Client Server News articles from August 2006

Client Server News archives from August 2006

IBM floats Opteron Armada: wags say it carries excess Intel chips as ballast.(International Business Machines Corp.)
August 7, 2006... IBM, which has been, um, sparing in its adoption of Opteron since it was the only big OEM to back the widget when it was introduced three years ago, has repented of its Sun--and HP-advantaging distance and its decision to sell Opteron boxes...

Microsoft to get new Eolas judge.(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Microsoft has persuaded the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to overturn a lower court decision and order that the great, potentially very expensive, Eolas patent infringement case be reheard by a different district court judge than...

AOL bites the bullet, rejigs its business model.(America Online Inc.)
August 7, 2006... AOL will be cutting 25% of its crew over the next six months, another 5,000 people, as it restructures to chase advertising rather than subscriptions, the same ad dollars Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are chasing. The layoffs--and AOL didn't...

Group of 10 drafts SML spec to address tower-of-babel problem.(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... The usual suspects, headed by Microsoft and IBM and including Sun, Intel, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco, BEA and BMC, have published a draft specification of what they call Service Modeling Language (SML) that's supposed to make the heterogeneous...

Microsoft lights candles to the patron Saint of documentation, praying for deliverance.(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Microsoft has submitted what should be the last of the protocol documentation it owes the European Commission and now it's waiting to find out if the agency thinks it's good enough for Microsoft to escape further fines. The EC socked...

Windows guard to change.(appointments )(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Brian Valentine, senior VP of the Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD), the guy brought in, in the midst of the Vista fiasco, to kick butt and take names, the guy nominally in line to succeed retiring Windows chief Jim Allchin, is...

CA poaches Symantec's CTO; recruits replacement CFO.(Ajei Gopal)
August 7, 2006... CA has replaced its lost CFO--one of the many CxOs who have passed through its portals lately. It has also replaced Alan Nugent, the guy it drafted to be CTO when the last CTO left, and has made Dr Ajei Gopal, plucked from Symantec where...

Real cuts Firefox deal; extends Google alliance.(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Under a multi-year deal that presumes some undisclosed amount of money changing hands, RealNetworks is going to start offering the Firefox browser with RealPlayer, its Rhapsody music service and RealArcade game. At the same time and...

IBM buys SOA provider.(service oriented architecture)(International Business Machines Corp.)(Webify Solutions)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... IBM has bought Austin, Texas-based SOA house Webify Solutions on undisclosed terms, intending to integrate it with its WebSphere middleware and push it through IBM Global Services. IBM says Webify has hundreds of industry-specific pre-built...

IBM spends $740m buying MRO.
August 7, 2006... IBM Thursday said that it's buying MRO Software, the publicly traded asset management ISV and long-time IBM partner, for $740 million cash, which works out to $25.80 a share, roughly a 19% premium. MRO's software will be integrated into...

Google offers alternative to Sourceforge.(Linux Watch)
August 7, 2006... Google is now competing with that open source mainstay, Sourceforge, the free ads-based VA Software-provided home to the collaborative development of literally scads of open source projects. The search giant is offering a Sourceforge...

Novell offspring pervasive pulls out of open source.(Linux Watch)
August 7, 2006... After 18 months of breaking its horns trying to crack the mainstream database market using Postgres, the open source database, embedded database house Pervasive Software is calling it quits. Pervasive president and CEO John Farr has posted...

EnterpriseDB gets 'pre-emptive' second round.(Linux Watch)
August 7, 2006... Open source Oracle clone, Postgresbased EnterpriseDB, has brought in an unsolicited $16.5 million second round led by chi-chi Fidelity Ventures that the company's equally prestigious existing backers Charles River Ventures and Valhalla Partners...

The poor, it appears, are ungrateful.(Linux Watch)(One Laptop Per Child )(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... According to press reports, India has told MIT's Nicholas Negroponte and his Linux/AMD-based One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) proposal-which needs government orders of five-10 million machines to get into production--to take a hike, India's minister...

New MyEclipse release due.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Genuitec, which says it can do for 30 bucks a year what IBM Rational and BEA Workshop charge $12k-$15k for, is about to roll out the finished version of its MyEclipse 5.0, an Eclipse-based J2EE IDE. The company figures it's saved developers...

Intel raps ATI's knuckles.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 7, 2006... In response to the prospective AMD-ATI merger, Intel has reportedly blocked ATI's access to its downstream roadmap downloads, stuff that's a couple years out.

