Client Server News articles from April 2002

Client Server News archives from April 2002

Walter Sues: Claims Fraud, Coercion & Lies.(Walter Hewlett)
April 1, 2002... God, don't ya just love it. This friendly $22 billion HP-Compaq merger thing - okay, $19 billion by now but still the largest high- tech merger ever - gets more and more entertaining, taking turns unique in corporate history, well, at least...

EMC Ups Layoffs, Follower Says.(Steve Duplessie report)
April 1, 2002... Storage giant EMC is laying off more staff than the 4,000 it said it would in October, according to Enterprise Storage Group founder and senior analyst Steve Duplessie. "Everything we've heard is that it's across-the-board," Duplessie...

HP Plans To Keep Integration Moving Despite Walter.
April 1, 2002... The now-famous HP-Compaq clean team responsible for their integration and redundancy plan has ballooned from an initial 300 or 400 people, then to 600 a couple, few weeks ago and now to 1,200 dedicated folks, according to an HP communiqu? from...

C# Widgetry Goes Shared Source.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... As it long ago intimated it would, Microsoft has made the source code for a Java-like Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) implementation and C# available as shared source, the closest it's gotten to open source. It's for academic,...

Oracle Reorgs.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Oracle is reorganizing its application development unit, something that reportedly shouldn't impact sales. Credit Suisse expects the move will put it back "on the playing field to compete effectively against SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel. The...

Network Commerce Sues Microsoft for Infringing Digital Content Patent.
April 1, 2002... Network Commerce Inc has sued Microsoft in federal court for infringing a patent it has on downloading digital content such as music, software and digital video in an online transaction. It is asking for an injunction and the usual treble...

Java's SOAP Slips.(support for protocol in Sun J2EE)
April 1, 2002... Despite Sun's attempts this week at JavaOne to trash .NET into the ground coupled with its attempts to at least pull even with Microsoft's advance column into web services, it appears that J2EE 1.4's native support for SOAP, the web services...

Iona Show Off Web Services Security Framework.
April 1, 2002... Iona Technologies, the wannabe web services contender, has got itself a web services security framework for secure web services integration naturally enough. Initially it'll authenticate web services by calling on LDAP v3- based directory...

Neoware Buys NCD Line.(Network Computing Devices ThinStar business)(Company Business and Marketing)
April 1, 2002... Neoware, the come-from-behind thin-client house trying to wrestle market leadership away from Wyse, has bought the ThinStar piece of NCD, the floundering company's most viable operation. The $4.25 million cash deal will give Neoware the...

NCD Tries Turning PCs into Thin Clients.(Network Computing Devices ThinPath PC)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
April 1, 2002... No sooner did the Neoware-NCD ThinStar acquisition deal close Wednesday when NCD, now more a software house than it used to be, was out with some new program called ThinPath PC meant to manage PCs as thin clients and reduce TCO. It turns a...

Lil8nux Advances.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Gee, for a bunch of guys kinda at sixes and sevens not all that long ago the Free Standards Group is coming around. Now, la-dee-da, it's got the Japanese government and Tokyo University launching an Asian Scripts & Infrastructure (ASTI) project...

Will the Feds Hand Microsoft Judge a Ripcord To Bail on the States and Will She Pull it?
April 1, 2002... Seems an odd time to inquire, but remedies judge Colleen Kollar- Kotelly asked the Justice Department late Monday whether it wants to belly up to the bar, so to speak, and venture an opinion on whether the nine non-settling states have a right...

The Texas Rangers are Back on CA's Case.(Ranger Governance)
April 1, 2002... Undaunted by the resounding defeat of its bid seven months ago to unseat four directors of Computer Associates, Texas-based investment firm Ranger Governance, an unit of the Ranger Capital Group hedge fund run by Sam Wyly, is making another...

CA Sues IBM.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Computer Associates sued IBM the other day in federal court alleging infringement of its SeOS access control software. CA claims that IBM Global Services illegally distributed the security software, which runs on NT, W2K and Unix. SeOS...

InterTrust Reorgs its Executive Suite.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... InterTrust Technologies Corporation, the DRM pioneer with the negligible revenues, a patent infringement case against Microsoft and a lot of IPO money in the bank, has restructured its executive suite. InterTrust founder Victor Shear, the...

IBM Bloodies Dell.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Based on numbers that all and sundry provide to IDC, IBM is preening over the not-very-surprising conclusion that it grew faster than Dell in high-end Intel server sales in Q4. Dell was flat or down in four- and eight-ways, while IBM, which...

