Client Server News articles from August 2008

Client Server News archives from August 2008

Alfresco Looks To Oust SharePoint.
August 4, 2008... Alfresco pounced on that SharePoint protocol that the European Commission forced Microsoft to disgorge and turned up Thursday with what it claims is the first fully compatible open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the...

Microsoft To Sic Red Dog on the Cloud.
August 4, 2008... One of Microsoft's confidants says that the Red Dog project that broke cover in a want ad a few months ago is indeed the Kiplingesque pet name for Microsoft's impending cloud infrastructure - well, at least part of it anyway. It was...

Microsoft Contemplates a Post-Windows World.
August 4, 2008... Starting with a clean piece of paper, Microsoft is having a go at building a non-Windows operating system. Code named Midori, it may never be released but if Midori isn't heir to Windows Microsoft better have something else like it up its...

Yahoo, HP & Intel Embark on Joint Cloud Research.
August 4, 2008... Yahoo, HP and Intel are going to do cloud research together using a global, multi-data center, open source Cloud Computing Test Bed bigger than anything put together for such a purpose before, they said. The whole testbed could potentially...

Google's Money Cries Out To Be Invested: WSJ.
August 4, 2008... Some little birds whispered in the Wall Street Journal's ear and got it to report that Google, which usually just buys start-ups, now wants to set up a venture arm a la Intel Capital, leaving the reader to imagine where the money would go, what...

Oracle Amends Suit, Claims To Have SAP by the Short Hairs.
August 4, 2008... Oracle has amended its billion-dollar suit against SAP claiming to have found the smoking gun implicating SAP CEO Henning Kagermann and SAP's executive board in the wholesale theft and resale of Oracle's IP by SAP support subsidiary TomorrowNow...

Portugal To Resell 500k Intel Classmate Laptops.
August 4, 2008... Under what it's calling the Magellan Initiative, this school year Portugal is supposed to resell for some unknown price 500,000 low-cost Intel-based Classmate PCs to the country's grade school kids. It is Intel's biggest Classmate sale...

JavaFX Preview Out.(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... Sun has released a JavaFX preview to create sexy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on PCs, mobile, TV and other consumer devices on the Java platform. It's not ready for commercial applications yet; Sun is looking for feedback. The...

Will Yahoo Be Wearing Two Black Eyes Come Saturday Morning?(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... After telling the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board that Yahoo's management was "pathetic," oilman T. Boone Pickens dumped his 10 million shares of Yahoo stock the other day for a ~$50 million loss. He acquired the position in May out...

BI Cloud Start-up Gets Seeded.
August 4, 2008... An emerging SaaS player called Good Data Corporation, with interests in collaboration business intelligence solutions, has gotten $2 million in seed money from analysts and sometimes investors Esther Dyson and Tim O'Reilly, Good Data founder...

Rackable To Resell IBM BladeCenters in Shipping Containers.
August 4, 2008... Rackable Systems is going to include IBM's BladeCenter servers in its ICE Cube modular data center offering, its idea of what you can do with a shipping container. Under its deal with IBM, BladeCenter T or HT systems will be the only blade...

IBM Buying Struggling ILOG.
August 4, 2008... Having cut a deal with ILOG's board, IBM is going to tender for the French company in both France and the US offering roughly $340 million cash (215 million euros), something like a 37% premium over ILOG's price last Friday, 56% if you consider...

Dell, the Un-Apple.
August 4, 2008... Provided it doesn't scrub the whole idea, Dell may put out a sub-$100 Wi-Fi-based portable music player up against the iPod that ties back to laptops that can download and organize multi-source music and videos thanks to software written by...

VMware Sets its Hypervisor Free.
August 4, 2008... Attempting to put space between itself and Microsoft - and as a talisman against a weakening economy - VMware the other day made good on its promise to cut the price of its standalone ESXi hypervisor to free. The ESXi 3.5 update 2 widgetry,...

VMware Launches Windows Scripting Environment.
August 4, 2008... VMware has released VMware Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit (for Windows), a free addition to its scripting toolkit portfolio, which is meant to help automate virtual datacenters. The toolkit is described an easy-to-use scripting interface for...

One of Google's Own Goes into Competition with It.(Cuil )(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... The two-year-old counter-Google search start-up, Cuil (say cool), Irish for knowledge and notable for its ex-Google founders, finally hit the radar screen Sunday and got a lot of ink because of its DNA, a lot of the comments cruelly negative....