Turnabout is fair play.(Mercury Interactive Corp, OpenView.)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Turns out that Mercury Interactive, HP's little $4.5 billion present to itself last week, tried to buy a revenue-sinking OpenView from HP back a couple of years ago during the Carly era. Now Mercury is supposed to be joined at the hip with...

Dump Rollins campaign starts.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 7, 2006... Without naming names, JP Morgan Securities has suggested in a research note that Dell consider "substantial changes in its business leadership structure," code words for dumping CEO Kevin Rollins and bringing back Michael Dell.

Vista outlook looking dim.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 7, 2006... According to reports from the beta 2 front, Vista is still bug-ridden, unstable and a memory hog three months before Microsoft is supposed to start packing it up to send to its business customers. Since it's already years late--and since...

Rambus ping-pong ball hits company in eye.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... The five FTC commissioners unanimously decided Wednesday that Rambus did too dupe the JEDEC standards body over the fact that it had sneaked its patented IP into the SDRAM and DDR SDRAM standards, and that its "anticompetitive behavior" had...

Ex-Brocade CEO posts $2m stay-out-of-jail bond.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Greg Reyes, the ex-CEO of Brocade, posted a $2 million bond and turned his passport over to his lawyers after being hauled into court Wednesday on criminal charges of securities fraud brought by the US Attorney in connection with stock option...

Xanadros thinks it's found an edge.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Xandros thinks it sees an opportunity for its Linux desktop in Microsoft's scheduled cancellation of support for Windows 98, 98SE and ME, especially for those users who don't want to pony up for more expensive hardware. It estimates that 50...

Microsoft claims Gates interview phoney.(BILLY GRAMS)(Interview)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... The New York Times had its Jayson Blair and now Bill Gates apparently his Bjoern Benkow. Benkow is a Norwegian journalist, who-according to Microsoft--fabricated an interview with Gates that ran in two Scandinavian publications under the title...

SAP to spend $1b in India.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... SAP says it's going to spend a billion dollars in India in the next five year and a lot of the money will go towards doubling its workforce. The company expects to have 3,500 people on its payroll there by the end of the year. SAP is going down...

Novell counts downloads.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
August 7, 2006... Ten days into the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, and Novell says it's seen 165,000 people download components (the thing includes both a desktop and a server). Novell also claims that 286,000 unique visitors have been to its Customer...

Apple backdating woes worsen.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 7, 2006... Apple figured out Thursday night that more of its tit is caught in this backdating wringer than originally thought but it doesn't know how bad or how far back it's going to have to restate. It looks like the last nine years.

How many torrents in an avalanche?(BILLY GRAMS)
August 7, 2006... Microsoft supposedly has a hyper-BitTorrent-like research project going on called Avalanche that it could presumably use for downloading operating systems and MSDN releases.

Apple NDAs Leopard expecting developers to keep quiet.
August 14, 2006... Apple the other day started pushing out a preview version of its sixth-generation operating system, Leopard, otherwise known as Mac OS X 10.5, to developers under non-disclosure expecting them to keep mum about a number of tantalizing new...

VMware stakes out Apple slice.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... VMware showed off some new prototype widgetry at the Apple developers show this week that will let Intel-based Macs run x86 operating systems other than Apple's precious Mac OS X, stuff like Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris in virtual...

Intel dumps its $780m dialogic acquisition.
August 14, 2006... Intel sold a telephony unit, its media and signaling operation, Wednesday to privately held Eicon Networks Corporation for an undisclosed amount of money. Intel will shed 600 people in the process. The company, in hand-to-hand combat with...

Brocade buys McData for $713m in stock.
August 14, 2006... Brocade, one of the first companies involved in the widening backdating mess, is going to swap $713 million in stock for McData, paying nearly a 50% premium for its rival, a sum that investors railed against, initially dropping the value of...

Intel's likely response to AMD-ATI.(ATI Communications)(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Graphics chip maven Jon Peddie figures Intel is going to build a GPU in response to the AMDATI tie-up, which he says threatens Intel across a broader front than anything AMD has ever be able to manage before. The ATI acquisition will let...

IBM splurges on FileNet in bid for control of content management market.
August 14, 2006... IBM said Thursday morning that it is buying FileNet, the business process and content management software house that competes with EMC's Documen-tum, for $1.6 billion cash, making it one of IBM's most expensive acquisitions ever. At $35 a...

