Client Server News articles from April 2009

Client Server News archives from April 2009

Sony Trademarks the Term 'PS Cloud'.
April 6, 2009... Sony apparently has cloud intentions. Sony Computer Entertainment has asked the US Patent and Trademark Office for a trademark on the term "PS Cloud." It's also reportedly registered the domain name "playstationcloud.com." The...

Microsoft & TomTom Settle; TomTom Pays Despite GPL.
April 6, 2009... The Linux kernel apparently does in fact infringe on Microsoft's patents - at least that's certainly the way it looks to the casual observer because TomTom has agreed to yank the offending widgetry out of its GPS devices over the next two...

SCO in Death-Defying Race to Denver.
April 6, 2009... SCO lost its last bid in bankruptcy court for an extension on putting a reorganization plan together. That means it no longer has dibs on formulating such a plan and that Novell or IBM could waltz in and propose one themselves and...

Jaspersoft Delivers First SaaS-Enabled BI Platform.
April 6, 2009... Jaspersoft has moved on to version 3.5, making it the industry's first multi-tenanted SaaS-enabled Business Intelligence platform. It's also got enhanced user and data scalability and new integrated web-based analysis capabilities that don't...

IBM Drops Price for Sun: Journal.
April 6, 2009... The Wall Street Journal, flourishing its unidentified sources, said Thursday afternoon that the price IBM is willing to pay for Sun had drop from between $10 and $11 a share to between $9 and $10 and that Sun is willing to accept the cut -...

While IBM & Sun Haggle, Rackable Buys SGI.(Company overview)
April 6, 2009... Rackable Systems, the large-scale server wannabe, said Wednesday that it's buying the now bankrupt SGI - or at least most of it - for roughly $25 million in cash plus the assumption of certain undisclosed liabilities provided a higher bid...

Amazon Turns Numbers Cruncher.
April 6, 2009... Amazon Thursday added Hadoop number crunching to its other cloud skills. It's put out a public beta of a new Web Service called Elastic MapReduce for processing vast amounts of data using a hosted Hadoop framework running on its giant...

Microsoft & IBM Parlay over Cloud Manifesto.
April 6, 2009... Microsoft and IBM, estranged over IBM's high-handedness in dictating a seemingly innocuous Cloud Manifesto that's read as Big Blue's attempt to stamp itself the ultimate leader of the cloud movement met Monday and parlayed at the Cloud...

Microsoft Chases Small Businesses.
April 6, 2009... Microsoft is now the parent of another new stripped-down server aimed at the huge population of small businesses - especially in emerging markets prone to using pirated software or Linux - called Windows Server 2008 Foundation. It is meant...

IBM Pushes a Species of Lotus in the Cloud.
April 6, 2009... IBM has got some cloud-based software that it will host on its own data centers that it calls a survival mechanism in this economy. Formally known as LotusLive Engage, it's promising to be out by April 7. It includes integrated...

Google Turns Big-Time VC.(venture capital )(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Google is going into the venture capital business with a $100 million fund to start, a year-one down payment apparently on millions more to come. Google Ventures will be run by William Maris, founder of web hosting pioneer Burlee.com and...

EC Delivers Cookie Monster Ultimatum.
April 6, 2009... The European Commission is waving a big stick at Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft and threatening to crack down on consumer profiling by online advertisers on the supposition that "basic rights in terms of transparency,...

Parallels Targets Virtualization at Workstation Market.
April 6, 2009... Parallels has launched Workstation Extreme said to be the first high-end workstation virtualization solution to give users near-native performance on resource-intensive applications, widgetry that typically requires extremely large memory,...

eBay Courts Third-Party Developers.
April 6, 2009... eBay is now officially beta testing its subscription-based Selling Manager service as a platform for third-party developers to sell their embedded tools. The space is used by close to 300,000 online merchants to manage their businesses at...

Deutsche Post Spin-Off Uses Open Source SOA To Bring Eclipse App Development to the Cloud.
April 6, 2009... Deutsche Post spin-off Sopera GmbH has waded into the cloud game with what it calls a next-generation application development platform. The company's Eclipse SOA initiative offers a platform in Eclipse, the IBM-started open source IDE, for...

Intel Nehalems Hit the Beach Running.
April 6, 2009... Intel launched its 45nm quad-core next-generation Nehalem Xeons Monday comparing them to the Pentium Pro of almost 15 years ago, the chip that put the company on the server map. Before the Pentium Pro, the first Intel chip optimized for...