YouTube Gets Sued Again.
August 4, 2008... Google and its little pal YouTube have attracted another lawsuit for copyright infringement. Rome-based Mediaset, controlled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is demanding 500 million euros ($779.3 million) in damages. Mediaset...

Parallels Aims at Internal, Channel Clouds.
August 4, 2008... Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov figures Google could dominate the cloud - the question is how much - with Microsoft at least a close second and maybe Apple can wrestle the rest of the wannabes like IBM, HP, Facebook, Adobe and EMC for third...

Microsoft's Appeasement Party Strikes Again.
August 4, 2008... Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is now suddenly a platinum sponsor of that open source touchstone, the Apache Software Foundation, and has pledged its $100,000 check. The move was announced Friday at the Open Source Convention in a speech...

Kickfire Get $20m in Funding.
August 4, 2008... Kickfire, the outfit with the MySQL appliance based on a proprietary SQL chip and focused on the data warehouse market, has gotten that second round it was looking, pulling in $20 million from Pinnacle Ventures and A round investors Accel...

Facebook Raids Mozilla.
August 4, 2008... Mozilla VP of engineering and Firefox lead Mike Schroepfer is jumping to Facebook as one of four engineering directors. His turf will be front-end product and platform engineering and he will report to Facebook's kid CEO Mark Zuckerberg....

Mozilla Deploys Pentaho, Vertica.
August 4, 2008... Having outgrown its homemade log analysis scripts, Mozilla has deployed Pentaho's commercial open source business intelligence (BI) Data Integration widgetry and Vertica Systems' high-performance analytic database to analyze large volumes of...

Purple Flowers.
August 4, 2008... Following last month's $32 million acquisition of Openwave's browser business, Purple Labs is buying the mobile applications suite and software engineering team of Sagem Mobiles, a French maker of mobile phones branded by Sony Ericsson, Orange,...

Jobs Tells the Times the Cancer Hasn't Come Back.
August 4, 2008... Out of the blue Steve Jobs called up New York Times reporter Joe Nocera - who's been pestering Apple about the state of Steve's health - and told him - off the record - what's been ailing him. Jobs appears to have confirmed the Times and...

Cisco Eying EMC?
August 4, 2008... Apparently Wall Street thinks there's something big going on at EMC - given the recent call and put action - and so speculation turns - as it inevitably does - to whether the company will finally spin off VMware or - and at least this one is...

Sun Shines on Channel.
August 4, 2008... In its latest attempt to get things right, Sun said Monday it's gonna turn all its US accounts except the top 300 over exclusively to its channel.

Mozy Claims 100% Growth in Six Month.
August 4, 2008... Mozy, EMC's online backup property, says it doubled the size of its enterprise and SMB customer base in the first half and now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage...

Sun Chases Cloud.
August 4, 2008... Sun is turning its Network.com utility computing operation into a separate cloud business under its chief sustainability officer Dave Douglas, reporting to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, according to The Register. Network.com, which sells access to...

Oracle Puts Ex-Adobe CEO on its Board.
August 4, 2008... Oracle has named former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to its board. He will be Oracle's 13th director.

TechCrunch Recants Digg Piece.
August 4, 2008... TechCrunch has taken back its story saying Google is going to buy Digg.com for $200 million. It claims something insurmountable came up during Google's due diligence

EDS Does better than Expected.
August 4, 2008... EDS, soon to become HP's services arm and IBM equalizer, earned a better-then-expected $160 million, 31 cents a share, up 16%, in Q2 on revenues up 3.2% to $5.62 billion. Contract signings were up 27% to $5.4 billion. EDS was expected to return...

VIA Hires Open Source Advocate.
August 4, 2008... VIA, the other x86 company, has hired Harald Welte, the Linux kernel hacker and GPL enforcer, to run interference for it with the open source community and help it refine its open source strategy for optimizing Linux on its widgets. He's also...

Oracle Buys User-Training Widgetry.
August 4, 2008... Oracle is buying Global Knowledge Software LLC (GKS), a division of Global Knowledge Inc and a provider of self-service training automation software. Oracle already sells GKS' Personal Navigator product as part of its User Productivity Kit....

Forrester Buys JupiterResearch.
August 4, 2008... Forrester Research has acquired JupiterResearch for $23 million, roughly 1.5 times revenues. It will become Forrester's marketing and strategy group. Forrester is estimating 2008 revenue of $246 million-$252 million with Jupiter in tow.

Google Throws More Money at Open Source.
August 4, 2008... Google has given Oregon State University another $300,000 to expand the capacity of its Open Source Lab to support open source projects. That brings its total donation to $750,000.The lab has hosted Firefox browser, which Google singelhandedly...

