Another "BEST" list for HP

The Silicon Valley Business Journal yesterday ran a story entitled

Four Silicon Valley companies rank on best places for IT jobs (none of which are Google)

These are the kinds of lists that HP routinely used to be on, at or near the top, for forty years or so.  Hasn't been true in quite some time.  So, naturally, the title drew me in.  

It actually is a list compiled by the magazine ComputerWorld.  Here's the bullet lead: ComputerWorld just released its list of the 100 best places to work in IT for 2014, and only four Silicon Valley companies made the list: LinkedIn Corp., Informatica Corp., VMware Inc. and Hewlett Packard Co. — although South San Francisco's Genentechalso made the list.

The criteria?  salaries, bonuses, promotions, programs for recognizing excellence, flex-time policies, the number of women and minorities in IT, elder and child care, and reimbursement for education.

LinkedIn and Informatica made it for 'mid-sized' companies; HP and VMWare for 'large'.  Here's the HP story: 

VMware and Hewlett-Packard made the list among large companies, rating 26th and 28th, respectively, out of 55 companies with over 5,000 employees. VMware has flexible vacation time, on-site cafes and gyms, and the opportunity to work with customers.

HP looks like a good place for high pay. It scores for competitive pay and benefits, company-matched 401(k) plans, and stock purchase plans. It also offers on-site health clubs, concierge services and programs to promote healthy living and fun.

Quicken, by the way, is great at employee retention career development and benefits.

No Silicon Valley companies made the list of small employers.

The link, if you'd like to read the whole story: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/06/24/four-silicon-valley-companies-rank-on-best-places.html?ana=e_du_pub&s=article_du&ed=2014-06-24&u=p3hytg4uJDjp%20I5PDYTDxA08920494&t=1403699555&page=all 

The MACHINE

HP took the wraps off "the Machine" this week at Discover.  Julie Bort reports on it, with pix, in the Business Insider at http://www.businessinsider.com/hp-shows-off-new-kind-of-computer-2014-6

Martin Fink, head of HP Labs, with Meg Whitman's backing and blessing, revealed a WHOLE LOT MORE than ever before, about what all of this Memristor stuff of Stan Williams, HP's semi-famous Fellow.  See the story from 2008 at http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2008/apr-jun/memristor.html

Peter Bright also covered the Discover announcements... see http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-plans-to-launch-memristor-silicon-photonic-computer-within-the-decade/   He did s nice job of positioning some past announcements (e.g. Moonshot and Apollo, covered in this blog a couple years ago), with bits and pieces of current introductions.

The whole 'system' is not due for completion until, say, 2017 at the earliest, or 2020 more likely, but hey, this is indeed good stuff--the kind of stuff HP used to be known for, changing the playing field.

Meg Whitman, for her part, did a great job of noting that if all the Data Centers (read Cisco Systems and Intel servers and Google and eBay and Amazon concentrated collections of 100,000's of 'blades' were counted for their energy consumption, they'd match the 5th largest nation in the world.  Egad.

At a time when Cisco blade servers have just 'arrived' to challenge the x86 vendors (Cisco has a surprising 20% of that market in less than 3 years since entry), a revolutionary energy play could indeed have true value for HP's fortunes.

What is it they say?  Stay Tuned?