An Intel Brand of Valium for McKinley & Xeon Boxes.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Never you fret your pretty little head. Uncle Intel has a solution to all your problems. Like these so-called free Solutions Blueprints it's putting together to help users feel comfortable deploying newfangled McKinley and Xeon servers. ...

Advice from Harvard.(Company Business and Marketing)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece by a couple of Harvard types saying it would have been a lot better if HP's outside directors had been allowed to meet on their own far from the intimidating glare of Madame Chairman Carly Fiorina. If...

HP To Front WordPerfect.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Corel says HP, a company whose dependence on Microsoft is growing, is going to bundle a 30-day trial version of WordPerfect Office 2000 on home and business PCs in North America. It said WordPerfect 9, included on Pavilion notebooks, can be...

Network Associates Has a Bad Week.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Network Associates has had a lousy week. First its McAfee.com spin- off tells it its offer to buy up the 24% it doesn't already own for $205 million and take the venture private again doesn't cut the mustard. Then the SEC tells it it's...

Darn Those Decimal Points.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Microsoft has amended the unearned revenue numbers it reported its last two quarters because of what it called "clerical errors." The company told the SEC that the $1.104 billion it had down for unearned revenues in its first quarter should...

CodeWeavers Claims To Run Office sans Windows.
April 1, 2002... While the nine rebel states are fighting in a courtroom in Washington, DC to put Microsoft Office on the auction block royalty- free and get it ported to Linux, CodeWeavers Inc claims it can run Office and Lotus Notes on a Linux PC without...

Red Hat is Growing Up.
April 1, 2002... Well, Red Hat's not just a freebie anymore. Nope. It's got itself an operating system that will never see a free download, according to executive VP of engineering Paul Cormier. It'll only be sold. It's not for the hoi polloi. It's for...

Caldera Claims Red Hat's Misguided.
April 1, 2002... Caldera, which must be worried, says Red Hat's got this Advanced Server thing all wrong - especially the part about trying to attack Unix - and that Linux is only good for "four-way or lower systems, web serving and file and print services."...

Sun Bows To Open Source Java. Well, Kinda, Sorta.
April 1, 2002... Sun has succumbed to pressure from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and threats that Apache will quit the Java Community Process. It will let upcoming "Sun-led" Java specifications go open source. Other Java players have apparently yet...

IBM Debuts New Linux Server for Telcos.(IBM Linux eServer 343)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... IBM introduced a new Linux eServer for the telecoms market Tuesday hitting Sun where it lives. IBM claims that a typical configuration of the new x343 costs 40% less than a Sun Netra 20 server. The 343 reportedly meets NEBS level 3,...

SteelEye Gets a New CEO.(Paul Adams)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Cluster specialist SteelEye Technology Inc has named Paul Adams president and CEO. He replaces company founder James Fitzgerald. Before SteelEye, Adams was CEO of collaborative CRM apps vendor TightLink and did stints at Evygo and Micro...

Ximian Launches Red Carpet CorporateConnect.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Ximian rolled out its previously announced Red Carpet CorporateConnect web service, the thing that lets companies centrally manage, control and customize the Linux software they distribute and update internally through a web-based management...

Linux Makes Headway in POS Market, Albeit Slowly.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2002... Linux is making headway in the retail point-of-sale terminal market but not as much as forecast. According to IHL Consulting Group, the population of retail POS terminals running Linux in North America rose 80% in 200, way under the very...

SOS Adds Third Patent Claim to its Veritas Suit.(Storage Computer Corporation)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Storage Computer Corporation (SOS), which wants to be the Microsoft of the storage set and charge all the vendors a tax, has added a third patent infringement charge to its five-month-old suit against Veritas. This time through, SOS claims...

LiveVault Debuts Backup & Recovery Service.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Storage start-up LiveVault has introduced a new managed online backup and recovery service. Dubbed Virtual Backup & Recovery Network, the IP-based service is targeted at small and mid-sized businesses and remote offices. The...

Prisa Upgrades VisualSAN.(VisualSAN 2.0)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Storage software house Prisa Networks has upgraded its VisualSAN SAN management software. Targeted at OEMs, the VisualSAN 2.0 widgetry features a new user interface and all three components of the suite have been enhanced - its Network...