Gartner reiterates Vista forecast.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Gartner is sticking to its prophecy that Vista won't launch until the second quarter of next year despite improvements in interim builds. In fact it says build 5472 was "a pretty solid platform, and one that can be used for day-to-day...

EMC shuffles management.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... EMC Tuesday kicked its CFO Bill Teuber, already vice-chairman, upstairs to handle EMC's acquisition strategy and named David Goulden, up until then head of the company's customer operations, CFO. Teuber is supposed to help CEO Joe Tucci...

Intel open sources next-generation graphics driver.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Intel has made some free software drivers available for its imminent 965 Express chipset graphics controller that support 2D and 3D graphics. Linux is currently dependent on proprietary 3D drivers, a distasteful situation for Linux...

SCO threatens to squat on Ellison's parking space.(Linux Watch)
August 14, 2006... There's SCO Forum. And then there's SCO Forum for major accounts, a closed-door parallel event where the brand name accounts that use SCO's Unix operating system--and there are still a lot of them--vented their frustrations this week over the...

Sun hires EnterpriseDB.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Sun has hired EnterpriseDB, the New Jersey company commercializing the Postgres database hoping to poach some of Oracle's business since it runs Oracle apps, to provide Sun with Level 2 and 3 technical support, services and training for Sun's...

Freespire released.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Linspire has gone GA with Freespire 1.0, the free desktop Linux distro that combines open source software with legally licensed proprietary drivers, codecs and applications. When Linspire announced this spring that Freespire was in the...

db4objects gets representation in China.(Linux Watch)(Shenzhen Menglongyitong Information Technology Ltd )(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... db4objects, creator of the open source object database for Java and .NET, has signed up Shenzhen Menglongyitong Information Technology Ltd to represent it in China. The two companies signed a comprehensive collaboration agreement to...

Centeris moves to likewise 2.0.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Centeris, the Linux server management ISV set up and backed by a bunch of ex-Microsoftees, has released the second rev of its Likewise software, the stuff that makes Windows and Linux work well together, reducing the cost of running the...

Novell fiddles with branding.(Linux Watch)
August 14, 2006... Novell has fiddled with its branding. It has changed the name of SUSE Linux, its free community distribution, to openSUSE, the name of its open source project. SUSE Linux Enterprise will remain SUSE Linux Enterprise. open-SUSE is not meant for...

Citrix buys Orbital Data.
August 14, 2006... Citrix is buying privately held Orbital Data Corporation for $50 million in a deal meant to shore up Citrix' end-to-end access capabilities. Four-year-old Orbital has technology that optimizes application delivery over a wide area network,...

AMD cracks another Intel icon.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
August 14, 2006... AMD Tuesday cracked Lenovo's previously Intel-only enterprise-directed ThinkCenter PCs, but the sacred ThinkPad notebook that Lenovo inherited from IBM, responsible for 52% of Lenovo's sales in Q2, is still off-limits to the interloper-at least...

Cisco buys into mystery concern.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Cisco has bought 80% of Nuova Systems, a months-old start-up founded by some high-ranking ex-Cisco folk, perhaps to keep it from Google's clutches. Cisco is putting $50 million into the joint and committing "certain technology" to it, leaving...

Rev F on tap.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... AMD is supposed to say on Tuesday August 15 that its next Opteron chip, the so-called Rev F, is available. It's maybe a month or two late. The dualcore 90nm chip will add DDR2 memory and Pacifica virtualization hardware support. It will also...

HP reaches out to Forrester.(Hewlett-Packard Co. appoints Richard Fichera)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... HP has hired Richard Fichera out of Forrester Research as its new director of BladeSystem strategy, reporting to Rick Becker, general manager of BladeSystems and volume software. Fichera will be responsible for the product roadmap, messaging...

Sprint, Intel et al & their $3b WiMax network.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Sprint Nextel is going to spend $3 billion between now and the end of 2008 building out a high-speed 4G WiMax-based wireless data network and it's signed up Intel, Motorola and Samsung to help it. It should have pilots running in test markets...

Microsoft wins one.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Microsoft got a summary judgment from a district court in Houston, Texas against E-Pass Technologies Inc, which claimed that Windows Mobile infringed a claim of its patent that describes a method for storing information from various individual...

Chastened Hummingbird flies with fellow Canadian.(OpenText Corp.)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Its wings clipped after unsuccessfully trying to mate with US-based Symphony Technology Group, Hummingbird Ltd has agreed to be acquired by fellow Canadian Open Text Corporation for roughly $489 million in cash less the $94 million Hummingbird...