HP Rolls Out its Nehalem Line.
April 6, 2009... In tandem with Intel's Nehalem 5500 launch Monday, HP rolled out it latest servers claiming that its widgetry is the brightest bulb in the industry's pack and exploits Intel's underlying technology more than most. For starters the...

Satyam Seeks To Wring Maximum Price from its Sale.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Satyam, the corrupt Indian outsourcer whose founder lied about its revenues for years, has changed the rules of the redemptive sale of a majority 51% stake in the company. It was supposed to be a sealed bid auction, winner take all. ...

IT Spending Going Backwards.(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Gartner's latest gaze into its crystal ball finds global spending on IT dropping 3.8% this year to $3.2 trillion from $3.4 trillion, with hardware taking it on chin, down 15% to $324.2 billion, IT services down almost 2% to $796 billion and...

HP Tests Android for Netbooks: Journal.
April 6, 2009... HP may dump Windows for Android in some of its netbooks to up its paper-thin margin, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper says HP's got programmers testing the freebie Linux-based cell phone operating system for a potential netbook...

EMC Props Up Quantum.
April 6, 2009... EMC is fronting Quantum $100 million so it can refinance its convertible debt and "address a key challenge posed by its current capital structure and the very constrained credit environment." EMC licenses Quantum's deduplication software and...

Microsoft Cops Want Beat Extended.
April 6, 2009... According to Bloomberg the states, led by California and New York, that were party to the Microsoft antitrust action may seek continued court supervision of the company's business practices for perhaps another three years. All supervision is...

Sun Cuts 1,500.
April 6, 2009... Sun reportedly fired 1,500 people company-wide this week as part of the plan it announced in November to cut 18% of its people, about 6,000 jobs.

Linux Foundation Has New Member.
April 6, 2009... credativ, a small German-based consulting and services firm that also happens to be one of Europe's largest employers of Debian developers, has joined the Linux Foundation and will participate in advancing the Linux Standard Base expecting to...

Rackspace Names Cloud President.(Lew Moorman)(Brief article)
April 6, 2009... Rackspace has made its chief strategy officer Lew Moorman, an ex-McKinsey consultant, president of its cloud business. As CSO, Moorman was responsible for the epiphany of the Rackspace Cloud (a ka Mosso) and drove the acquisition of webmail.us,...

Ex-Sun Scientists Build Cloud Boxes around IBM Servers.
April 20, 2009... The racks and racks and racks of commodity servers that make the Web 2.0 world and now the cloud possible are really lousy at it. They're slow, underutilized, don't scale worth a hoot, eat power and space, and now they're multi-core. They...

McKinsey Slams the Cloud.
April 20, 2009... McKinsey & Company says that outsourcing your typical big corporate or government data center to a cloud service would cost double what it costs to keep the thing in-house. The mighty consultant has run up what it figures is a "hype-free"...

IBM Doesn't Want Sun: CNBC.
April 20, 2009... Well, if rebuffing IBM's $7 billion offer as too low the weekend before last was a negotiating tactic then the gambit has blown up in Sun's face according CNBC. Following a Bloomberg story saying Sun wanted IBM to come back to the table -...

Google's Growth Engine Wheezing.
April 20, 2009... Google's stock briefly bounded past $400 in after-hours trading Thursday for the first time since last October on the strength of its Q1 earnings performance. When last seen, however, it had given back the after-hours gains apparently...

Microsoft's First Cloud Server Hits Public Beta.
April 20, 2009... Microsoft Wednesday sent Exchange 2010 out into public beta. It's its first server built from the ground up, according to Microsoft, to be deployed in the cloud as an online service as well as on-site. Microsoft expects to start selling...

EMC Creates Monster Cloud Storage.
April 20, 2009... EMC Tuesday rolled out a spanking new built-from-the-ground-up high-end storage architecture for the cloud and its federated kin, the virtual data center, a k a the internal cloud, widgetry that's been a couple of years in development. ...

Intel Calls a Bottom.
April 20, 2009... In reporting the company's numbers Tuesday evening Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that "We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns." Seems enough of the haze has...

HP Takes US Crown Away from Dell.
April 20, 2009... Dell continues to slip. According to the latest numbers out of Gartner and IDC, HP has overtaken Dell in the US PC market for the first time since, gee, 2001. Dell lost the lead worldwide to HP in 2006. In Q1 Dell's US market share...

Infobright Aims To Challenge MPP Data Warehouses.
April 20, 2009... Infobright, the Toronto-based open source data warehousing company, is pushing out rev 3.1 of its low-cost software. It adds x86 Solaris 10 support to its Enterprise Edition and an enhanced SQL Framework to both its Enterprise and Community...

