Nokia once again demonstrated its market leadership during the second quarter, with total shipments equaling more than those of the next three vendors combined. Much of Nokia's growth was attributed to its shipment growth within Europe and Asia, but still showed some signs of struggle in North America. At the same time, Nokia enjoyed leadership within the converged mobile device space, with a record shipment of 13.9 million units shipped, thanks in large part to its heavily promoted Nseries and Eseries devices.
Samsung sustained its upward trajectory for the fourth quarter in a row, and shipped a new record unit volume for a single quarter. With 37.4 million units shipped, Samsung wrested the No. 2 spot from Motorola. While Samsung pointed out the success of its Ultra Edition phones and recent release of its Ultra Special devices, the company also enjoyed an increase in volumes going into emerging markets.
Motorola was the only vendor to post a year-on-year decrease among the leading vendors, and by the end of the second quarter, the company slipped to third place, citing ongoing shipment challenges in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and to lesser extent, Europe. Motorola is seeking to reverse its fortunes by installing a new management team, refreshing its product portfolio, lowering inventory and reducing its workforce, but expects to face more challenges before recovering. On the positive side, the company crossed a milestone having shipped its 100 millionth RAZR phone.
Sony Ericsson remained the clear number four vendor during the second quarter, and took honors for having the largest year-over-year shipment increase among the leading vendors. Sony Ericsson's Walkman line of phones accounted for a third of its shipments in the second quarter, and the company announced two new Walkman-branded handsets, the W960 and the W910, both expected to ship later this year. In addition, Sony Ericsson announced plans to establish its own research and development site in Chennai, India, a move that will no doubt aid its manufacturing agreements with partners Flextronics and Foxconn, which already have locations in India.
LG Electronics, having reached a new record shipment level this quarter, remained firmly in fifth place during the second quarter, and despite its improvements, closed the gap with Sony Ericsson only slightly. LG Electronics' also reported a marked increase in its operating margin. A year ago, LG Electronics' operating margin hovered just above zero, but in a year's time, LG was able to push it above the 10% mark, an accomplishment attributed to its high-end devices like the Chocolate and the enV.
Culled from celullar-news.com

Cisco has announced the introduction of VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC), an orchestration platform that leverages network intelligence to provision resources together as virtualized services.
Considered as industry-first approach, this solution greatly reduces application deployment times, improves overall resource utilization, and offers greater business agility. Further, VFrame DC includes an open API, and easily integrates with third party management applications, as well as best-of-breed server and storage virtualization offerings.
With Vframe DC, customers can now link their compute, networking and storage infrastructures together as a set of virtualized services. This services approach provides a simple yet powerful way to quickly view all the services configured at the application level to improve troubleshooting and change management.
VFrame DC offers a policy engine for automating resource changes in response to infrastructure outages and performance changes. Additionally, these changes can be controlled by external monitoring systems via integration with the VFrame DC web services application-programming interface (API).
“Taking advantage of the ubiquity of the network to orchestrate data center services could help data centers evolve beyond their current siloed functions,” said Lucinda Borovick, Director of Data Center Networks, IDC. “This approach has the potential to deliver more efficient application provisioning, reduce costs, and increase IT productivity.”
VFrame DC is a highly efficient orchestration platform for service provisioning, which requires only a single controller and one back-up controller. The real time provisioning engine has a comprehensive view of compute, storage and network resources.
This view enables VFrame DC to provision resources as virtualized services using graphical design templates. These design templates comprise one of four VFrame DC modular components: design, discovery, deploy, and operations. These components are integrated together with a robust security interface that allows controlled access by multiple organizations.
“VFrame Data Center offers unprecedented orchestration within the data center network, for dynamically re-programming server, storage and network resources into agile application services,” said Jayshree Ullal, Senior Vice President, Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco. “This agility addresses the need for greater time to market for complex E-commerce application deployments by customers.”