Perot wins key health-care IT outsourcing deal in India

Perot Systems has bagged a 10-year IT outsourcing contract in India, its first outside the U.S. The win reflects Perot's bid to grow its health-care business in markets other than the U.S., as well as in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil, and Mexico, company executives said on Friday. But only 4.1 percent of the company's revenue from the health-care industry was from outside the U.S., up from 2.5 percent two years ago, said Kevin Fickenscher, executive vice president for International Healthcare at Perot, in a telephone interview. In the second quarter, 48 percent of Perot's revenue came from the health-care industry. Expansion outside the U.S. is a key focus area for Perot, said Raj Asava, Perot's chief strategy officer.

The maturing health-care industry in these emerging markets has a big appetite and also funds to invest in technologies such as electronic health records and clinical information systems, Asava said. For its health-care business, the company is targeting emerging markets in the Middle East, China, India, and Latin America, besides more mature markets such as the U.K. and Germany. The contract with Max Healthcare, a large hospital chain in India, has an initial value of US$18 million, but could go up in value as more applications and services are added, Perot said. The deployment will be around the open source VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) electronic health record and health information system, he added. Besides running the applications already installed at Max, Perot will also deploy an electronic health records system and other IT infrastructure, Fickenscher said. Perot already has a services subsidiary in India with about 9,000 staff that offer outsourcing services to customers in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world.

Multinational and Indian service providers are targeting India's growing services market, including in the telecommunications sector where a number of mobile service providers are outsourcing their IT infrastructure. About 60 percent of these staff do work for the health-care industry. The immediate opportunity for vendors of IT targeting the health-care industry is from private sector providers, but government run hospitals will soon follow, Fickenscher said.

HP's DreamScreen aims to cut ties to the PC

HP is trying to revive the idea of placing smart screens around the home to display content from the Web and PCs, though the number of Web sites available at first will be very limited. It can also be hooked up to a PC to play music or video stored on the computer in a different room, or to display photos like a digital picture frame. "What we're really trying to do is bring a simple, user-intuitive device that's always on, always connected to the Internet, to bring Web applications that don't require PCs," said Ameer Karim, director of worldwide marketing with HP's futures and innovations group. The HP DreamScreen, announced Thursday, can display content from the Web without needing to be hooked up to a PC, using its built-in wireless connection. The screens use a remote control and a touch panel for input, and can also be used as an alarm clock, to check the weather or to play any of about 15,000 global radio stations, HP said.

Instead, HP worked with Internet companies and content providers to develop interfaces to display their content. The DreamScreens don't come with a Web browser, however, which limits the Web content that can be viewed. The initial partners are Facebook, the music site Pandora and the photo site Snapfish. The company stressed that the devices are supposed to complement PCs, not be a substitute for them. More applications may be added in the future, Karim said.

Starting a PC just to check something on the Web is time-consuming, Karim noted. The products come in 10.2- and 13.3-inch sizes, priced at US$249 and $299, respectively. The DreamScreens can be hung on a wall or put on a table in living rooms or kitchens, and look more elegant than most PCs, according to Karim. "Internally, we've been calling it 'bite-sized computing.' It's snippets of the stuff you'd normally get on a computer, but we don't really want to bring productivity here," he said. They will be available starting October in the U.S. through Best Buy, Amazon.com and other retailers. The device may support TV viewing in the future, Karim said. "It is very likely you will see these devices do all sorts of things like access content on a DVR or a set-top box." It may also pull video content from TV stations in the future.

HP didn't provide plans to sell the product worldwide. Other companies have tried to market smart screens for the home but without success. The products failed to gain traction and were eventually cancelled. A few years ago Microsoft was promoting its Windows Powered Smart Displays, which had to be connected to a PC to display Web content but were otherwise similar. HP's smart screen uses the Linux OS and comes with 2GB of internal storage so that photos, music and movies can be stored locally. It supports multiple MPEG video formats; the JPEG, PNG and bitmap (BMP) photo file formats; and MP3, WMA, AAC and WAV audio formats.

It will have a USB port and a memory card reader, from which digital content can be played. HP didn't comment about the processor inside the product. Intel has shown off TV sets and set-top boxes that run small Web applications that it says can complement TV viewing. Other companies are also experimenting with new ways to access the Internet in the home. For example, a group of friends on MySpace could chat with each other about a program they are watching.

