of its competitors. The Mountain View site reportedly employed a team of 75 that focused exploring new applications for distributed computing - the fundamental concept behind the cloud - in areas such as natural language search, data privacy and network security.

But although the lab itself is no longer operational, Microsoft is still clinging to its Silicon Valley research investment. Projects that were ongoing at the time of the termination have been transferred to other research facilitates along with key members of the original team, which indicates that business will continue more or less as usual at those sites for the foreseeable future.
While the cuts were met with stockholder approval, there's speculation Nadella's staff reductions are a strategy of short term gains that will jeopardize the corporation's long term prospects.

RedHat looks to mobile apps with purchase of FeedHenry

by
in linux on (#2STT)
story imageIn a move to compete on the mobility front, Red Hat Linux is acquiring FeedHenry for about US$82 million. The enterprise mobile application platform provider essentially makes it possible for Red Hat to support mobile application development in public and private environments.

From ConvergedDigest:
FeedHenry, which is based in Waterford, Ireland, helps enterprises to accelerate mobile app backend integration via private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises systems with connectors and plug-ins to common enterprise systems such as salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, etc. The FeedHenry platform offers developers the flexibility to create native (Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry), hybrid, HTML5 or web apps. The platform supports a wide variety of popular toolkits including native SDKs, hybrid Apache Cordova, HTML5 and Titanium, as well as frameworks such as Xamarin, Sencha Touch, and other JavaScript frameworks.

FeedHenry was founded in 2010 as a spin out from the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology.
Seems like good news for mobile platforms based on FOSS technologies. Or is this just RedHat trying to stay relevant in a world where operating systems matter less than web services and mobile access?