SilkWorm 12000 Moves to GA.(Brocade Communications Systems)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Brocade Communications Systems said Monday that its new enterprise storage SilkWorm 12000 switch, whose frame filtering technology is at the heart of a suit filed a couple of weeks ago by McData, is now generally available to OEMs. The new...

Where Does The File System Belong?
April 1, 2002... Merrill Lynch says it thinks that "Sun is interested in taking the file system off the server on to a storage appliance, which would cause Veritas pain."

StorServer To Debut Compact Backup Appliance.(StorServer S10000)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The StorServer start-up plans to introduce a compact backup appliance called the S10000 at the end of April. The Colorado Springs, Colorado house says the 16-inch-high widget can be configured as a tabletop/desktop system or upgraded to...

EarthWhere Debuts.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
April 1, 2002... Storage Area Networks has introduced a new family of data management appliances called EarthWhere designed for users of remote sensing and geospatial data. Described as an extension of its GEMS line for the same markets, EarthWhere is...

ADIC Launches New SAN Appliance.(Product Announcement)
April 1, 2002... Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC) has brought out a new management and connectivity appliance for SANs called Pathlight 5000 to provide secure connections between pools of servers and storage resources. The Pathlight 5000...

nStor Loses $5.9m.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Storage systems vendor nStor Systems lost $5.9 million, or eight cents a share, on revenues of $3.7 million in Q4. A year ago, it lost $17.8 million, or 51 cents a share, on revenues of $7.3 million. nStor acting president Thomas...

Pioneer-Standard Forms Storage Unit.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Systems integrator Pioneer-Standard Computer Systems Division has set up a Storage Solutions Business unit to provide networked storage from major vendors including Compaq, Hitachi Data Systems and IBM to the enterprise.

McData Fighting Uphill Battle against Brocade, Merrill.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Says Merrill Lynch thinks short-term switch vendor McData is fighting an uphill battle against market leader Brocade Communications. "The engineering prowess of McData is being overshadowed by the sales and marketing power of Brocade,"...

THE DAY THE HP WAY DIED.
April 1, 2002... Forwarded from deep within the bowels of HP and sung to the melody of American Pie with apologies to Don McLean A long, long time ago I can still remember how computing used to be worthwhile. And I knew from the day I was born that I...

On the Verge of the Next Great Paradigm Shift.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Seems we should brace ourselves for the advent of the first application that Microsoft will ship that's been done up for the .NET platform. At least that's what Microsoft calls it though .NET purists may take exception. Anyway, whatever...

More Layoffs Ahead for Sun?(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... There are rumors abroad in the land that Sun is contemplating a reorg and a further reduction in force. When it decided to fire 9% of its staff, roughly 3,900 people, after a positively dismal September quarter, it was widely believed it was...

Work Quickens on Lunix-on-Hammer.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... There's a 2.4.19pre4 Linux kernel snapshot floating around. It's a port to AMD's x86-64 Hammer architect on the Virtutech VirtuHam-mer simulator. SuSE calls it a "major update" and says that since there are so many bug fixes developers should...

The Rose among the Thorns.
April 1, 2002... Ahh, we have learned that there's a clutch or two of Microsofties working to penetrate the enterprise who would love to be shot of any further identification with the Windows brand and look longingly at that Microsoft v Lindows suit where the...

Goings On.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Microsoft has lost Pete Conway, the director of Windows Datacenter marketing, to EMC. He reportedly needed to go back east for personal reasons. Two of the fellows on his staff are currently replacing him. The Datacenter push, such as it is...

Microsoft & Unisys Mount the 'Unix Alternative'.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Microsoft and Unisys are supposed to kick off their first-ever multimillion-dollar global marketing campaign today looking to dislodge customers from their Sun, HP and IBM boxes and move them to the ES7000 NT mainframe and Windows Datacenter....

Like the Wild West, the Town's Still Wide Open.(Merrill Lynch survey)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... The latest Merrill Lynch survey of 75 US and 25 European CIO finds two-thirds of them investing in web services and split between J2EE and .NET for their underpinnings, without any real commitment. The numbers run 26% J2EE, 22% .NET, 7% both,...

The Imperial Touch.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
April 1, 2002... Imperial Technology is days away from outing a SANaccelerator, supposedly the first data acceleration device specifically for improving application performance in Fibre Channel SANs. Apparently the bottleneck's not the network, it's in the...