Intel seeks academic lever.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Intel said Monday that it would be providing 45 top universities with expertise, funding, development tools, dual-core laptops, educational materials, on-site training and "sustained collaboration" to get its multi-core and multithreading...

CA goes slumming.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 14, 2006... CA, once the byword for mainframe software, is now gonna be selling through Radio Shack. It's going to push its eTrust Internet Security Suite, eTrust Antivirus and Desktop DNA Migrator through the 6,000-store retail chain and web store.

Xandros joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Xandros has joined OSDL to push the adoption of desktop Linux. It will participate in the consortium's Desktop Linux working group focusing on advancing standards-based usability and consistency. IDC projects that the desktop Linux market will...

Dell still hasn't scrapped bottom.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 14, 2006... Banc of America figures Dell hasn't bottomed out yet because it isn't strong enough in the third world and is overexposed in corporate accounts in the US, Europe and Japan, a problem that flirting with AMD won't help.

Malcomb Forbes turns over in his grave.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 14, 2006... For the first time in its history Forbes has brought in outside investors, selling off a minority stake to Elevation Partners, a private media and entertainment buyout group started by Roger McNamee that includes Bono, the Irish U2 rock star...

Cache wins DOD contract.(BILLY GRAMS)
August 14, 2006... After working on it for a long time, InterSystems Corporation has gotten an initial $14.7 million contract from the Defense Department for its Cache post-relational database. The contract could be worth a total of $63 million over five years if...

Linux cannibalizing its mother.(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Unix is losing share to Linux in the US government enterprise server market, one of Unix' original strongholds, according to an IDC report that says Linux use on government enterprise servers--in other words non-scientific systems--will rise...

Snip, snip, snip.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... Sun, which is already abandoning two campuses of its own in California, has put a "For Sale" sign outside the old 430-acre StorageTek campus in Colorado. Sun has laid off 1,900 staffers here and abroad in the last few days as part of its plan...

Comverse CEO on the lam.(Comverse Technology Inc.)(Kobi Alexander )(Brief article)
August 14, 2006... The former CEO of Comverse Technology Inc Kobi Alexander is on the lam with a warrant sworn out for his arrest after he failed to show up in court Wednesday to be charged with criminal fraud in connection with a widening government backdating...

Dell's defection from Intel widens.
August 21, 2006... Dell used an expanded pact with AMD Thursday when it reported its fiscal second quarter to distract from its shoddy performance. The performance crown has now gone to a rebounding HP. As has been rumored for weeks, Dell is going to sell a...

Writely's back.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Writely, the free beta software-as-a-service web word processor that Google bought back in March to torment Microsoft, is back in business. When Google moved in, Writely stopped letting new users play with it. It was supposed to be...

Opteron quad tapes out.(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... AMD says it's taped out the quad-cell Opteron chip that it intends to bring to market the middle of next year, months after Intel starts peddling its first quad. It said so when it officially unveiled its two-core Rev 7 chip on Tuesday, as...

HP earnings surge.
August 21, 2006... HP Wednesday delivered earnings of 48 cents a share, a total of $1.5 billion, up from three cents a share in the company's third fiscal quarter last year. Revenues were up 5% to $21.9 billion, putting the company in line to pass IBM in revenues...

Batteries burn benighted Dell.
August 21, 2006... Remember those pictures of that spontaneously self-immolating Dell laptop on TV a few weeks ago? The ones that have been playing on the Internet ever since--along with stories about the Arizona guy whose pick-up truck went up in flames while he...

Young Russia start-up monitors VMware.(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Four-month-old Veeam Software in St Petersburg, Russia says it's developed the Veeam Monitor, an application to monitor the performance and resource usage of all the virtual machines running on a VMware Server or Workstation. It's...

SAP invests in Questra.
August 21, 2006... SAP joined VCs Menlo Ventures and Trident Capital in putting $12.5 million in Questra Corporation, which does intelligent device management. It's the first investment by SAP's three-month-old $125 million NetWeaver Fund, created to build a...

IBM seeks open source revenues beyond Linux.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Armed with eight broad open source initiatives, IBM says it's pushing beyond Linux looking for new business opportunities and spreading the open source gospel to non-believers in what amounts to a further reshifting of the software industry....

