HP accused of spying on Dell's printer plans

A former Hewlett-Packard executive accused by the company of stealing trade secrets is now saying that he was instructed by the company's management to spy on rival Dell.

Karl Kamb Jr., previously HP's vice president of business development and strategy, was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by HP in 2005. It alleges that onetime HP employees illegally started a rival flat-screen TV company while still working at HP and it is claiming up to $100 million in damages.

Kamb, who has denied any wrongdoing, filed a countersuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Friday, according to legal documents. Among Kamb's allegations:

• That in 2002, HP hired Katsumi Iizuka, a president of Dell Japan until 1995, to supply information on Dell's plans to enter the printer business.

• That "senior HP management" signed off on the payments to Iizuka.

• That HP obtained Kamb's private phone records through pretexting, the practice of seeking information by masquerading as someone else. Among the defendants in Kamb's suit are former HP Chairman Patricia Dunn and former HP attorney Kevin Hunsaker.

In a statement on Wednesday, HP denied Kamb's accusations.

"This counterclaim is wholly without merit," HP said. "It's a blatant attempt to delay the prosecution of the original case...We intend to vigorously pursue our original claim and to defend ourselves against this action."

The countersuit, which seeks unspecified damages, comes only a few months after an embarrassing episode in HP's history, in which the company engaged in illegal pretexting to obtain the private phone records of journalists, employees and company board members as part of an effort to uncover a news leak on the board. Former HP Chairman Patricia Dunn has been charged with four felony counts related to the scandal and has pleaded not guilty.

The new allegations leveled at HP by Kamb do not appear to be directly tied to the hunt for the boardroom leak. However, Kamb has pointed to some of the evidence that surfaced during last fall's investigation into HP's pretexting, and a timeline indicates that the company had already employed pretexting for phone records around August 2005.

Dell calls on Motorola's Garriques

Dell has hired Motorola's Ron Garriques to run the company's entire consumer business, it announced Friday.

Garriques, who was an executive vice president at Motorola in charge of its cell phone division, will become the latest hire at Dell in recent weeks. He will report directly to CEO Michael Dell and run an organization that contains all of Dell's product and sales teams dedicated to consumer goods, said Bob Pearson, a company spokesman.

Over the past few months, Dell has overhauled its executive roster, following a disappointing year that cost former CEO Kevin Rollins his job. For the most part, the new executives--such as Garriques--have come from outside the PC and server industry as the company looks for new talent and fresh ideas.

Dell executives have admitted that the company took its eye off the ball last year in being slow to respond to customer support and quality concerns. Several longtime Dell executives have been reassigned or have left the company as the new blood comes onboard.

Garriques brings his track record from Motorola down to Central Texas. Under his leadership, Motorola introduced a number of successful handsets--such as the Razr--that were hits with consumers. However, Motorola's momentum has slowed of late, and the company has warned of lower-than-expected profits.

Dell is wasting little time getting Garriques behind a desk; he starts next week. The company is also kicking off a search for a chief marketing officer, Pearson said.

Dell Opens Call Center in Philippines

American computer maker Dell Inc. opened its second customer call center in the Philippines Thursday, bringing the number of local employees to 2,600, a company official said.

'We're growing quite rapidly,' Dick Hunter, Dell's vice president for customer experience, told a news conference.

He said the company plans to hire about 100 people per month until it reaches the target of about 2,600 employees.

'Our expansion is evidence of the quality and talent of professionals here in the Philippines,' he said.

Dell's customer contact network includes more than 25 locations globally.

Company officials declined to discuss investment details, but Philippine Trade Secretary Peter Favila said Dell had infused investments of 466 million pesos ($9.7 million) for the second call center.

Dell invested 366 million pesos ($7.6 million) last year for its first customer support facility in Manila. It now employs 1,400 workers.

The call center industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in the Philippines, which has a large pool of college-educated workforce easily trained for English-language customer assistance.

The Contact Center Association of the Philippines projects the local call center business to become a $7.3 billion industry by 2010. It employed almost 180,000 people last year.

Dell takes small steps toward Linux

Dell has acknowledged that 83,000 users have urged it to sell PCs with Linux pre-installed, but it has fallen short of accepting their suggestion.

The requests were made through a new user forum, Dell IdeaStorm, which was launched by Dell 10 days ago, shortly after Michael Dell regained the chief executive's seat. Dell IdeaStorm gives users the chance to tell the PC vendor what kind of systems it should offer.

As of Monday, more than 83,000 users had requested that Linux should be provided on all Dell PCs.

In a statement issued on its Web site, Dell said it had taken notice of the suggestions made on the IdeaStorm. But it stopped short of offering pre-installed Linux, and instead said it would certify some of its corporate machines with Novell's Suse Linux software. Certification should mean that Suse would function smoothly on all Dell PCs.

"It's exciting to see the IdeaStorm community's interest in open-source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. We are also evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line," Dell said.

"The IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen (Linux) distributions. We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas," the statement continued.

While Dell responded to four other suggestions from the IdeaStorm, it chose not to respond to two of the top six requests, one asking for the provision of OpenOffice alongside Microsoft Office and one requesting that Dell's systems should be offered without an operating system for customers outside the U.S. Fifty-three thousand users promoted the first suggestion, and 32,000 voted for the latter.

Dell currently offers three PC models without an operating system, known as the nSeries, but only customers in the U.S. can buy them.

One request the company did address was a demand for a "clean" Vista operating system, without extra software from the likes of AOL, EarthLink and Google.

Dell said customers buying its XPS range of PCs could already opt out of "almost all" pre-installed software. "We will be expanding this effort in the coming months," Dell's statement said. "Dell has also taken steps to make it easier for customers to remove software once they receive their PC. Today, customers can kick off an un-install of almost any application by declining the EULA (End User Licensing Agreement)."

"We plan on increasing the degree of customer control moving forward, allowing customers to more quickly select software they want to remove and facilitate simple un-installation," Dell added.