The Grudge Report.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Walter Hewlett gave a speech at the Council of Institutional Investors Monday in Washington, DC, one of two known speaking engagements he's got as part of his 15 minutes of fame. Carly was supposed to speak on Tuesday but canceled the Friday...

Bubba.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... That judge that presiding over the Microsoft antitrust trial must have a really big bouncer named Bubba watching over her court who really spooked Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann. We ran into Tiemann right after he got off the stand and all we did...

Hmmm...(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... Bear Stearns had dinner with Borland the other night and came away with the news that - from Borland's perspective - the "adoption of Microsoft .NET and the Visual Studio.NET development platform has been slower than expected." Borland is still...

Counterculture.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2002... SAP CEO Hasso Plattner told a JavaOne audience this week that the "industry will not survive the next 20 years with applications built by a few big companies." Twiting rival Oracle and its something-for- everyone policy, he said, "Software has...

Lineo Narrowly Averts Death.
April 8, 2002... Lineo has run plum out of money. After terminating roughly 50 of its 120 employees two weeks ago at the behest of its board and investors (CSN No 443), Lineo, the seemingly promising embedded Linux pioneer, bounced its paychecks. In...

What Goes & What Stays if HP & Compaq Ever Merge.
April 8, 2002... This is just still rumor, mind, but the buzz in HP circles, or maybe we should say in and around the now-famous clean team, suggests that the way they'll separate the wheat from the chaff in their look-a- like product lines if and when HP and...

Belluzzo Out.
April 8, 2002... When the news broke Wednesday night that Microsoft president and COO Rick Belluzzo was out, the practically universal reaction was to make book that he was canned. The circumstances are at least suspicious. Despite some mumbling from...

Dell Unsheaths a Blade.
April 8, 2002... Dell turned up in New York Wednesday before its meeting with Wall Street with prototype blade servers in tow to underscore the subtle message that it ain't just no stinkin' PC company. See, every now and again Dell takes a nip of that...

Dell, Microsoft & InfiniBand.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Dell said Wednesday that it was working closely with Microsoft on InfiniBand, which basically comes down to Microsoft using nothing but Dell servers for the R&D and Dell making accommodations as Microsoft phones them in, one of Dell's VPs said....

Dell Reiterates.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... The real reason Dell hit the Big Apple this week was to chat up the investor class and reaffirm its fiscal Q1 guidance of 16 cents a share on $7.9 billion. Actually it's doing a tad better than it expected. In mid-February it figured...

New Hot Line.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... We read in the papers that because of 9-11 they're going to set up a so-called CEO Link, a high-security, mostly phone-based communications network linking government leaders to high-tech CEOs. It's for recovery and response. Initial access...

HP Drums Walter off the Board.
April 8, 2002... Running the risk of looking small, HP is going to strip Walter Hewlett of his directorship for sandbagging it with that lawsuit he filed last week to invalidate what he calls a tainted shareholders vote and derail any merger with Compaq. ...

OASIS Starts DRM Work.(digital rights management)(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... There's a new Rights Language Technical Committee over at OASIS, the XML interoperability consortium, to advance an XML rights language standard for digital rights management. They figure to provide a universal method for specifying and...

P4 at 2.4 Gigs.(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... The Pentium 4 is now at 2.4GHz and goes for $562 in 10,000-unit quantities. The thing is being built on 300mm wafers as well as a 0.13-micron process.

HP & Web Services.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... HP says it's put pixie dust into its Netaction software to make "the potential of web services into reality." My, my. Anyway, it's aiming these new developer tools, solutions and support services at telcos, service providers, government and...

HP Dubs Knights.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Good as its word, HP Wednesday named 150 senior managers, a m?lange of both firms, who will report directly to the heads of the company's prospective new businesses. It also named the folks who will run regional sales in North America,...

Walter's Subpoenas.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... The Dow Jones reported Thursday that Walter should be subpoenaing Deutsche Bank, Bankers Trust, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Company for documents in his suit against HP and that subpoenas had already been served on Compaq, Deutsche Asset...

Sun on HPQ.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... There's something about the Far East that gets American executives to musing about the HP-Compaq merger. Michael Dell licked his lips from out there in anticipation of making out like a bandit because of their prospective marriage a couple of...

Aelita Opens Europe Front.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Aelita Software, whose charter is to improve the security and usability of Microsoft widgetry like Active Directory, Exchange, .NET and Windows 2000, is pushing into Europe. It's set up a UK operation in Reading under ex-SCO Central European...