Ingres integrates Linux OS with its database; goes into the appliance business.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Looks like Ingres is going to try to build its own stack, starting with a database software appliance. It's integrating the Ingres database with rPath Linux, calling the joint development Project Icebreaker. They're just using those...

Mainsoft runs .NET Apps on WebSphere on Linux desktop.(Linux Watch)
August 21, 2006... IBM's WebSphere middleware is going to be able to run Microsoft's .NET web and server applications natively on a Linux desktop complements of Mainsoft, the cross-platform outfit, which says the facility completes its portfolio of .NET-J2EE...

Sun adds Java ME to open source pledge.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Sun expanded on its promise to open source Java at LinuxWorld this week. Now it's supposed to open source the Java Micro Edition (ME), the mobile/embedded stuff, as well as parts of the desktop version of the Standard Edition (SE) like the...

x86 Linux apps to be ported to power.(Linux Watch)
August 21, 2006... Transitive, the Anglo-American concern that supplied the magic behind Apple's Rosetta translator and is siphoning off Sparc applications to Intel's Itanium and Xeon, has been hired by IBM to transport x86 Linux applications to its...

HP to support free Debian distribution.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Hewlett-Packard is breaking with the rest of the OEM pack and is going to support the free Debian distribution for those of its accounts that can't stand the idea of paying Red Hat or Novell for their distributions because of their FOSS...

Google to pay freight for number 2 Linux guy.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Now that English-born Aussie Andrew Morton, Linux' second-ranking kernel hacker, has resolved what friends described as his US visa issues, he has "taken a job" with Google. In other words, Google is going to pay his salary while he continues...

IBM's instant messenger goes Linux.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... IBM gave Linux a nudge on to the desktop this week by unveiling a Linux version of Lotus' Sametime instant messaging and web conferencing software. The real-time collaboration software will support both the Linux server and desktop. Notes, the...

OSDL & LiPS become kissing cousins.(Linux Watch)(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Open Source Development Labs and LiPS, the French-based Linux Phone Standards Forum, have tied up to reduce fragmentation, advance Linux on mobile phones and increase revenue opportunities. They're talking about providing customizable...

Novell to bundle RealPlayer.(Linux Watch)
August 21, 2006... Novell is going to bundle RealNetworks' upgraded RealPlayer on the SUSE Enterprise desktop. The player will support Windows Media formats, when it arrives in December. The code already includes Real's Helix Banshee music player, which Novell...

NEC fault-tolerant box gets red hat-certified.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... NEC's fault-tolerant Xeon-based Express5800/320Ma server has been Red Hat-certified, standard Red Hat, that is, a singular event that's been years in the making and steps up NEC competitive potential against IBM mainframes and HP Non-Stop...

Wannabe oracle buster sharpens its weapons.(Linux Watch)
August 21, 2006... EnterpriseDB, the start-up commercializing PostgreSQL, upped the ante against Oracle's pat hand at LinuxWorld this week when it announced the general availability of EnterpriseDB Advanced Server 8.1 The rev automates the migration of data...

Lenovo to support SUSE on ThinkPads.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Lenovo is going to support--but not preload--Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system on a couple of new $3,000 ThinkPad T60p laptops, Intel Centrino Duo-based versions of the iconic IBM notebook. They're the first Linux...

Start-up sets new bar in green machines.(Linux Watch)
August 21, 2006... The industry and users talk innovation and then shy away from it, spooked at the idea of being too innovative. California start-up Movidis Inc, however, which started in video streaming, is running straight into the spinning propellers. ...

Mule source gets funded.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... Hummer Winblad and Morgenthaler Ventures have tucked $4 million in the jeans of tiny start-up MuleSource, which is doing an open source enterprise service bus and integration platform, known as Mule, part of the plumbing for the next-generation...

Firefox 2.0 delayed.(Linux Watch)
August 21, 2006... Firefox 2.0 won't be out before late October. The browser has been delayed again on account of bugs. It's supposed to compete with IE 7.

CA to cut another 1,700 jobs on earnings drop.(Brief article)
August 21, 2006... The rumors proved true. CA is going to cut 10.5% of its workforce, roughly 1,700 people, half in the US and 300 of them connected with joint ventures. The company has already cut close to 2,000 people the last couple of years. The news was...

Oracle ups stake in I-flex.
August 21, 2006... Oracle has raised its stake in I-flex, the Indian financial software maker that it bought a majority piece of last year for roughly $800 million. The new $125 million investment will give it 55.1%, up from 52.5%. The funds will help I-flex buy...