HP sends 200 employees to Palm, VPN & Enterprise-class security on the way 33
HP recently held a presentation / webcast for employees and Palm Exec Jon Rubinstein discussed both Palm and the future of webOS during the presentation.
Rubinstein was typically bullish about Palm's future given that he (and we) expects the mobile web to become "10 times larger than today's PC internet." Palm now has the resources to deal with a scale of that size, Rubinstein said that "more than 200 HP employees have joined the Palm team, including many sales people."
Some of those HP employees on-site for the presentation received Palm Pre phones. One such question was from an HP employee looking to find out how soon webOS would be able to handle the (probably pretty secure) Enterprise intranet the company uses. Rubinstein noted that "We do have VPN capability and that type of thing coming online soon. We do have enterprise-class security coming in the future as well."
VPN is no surprise after the gigantic webOS 2.0 screenshot leak earlier this week, but we'll be curious what other enterprise features will be coming. More generally, we're glad to see that HP is facilitating engagement between Palm and the larger company.
Thanks, anonymous!
33 Comments
Man, I CAN"T WAIT!!!!!
Count me in...I'm pumped and it is good to see HP stepping in with help from 200 more people (hopefully most in R&D).
I'm hoping many of those are from the Voodoo side to help bring the hardware in step with the excellent software we all love. Thanks for the update, Sorli...
Palm need help in just about all areas. The one area they probably have a handle on is the OS, but a few extra hands, eyeballs and neurons won't hurt either.
I'm hoping many of "The 200" are skilled communicators from Sales and Marketing, as that was one of the tent poles, to co-opt a term, that Palm never raised properly.
So that's about a 20% increase in employees? I think I remember Palm saying they were around a 1000 employees before although I guess probably quite a few people left, we heard about some of the high profile members leaving but I suppose there were others.
It's a shame that Palm lost a lot of the high-level management and design team that were behind webOS but I got the feeling that they were suffering from not having enough lower level people to implement all the great ideas. Hopefully this can turn that around and they get some great visionary people from HP coming into fill the shoes left.
Very cool to hear. It can't come soon enough, but the beta SDK and leaks have tide me over.
Cool, maybe this will get fixed and I will be able to access my corporate email:
forums.palm.com/t5/Wireless-Email/WebOS-Not-Enforcing-Exchange-Hard-PIN-s-when-will-this-be-fixed/m-p/257025/highlight/false
One can hope.
i guess no mention of FLASH
I'll certainly take it if it comes, but I've given up on Flash for our current devices. Yeah, it's a broken promise, but too much time has passed. The reason(s) don't matter, to me, at least.
+1 We've gotten this far without it. And the early reviews from Flash mobile users reveal it's costs appear to be equal to its benefits, so I'm not in a hurry to be a beta tester.
The extra help is welcome news. I need the native ability to open forwarded .eml files and Flash would be nice. This is so close to a business class device, the inability to open forwarded .eml files is inexcusable.
i hope Ruby ask for more if he needs more.
Glad to hear about enterprise security. My company supports some other platforms, but forbids some (like WebOS) without...full incription, or something like that. Trying to wait patiently.
incription?
My trusty old TX was stolen by a sleazy pickpocket yesterday. Encryption is a key feature for me in a new device.
Oh, and I need a screen as big as my TX.
It's funny that I have to buy another TX from the web instead of getting another Palm device. It's been, what, 5 years, and still no large screen slate device from Palm?
Palm created the slate, and Apple ran away with the idea and scored.
Just like the pickpocket did with my old TX I guess.
From a market share perspective, I'd wager Palm did better then Apple is ever going to do. What proportion of the PIM market did Palm have, at its peak?
Define "better."
Because I am hard pressed to imagine any metric that puts Palm at any point in its history above where Apple is now.
Palm PIM was a near monopoly. Sony, Handspring, just about everybody licensed Garnet. Sharp Wizard and Apple Newton were the only notable exceptions that I can remember. And we know how long they lasted.
You're defining better by "market share" (of a new field they -- basically --defined)?
I will agree with that.
But they weren't big, they weren't flush, they got bought and sold over and over again, so by many other metrics they wouldn't be considered "better" at all.
So WTH happened? ( and I ask this as a long time Palm user, and early adopter, who loved the company)
I didn't define anything. Just answered your question.
They moved the o/s on to become the backbone of the Treo phones, evolved a little, then sat on their hands a lot, and wasted a lot of money inventing (then not releasing) the netbook computer.
Sad chapters for sure. They lost their way.
And actually, Palm was a participant in the tech bubble with wild increases in stick price. Palm amd Handspring paved the way for the smartphone era. Every travel and sales oriented business person had a pda with palmos on it.
> we'll be curious what other enterprise features will be coming
One of them better be proper PEAP.
Too bad HP didn't send more like 300 employees because then you could have used an image from the movie "The 300" with the Spartans holding Palm smartphones. That would have been epic. If I were running HP, I would send over 100 more employees just to see it.
I beieve that we will get more than one new phone. When you look at HP PRODUCTS they cover all poppulations. I can3 wait for new hardware and built in speed.
I just had to replace my old pre that was falling apart. In the process no one gave me a clue that I was going to lose all my data in certain apps that I had valuable info. In. Accounting to disres thing that I spent lots of time on. The folks at Sprint so called copied everything on my hard drive but were not able to get my data back. ANY SUGGESTIONS WOULD BE APPECIATED.
I am in...I am at home today, but I am a working! Contacting different venues for space. Talking to different providers who want exposure and contribute. I will do what it takes for the Pre and Palm as a whole to succeed. I am so in. Dallas get ready!!!
Palm/HP, please send a few people to work with IBM to port Lotus Notes Traveler to webOS 2.0. While I'm at it, I may as well ask that it also somehow integrate with synergy.
This is great - the news trends out of HPalm are in the right direction, and we're getting more each month. A lot of good things are in store for us users in the next few months.
I want flash I need to watch my cnet.com videos from my phone and I don't have to borrow my brothers android to do that
By "other enterprise features" I hope they mean proxy support for networking is included. Without that, many corporate networks (like mine) will still be useless with webOS.
Hopefully the new hp SALES folk at Palm open up the app catalog for Switzerland so that we get access to paid palm webos apps. As long standing palm users and importers of palm pre devices, we expect this step and could contribute to the web os growth.
"other enterprise features"
I hope this means Lotus Notes support.
What is reported in this story is true. Ruby seemed pretty fired up and confident.
VPNc is not a Palm program (if it's the same thing I'm thinking of) and you can get it now.
http://code.google.com/p/prevpnc/
where are all the hp staff apps?