Rogue Wave Restructures.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Rogue Wave Software, which ousted his president back in October, has now cut 10% of its US staff to enhance profitability and move more of its thrust overseas to Asia and Europe. It has set up an Asia- Pacific headquarters in Sydney and is...

The Antitrust Bill.
April 8, 2002... Citizens against Government Waste (CAGW), a not-for-profit organization that says it's not a Microsoft thrall, conservatively estimates that the continued litigation of the nine states and the District of Columbia is running taxpayers $30,000...

Network Associates Moves on McAfee.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Network Associates has changed its mind again and has started a tender for the 25% of its McAfee.com that it doesn't own for roughly $205 million. McAfee, which previously rated the offer insufficient, told its shareholders to hang in there and...

TCO is on Microsoft's Side.
April 8, 2002... The Aberdeen Group has been doing some TCO research - on whose nickel is probably evident by the results. It said it found that Windows 2000-based server enterprises - that's for medium and large business - ran at a 46% cost advantage over...

MSFT Storage Site.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... In keeping with its storage ambitions, as murky as they may be, there is now a Microsoft storage web site. See www.microsoft.com/storage logically enough. The most interesting tip of the iceberg is probably the Blackcomb operating system...

Imlogic Gets Funding.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... IMlogic, the Boston outfit where Microsoft is picking up IM archiving technology for next-generation widgetry, got $3.75 million in first-round capital from General Catalyst and Kodiak Venture Partners. IMlogic founder and CEO Francis deSouza...

VS.NET for T&M.(Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, T&M Programmers Toolkit from Agilent Technologies)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
April 8, 2002... Agilent technologies has got a T&M Programmers Toolkit that it says extends Microsoft Visual Studio.NET to engineers creating test and measurement apps. It says it's completely integrated into the Microsoft toolkit. Prices start at $695.

Starkitty Joins the Litter.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Seems we should brace for Sun's imminent new Starkitty release, a baby version of its high-end Starcat Sun Fire 15K that falls somewhere between a 24p Cat and a mid-range Sun Fire 6800. A little something that perhaps Unisys would like to claw...

EMC Better Be Careful, This One's Got a Gun.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... EMC's got one ticked-off customer who's telling other folks avoid EMC and its Platinum reseller ManagedStorage Inc. Seems its Clariion storage array crashed and its system was down for 40 hours because of a bug in the EMC firmware that caused...

Lineo Sing-Along.
April 8, 2002... Business crises these days seem to be provoking outbursts of song. Last week we had the Requiem for the HP Way sung to the tune of "American Pie" and this week's anonymous contribution is in honor of Lineo and is sung to the tune of that old...

Pesatori's Out as BlueArc CEO.
April 8, 2002... Enrico Pesatori has stepped down as CEO of BlueArc Corporation. The move is the latest change in senior management at the highly touted NAS start-up. In Q4, a restructuring led to the departure of BlueArc's sales chief Alan McMillan and...

McData To Miss Forecast; Revises Guidance Again.
April 8, 2002... Storage switch vendor McData Corporation warned Thursday that it would fall short of its earnings and revenue guidance for Q1. It expects revenues to range from $62 million and $64 million down from $73 million-$78 million. The revised...

HP Names Compaq Exec Storage Chief.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... Hewlett-Packard has named Howard Elias, senior VP of Compaq's Business Critical Server Group, to head the storage group of the combined organization, if and when they get that far. Compaq made it clear a few months ago that Elias was one of...

HP Debuts New Virtualization Appliance.(sv3000)(Product Announcement)
April 8, 2002... As distracted as it might be by the merger fracas, Hewlett-Packard has still managed to roll out a new virtualization appliance targeted at mid-sized business. Like its older sibling, the HP SureStore SANlink, the new sv3000 device lets...

Sun's Achilles Heel.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2002... "Storage has been the Achilles heel of Sun's network computing architecture where we estimate that Sun's attach rate of storage to servers has fallen to the 25%-30% range, down from more than 50% two years ago. - Robertson Stephens

New NetApp Widgetry Meant To Boost Biz Apps Performance.(DAFS Database Accelerator, NetCache 5.3)(Product Announcement)
April 8, 2002... Network Appliance introduced two new products Tuesday aimed at boosting the performance of enterprise applications such as databases, ERP and CRM software. The DAFS Database Accelerator 1.0, an extension to NetApp's database storage...