PTO Decision Could Save Microsoft a Packet.
April 20, 2009... One day you're on top of the world with a jury award of $1.52 billion against Microsoft for MP3-related patent infringement - the largest such award in US legal history - but the judge throw it out. Then you get a decision against Microsoft...

BT Venture Buys Control of Satyam.
April 20, 2009... Tech Mahinda, an Indian outsourcing firm 31% owned by BT, has won the auction for 51% of the scandal-rocked Satyam Computer Services for a mere $580 million, not much for a company that was valued at $7 billion a year ago. Tech Mahinda...

HP Revs HP-UX.
April 20, 2009... HP, whose third-rank Unix franchise could have been really pushed to the back of the bus if Sun took IBM up on its offer a couple of weeks ago and they combined forces, has enhanced its Serviceguard software and its HP-UX 11i operating...

Larrabee Due Early 2010.
April 20, 2009... Intel says that its many-core supercomputer-like x86 Larrabee GPU chip, a challenge to Nvidia and ATI, has seen first silicon and is currently in debug. The widget is expected to hit volume production early next year. Now all Intel...

Cast Iron Protects Corporate Data on Google Cloud.
April 20, 2009... Cast Iron Systems has widgetry to encrypt the exchange of data between a company's firewalled enterprise apps and Google's cloud. Cast Iron for Google Apps, which includes Google's Secure Data Connector, is supposed to make it easier for...

Start-up Seeks To Exploit Memcached Market.(Gear6)
April 20, 2009... Gear6, the two-and-a-half-year-old start-up that kicked off accelerating NFS, is branching out into Memcached, figuring the open source widgetry is going to turn into one of those industry pulse points like web servers used to be before they...

Dell Seeks To Benefit from Sun's Dilemma.
April 20, 2009... With Sun's destiny uncertain - and its users undoubtedly nail-bitingly anxious - Dell, which is not in great shape itself, is looking to land a few competitive body blows on the stumbling giant. It's offering to migrate Sun customers from...

Another Microsoft Enemy Joins EC Complaint.
April 20, 2009... The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), the front organization for IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, RealNetworks, Opera as well as other companies on the Redmond enemies list, has become a party to the European Commission's latest...

eBay To Dump Skype.
April 20, 2009... A market-pressured eBay with enough problems of its own said Tuesday that it was going spin off Skype, the mostly free computer-to-computer VoIP software that it paid an over-the-top $2.6 billion for in late 2005 with a $1.5 billion earn-out...

Cupcake Betas.(Brief article)
April 20, 2009... Google has sent Cupcake to beta. Cupcake's the new version of its Android operating system, which should make final release by the end of the month. Cupcake includes soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders and speech recognition....

Novell Client for Windows Revved.
April 20, 2009... Novell has updated its Client for Windows, the widgetry that enables Novell Open Enterprise Server connectivity. Novell calls it a major revision of the Novell Client and says it allows a Vista workstation to log in to Open Enterprise...

VMware's Big Day.
April 20, 2009... VMware is supposed to float out its next-generation cloud-leaning revenue-seeking vSphere widgetry and its Virtual Datacenter Operating System on or about Tuesday April 21 in company with Intel and Cisco including a push on the virtualized...

Yahoo & Microsoft Talking Again: Reports.
April 20, 2009... Quoting unnamed sources the Dow Jones All Things Digital blog reported Friday that Yahoo and Microsoft have started sounding each other out again about a search and ad partnership and said Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo's new CEO Carol...

Layoffs To Hit Yahoo.
April 20, 2009... Yahoo is going to be laying off a few hundred people perhaps on April 21 when the company posts its Q1 results, according to several press reports. The All Things Digital blog suggests whole units could go. They will be the first major labor...

Discovery To Delay AMD v Intel Trial.
April 20, 2009... The trial date for the great AMD v Intel antitrust suit has changed from February 2010 to March 29 2010. The parties agreed to extend discovery, mostly depositions, from May 1 to mid-June so the whole schedule slipped. The action has already...

Google Open Sources Omaha.
April 20, 2009... Google has open sourced its Update widgetry, a k a Omaha, the stuff that installs Chrome and Google Earth on Windows and keeps it up-to-date, so non-Google programs will use it and developers will get involved. It's using the Apache 2.0...

DOJ Wants Microsoft Oversight Lengthened.
April 20, 2009... Because Microsoft can't write decent documentation in a timely enough fashion to satisfy regulators - a fact that cost it in Europe - the Justice Department and states attorneys general asked the district court overseeing Microsoft's 2002...

