Last month, Cisco and EMC appointed Michael Capellas to lead the VCE coalition and named him CEO of ACADIA the Cisco-EMC joint venture with investment from Intel and VMware where he reports to Joe Tucci, John Chambers and the ACADIA board (consisting of two EMC execs and two Cisco execs plus Capellas). It's hard to imagine anyone able to have that many top level bosses but Capellas certainly isn't your average CEO. Capellas was Chairman and CEO of Compaq in 1998 leading up to its acquisition by HP where he spent time after the merger as president. After that he ran MCI during a difficult rebuilding phase. You might wonder why Capellas would take on an assignment like ACADIA - we've been told since it was formed in November 2009 that ACADIA was set up to sell Vblocks - preconfigured versions of Cisco's UCS server, EMC storage and VMware software. But maybe there's going to be more to this story than that - what might interest someone like Capellas is the launching pad to build something bigger - more than an entity selling preconfigured packages - more like a new computer company. ACADIA could be the perfect platform for doing this — with a birthright consisting of networking, server, storage, software and with Capellas as CEO can it grow quickly enough to compete with the likes of computer giants IBM and HP?
While the swine flu epidemic was more or less a bust, iPad Envy has hit Silicon Valley in a big way. Lots of people want one but corporate affiliation may mean that if you get one you might have to keep yours in the closet. If you bought and boasted about your new Kindle in 2009, then buy one of those iPad book covers to conceal it — we don't want to hear how much you love it. If you work for any one of a long list of companies including Intel, Google and Microsoft then you can't take your iPad to work. Probably the worst case of iPad Envy may be HP which on Wednesday said it would pay $1.2 Billion to acquire Palm and subsequently went on to say that Palm's webOS was a key dealmaker cause HP needed an OS for building things like ...iPads. Since we don't know the details it's hard to say whether this will be a success or not and there seems to be a lot of value in the Palm patent portfolio. An argument can be made that HP could have been a stronger player in the mobile market if it was device agnostic and treated things like smart phones and tablets like disposable devices. However, with this acquisition we're past that point. You've got to wonder why HP would want to take on a competitor like Apple. HP's enemies list is pretty big — longstanding were IBM and Dell. More recently Cisco. Now add Apple and Google into that mix and you end up fighting battles on too many fronts. With regard to Palm, one of our readers who shall remain nameless sent in this final advice learned from the Palm debacle — for heaven's sake, don't call your hot new product the "Pixi." Blackberry, iPhone, Danger, Android — all OK names. But Pixi? That's a mistake you can't recover from.