HP adds Snow Leopard printer drivers after customer complaints

Hewlett-Packard has added support for an additional 38 printer models or printer series to Snow Leopard, delivering on a promise made shortly after the release of Apple 's new operating system when angry users complained that older devices didn't work after upgrading. According to HP, 38 DeskJet, OfficeJet, and LaserJet drivers were added to those made available on Aug. 28, when Apple launched Snow Leopard . Although a list showing only the new drivers has not been published on either Apple's or HP's Web site, the complete list available on the former has been updated to include the new drivers, said Rick Spillers, a member of HP's Mac Connect team. On Thursday, Apple posted a printer driver update for Mac OS X 10.6 , aka Snow Leopard, but did not call out the specific drivers added to the 51MB driver download.

Among the newly-supported printers are the HP 910 inkjet printer, the DeskJet D1300 series, the OfficeJet 5500 series and the LaserJet M1120. Almost immediately after Apple started selling Snow Leopard, users who upgraded began griping on the company's support forum that their long-reliable printers were not being recognized by the new OS. Others became angry when an HP representative told them they should buy a new printer if a driver wasn't available for Snow Leopard. HP 1280 working!!!" crowed another user, "omarz," in a message Thursday. "I just update[d] to Snow Leopard 10.6.1 and now suddenly it was detected and it's working!" A driver for HP's PSC 1200 series was one of the 38 included in yesterday's update. After Thursday's update by Apple, several users reported on the same support forum that they were now able to use their formerly-bricked printers. "Today, I downloaded all the update software for printers and Mac [Snow Leopard], and everything now works fine," said someone identified as "AndyGump" on the same thread where users complained two weeks ago. "Incredible! HP's Spillers recommended that users update to Mac OS X 10.6.1 before applying the separate driver update. "Make sure that the printer is turned on and connected via [a] USB cable before launching Apple Software Update," said Spillers in an e-mail reply to questions. Apple built support into Snow Leopard for some printer makers' all-in-one devices, adding the functionality to the Image Capture application.

Spillers also said that there has been confusion about how owners of HP all-in-one devices - which both print and scan, and in some cases also fax, documents - get their hardware to work with Snow Leopard. "The other interesting thing I've found is trying to educate customers on the new scan interface for HP inkjet All-in-Ones that we've integrated with Snow Leopard," he said. HP has posted instructions on how to use its all-in-one printer/scanner hardware with Snow Leopard on its customer support site. Looking at the [support] forums, it seems that HP is the only print vendor really participating ... not sure I see much input from other print vendors." Snow Leopard users can manually download the HP driver update from Apple's site, or install it using the Mac's integrated update service. Spillers also took a shot at HP's rivals. "In general," he said, "HP did a great job providing full updated 10.6 drivers for almost all of our products, including LaserJets going back 10+ years.

Dell finds a rare bright spot in demand for iSCSI storage

Like many technology vendors, Dell has been battered in recent months by a steep drop in demand for computers and other technology products. Yet demand remains strong for one of Dell's smaller product families, the EqualLogic range of iSCSI (Internet SCSI) storage-area network products.

"A lot of the growth is coming from virtualization," said Travis Vigil, senior global manager for storage at Dell.

Dell acquired EqualLogic in January 2008, paying US$1.4 billion to acquire the company and its iSCSI product line.

ISCSI is a transport protocol that allows blocks of data to be carried over an IP network without the need for specialized networking interconnects, like Fibre Channel. The technology has gained in popularity as more companies look to virtualization to improve the efficiency and performance of servers and applications. Compared to Fibre Channel, iSCSI can be cheaper and less complex to roll out, which makes it attractive to companies worried about managing costs.

That's translated into higher demand for Dell's iSCSI products, particularly among companies with between 500 and 5,000 employees. During the first quarter, sales of EqualLogic iSCSI products rose 71 percent over the same period last year, even as Dell's overall storage sales declined by 17 percent, to $534 million.

While revenue growth was strong, the profitability of the product line cannot be determined since Dell's financial statements don't provide that level of granularity.

Analysts and others will be watching closely when Dell reports its second-quarter results later Thursday. To be sure, iSCSI storage products alone won't reverse Dell's fortunes or do much to counter a sharp slowdown in PC sales. The company estimates these products will generate $400 million in revenue this year; that's equivalent to just 0.7 percent of the $61.1 billion in revenue that Dell reported for its previous fiscal year, which ended in January.

Even so, strong demand for these products has been a rare bright spot for Dell executives who've otherwise struggled in recent quarters with sinking demand for the company's products.