VC Named to Dell Board.
April 20, 2009... Dell has suggestively named Accel Partners VC Jim Breyer, an ex-McKinsey guy, to its board, citing his experience in strategic planning and finance as well as capital markets and emerging companies. Breyer has invested in more than 30 Internet,...

HP To Appeal Patent Ruling.
April 20, 2009... HP says the $53 million in damages it's supposed to pay Cornell University and the Cornell Research Foundation for infringing a patent describing the execution of MPU instructions with its PA-8000 chips will cost a penny or two a share in its...

Microsoft Loses its Data Center Boss.
April 20, 2009... Microsoft has lost the general manager of its data center services Michael Manos, the guy responsible for its data center architecture, construction, design, operations and research (think containers). He's gone off to Digital Realty Trust, the...

Cisco Acquiring Colocation Space: Report.(Brief article)
April 20, 2009... The Seeking Alpha blog says it's been contacted by two colocation companies claiming that "Cisco is acquiring colocation space in various third-party data centers in the US for what Cisco is calling a new Cisco-based content delivery network....

Microsoft To Accelerate IE8 Distribution.
April 20, 2009... Microsoft's supposed to start distributing IE8 through its Automatic Update/Windows Update service next week. Users will have to opt-in to install the new browser. Notifications sent to folks running IE6 and IE7 on XP, Vista, Windows Server...

Cisco To Put R&D Center in Korea.(research and development)(Brief article)
April 20, 2009... Cisco says it's going to put an R&D center in South Korea and invest upwards of $2 billion in the country over the next five years including $500 million in loans and investments in local IT and communications concerns. It's planning to raise a...

Satyam Asks To Be Delisted.
April 20, 2009... Scandal-ravaged Satyam has asked to be delisted from Euronext Amsterdam, saying that the financial and legal burdens aren't worth it. It will stay on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange of India and the New York Stock...

Mainstream Support Ends for XP, Office 2003.
April 20, 2009... Microsoft dropped mainstream support for XP and Office 2003 on April 14, which means no more free fixes; non-security hot fixes will only go to those with paid-up support contracts through April 2014.

Novell Names Two to its Board.
April 20, 2009... Novell has tapped Avid Technology CEO Gary Greenfield, once with Francisco Partners, the private equity house, and Judith Hamilton, the erstwhile CEO of Dataquest, who serves on the board of the Wildlife Conservative Society and RR Donnelley...

IBM Layoffs To Hit Europe: Report.
April 20, 2009... IBM is reportedly getting set to lay off "thousands" of staffers in the UK, Germany and Ireland and move the jobs to Eastern Europe, China, India and South America, according to an unconfirmed story in the Observer over the weekend. The British...

Spansion Claims Breakthrough in Main Memory.
April 27, 2009... Despite crippling losses, filing for Chapter 11, massive job cuts, the abrupt departure of its CEO and CFO, a search for somebody to buy it or merge with it, incapacitating debt, delisting threats and a patent suit, Spansion, the spun-off...

So Oracle's Gonna Screw with IBM Huh...
April 27, 2009... Ah, the great chessboard of life. So figure Oracle's possession of Sun and its attendant resources like, oh, MySQL and Java is a potential threat to IBM. So what does IBM turn around and do? Well, it plays a card it's been holding in its...

VMware's Newfangled Cloud OS Positioned for Takeoff.
April 27, 2009... VMware Tuesday announced what it calls the industry's first cloud operating system ahead of delivering the thing sometime before the end of June. Branded vSphere 4, the expected widgetry, which promises a 100% virtualized cloud, is meant...

Virident Pitches GreenCloud Servers at Internet Greats.
April 27, 2009... Virident Systems, a newcomer run by a co-founder of SGI, has started down that sometimes thankless, unforgiving path of a disruptive new server company. For its value proposition it's using flash instead of traditional memory, targeting...

EC Evidently Aims To Hang Intel High.
April 27, 2009... The European Commission has reportedly drafted a final antitrust decision on Intel that - predictably - calls for a fine and a ban on Intel's allegedly anticompetitive rebates though what any "ban" - a complex issue - might entail remains to be...

Sun's Largest Stockholder Sells Out Early.
April 27, 2009... How odd. Southeastern Asset Management, which foolishly spent $2.1 billion buying 22% of Sun over the last few years, didn't wait around to collect Oracle's $9.50 a share, money it should have been able to pick up by summer and a price it...

AMD Gets Testosterone Shots, Revs Chip Schedule.
April 27, 2009... Trying to get the best of Intel, which trounced it with the quad-core Nehalem, AMD said Wednesday during a webcast updating its rollout schedule that its so-called Opteron Magny-Cours chip, a 45nm piece of silicon with eight to 12 cores and due...

Sun's GlassFish & Friends To Swim in Amazon's EC2 Tank.
April 27, 2009... Sun has put its open source GlassFish portfolio and identity management OpenSSO and OpenDS software on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Sun said it was the first step in its strategy to offer its portfolio of open source software on a...

HP Takes On Cisco.
April 27, 2009... Well now the fat is in the fire. A ticked-off HP is coming out against Cisco with both guns blazing. It claims it's been working for years on the kind of all-in-one compute-storage-network-fabric-power-and-cooling convergence that Cisco...

Sun To Monetize its Cloud with Zuora.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
April 27, 2009... Sun's going to use Zuora's commerce-as-a-service billing engine for its cloud whenever the cloud finally gets here and provided, of course, that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, soon to be Sun's new owner, countenances Sun's cloud adventure. Larry's...

Need Money? Ask Your Mama.
April 27, 2009... Venture capital, supposedly the lifeblood of American innovation, has developed thrombosis. What's left of rich people, pension funds and endowments aren't investing in VC funds and VC funds, in turn, aren't putting money into start-ups....

Sun Supports Google Apps Premier Edition Users.
April 27, 2009... Sun has made a new open source OpenSSO Express release available to provide scalable federated single sign-on for organizations using Google's Apps Premier Edition as their collaboration and messaging service. It will let employees use...

Microsoft Revenues Down 6%, Profits Down 32%.
April 27, 2009... Microsoft's in some amount of pain that it blames on the recession and deteriorating spending and says it doesn't expect things to get better this quarter, maybe longer, maybe into the next calendar year, a forecast it's made before. Its...

VMware Predicts Rough Going Ahead.
April 27, 2009... VMware said Wednesday that it earned $69.9 million, 18 cents a share in Q1, up 64% on revenues up 7% to $470 million. On a non-GAAP basis before charges, the virtualization leader earned 25 cents a share, up 14%. Its non-GAAP operating...

Bottom? Bottom? What Bottom Where?: AMD.
April 27, 2009... AMD CEO Dirk Meyer says he doesn't know how anybody could call a bottom - like Intel CEO Paul Ottellini did last week - given the continued lack of visibility and uncertainty in the marketplace. Although Intel is expecting Q2, usually down...

There's Gonna Be 700 Fewer Yahoos in the World.(Brief article)
April 27, 2009... Yahoo, as expected, is going to fire another roughly 700 people, 5% of its workforce, in the next couple of weeks. CEO Carol Bartz, there now about a hundred days, said the cuts wouldn't be like the across-the-board ~10% cuts Yahoo did in...

Recession Costs IBM.
April 27, 2009... After letting Sun go to Oracle, an outcome seen as a problem for IBM, Big Blue said its first quarter came up short on revenues. The total was $21.7 billion, down 11% against a consensus of $22.5 billion with earnings of $2.3 billion, off...

Kickfire MySQL Data Warehouse Appliance Launches.
April 27, 2009... Kickfire, the MySQL data warehousing start-up that invented its own SQL chip, is starting to roll out its newfangled plug-and-play appliances to the mass market - the first low-end data warehouse play ever- and obviously it's targeting the...

MySQL Steps on Larry's Toes.(Larry Ellison)(Brief article)
April 27, 2009... Sun this week of all weeks started circulating a preview of MySQL 5.4, a new powerful and scalable version of the open source database that's supposed to enable InnoDB, MySQL's primary storage engine - which Oracle already owns - to scale up to...

Innobase Embedded Version.(Brief article)
April 27, 2009... Innobase Oy, the MySQL storage engine operation that Oracle bought out from under MySQL some time back, is out with a new embeddable version of its widgetry, said to be complete and self-contained, minimizing the memory and disk footprint and...

Sun & Oracle Dumbfound Microsoft, IBM.
April 27, 2009... In Moscow when the Oracle-Sun news broke, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Reuters that he was "very surprised" and that having just heard about it needed to think about it. Evidently they didn't warn him ahead of time. Having thought about it...

It's Larry's Problem Now.(Larry Ellison on Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
April 27, 2009... Sun is supposed to report its March quarter on April 28. The Street figures revenues will be down 11.5% year-over-year to $2.9 billion with most of the money coming from indirect sales. Figure soft sales of high-end servers, a weak mix, weak...

Sun Folk Advised To Update their Resumes.
April 27, 2009... Given Oracle's claims about what it can wring out of Sun in earnings, people are trying to calculate how many Sun folk will be fired. The New York Times says industry analysts suggest up to 10,000, roughly a third of the place. Citigroup thinks...