IBM Claims To Catch Bugs as They're Written.
August 4, 2008... IBM claims Rational Software Analyzer, a plug-in to Eclipse 3.3, catches bugs while code is being written rather than right before it goes into production reducing the number of defects hitting the marketplace 15%-20%. The widgetry, which IBM...

IBM & Linux Distros Try Ganging Up on the Microsoft Desktop.
August 11, 2008... IBM, Canonical, Novell, Red Hat and the distributions' hardware partners are ganging up on Microsoft, intending to push a Microsoft-free desktop alternative involving Linux, Lotus Notes and the freebie OpenOffice-based Lotus Symphony. They...

Dell's Cloud Trademark Stymied.
August 11, 2008... A person or persons unknown has upset Dell's plans to trademark the nebulous buzzword "Cloud Computing." On Tuesday the US Patent and Trademark Office suddenly yanked the so-called "notice of allowance" that gave Dell the mark but didn't...

AT&T Takes to the Cloud.
August 11, 2008... AT&T broke into the cloud business Tuesday with the "global launch" of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting and describes as a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses. It's...

Steve Jobs Eats Humble Pie.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... In an internal e-mail leaked to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe, Apple's panned flirtation with the cloud, was launched prematurely and was "not up to Apple's standards." Remember? Even the Apple-loving Walt...

Symantec Acquires nSuite Virtualization.
August 11, 2008... Symantec is building out its endpoint virtualization widgetry by acquiring nSuite Technologies, a privately held virtual workspace management company that has specialized in hospitals and healthcare. Terms were not disclosed. The buy will...

Intel Hikes Up Its Skirt; Flaunts Larrabee, the Next Great Thing.
August 11, 2008... Ahead of Siggraph next week Intel decided to lift its skirt and pass around the paper it'll read there describing Larrabee, its new hydra-headed x86 graphics accelerator architecture meant to take on Nvidia and AMD's graphics arm ATI in late...

Amazon Backs a Cloud Server Start-up.
August 11, 2008... Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) - your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like...

SQL Server 2008 RTMs.
August 11, 2008... SQL Server 2008 has RTM'd. Microsoft says there were 450,000 downloads of the preview, 75 large-scale applications are already in production and more than 1,350 applications are being developed by ISVs. It will be offered in an Enterprise...

Judge Removed in Microsoft Patent Case.
August 11, 2008... The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has removed Los Angeles District Court Judge Manuel Real, 84, from a $500 million Microsoft patent infringement suit, overturned his 2006 decision finding three of Research Corporation...

IBM Building its 8th & 9th Clouds.
August 11, 2008... IBM said Friday that it is going to build a $360 million state-of-the-art commercial cloud on its campus at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, intending that the thing be the first built with IBM's New Enterprise Data Center design...

It's Official. Icahn's on the Yahoo Board.
August 11, 2008... Microsoft hugger Carl Icahn is now officially on the Yahoo board. Under the deal that ended his proxy fight, two more directors from Icahn's original "oust-the-incumbents" proxy slate are supposed to be elected by mid-month. The list was...

Yahoo Stockholders Don't Like Jerry Yang THAT Much.
August 11, 2008... Turns out the vote that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo's board to office last Friday by a surprise three-to-one margin was seriously miscounted. The official tabulation claimed that CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote (14.6% withheld) and...

Salesforce Rival Won't Break Even This Year.(NetSuite Inc.)(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Salesforce.com rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company, lost $3.2 million, a nickel a share, on revenues up 43% to $36.6 million in the second quarter and said it doesn't expect to break even the rest of the year. It expects revenues of...

Sun Eclipsed by Economy.
August 11, 2008... If Sun hadn't done that one-for-four reverse stock split in November and turned its $5 stock into a $20 stock, it would now be a $2 stock. Instead, it's a $9-$10 stock, down 50%. And things don't look like they're gonna get much better. So...

Deutsche Post Scrubs HP Outsourcing Deal.
August 11, 2008... Deutsche Post ain't going to outsource its IT to Hewlett-Packard like it planned, according to InformationWeek, which got a hold of an internal Deutsche Post e-mail saying that the deal was off. In signing a letter of intent in January,...

IBM Contributes Open-Source Code for Linux Supercomputers.
August 11, 2008... IBM has released its first certified package of open source software for supercomputers based on Linux. The IBM HPC Open Software Stack is supposed to make clusters more productive and easier to manage and HPC, which has jumped the...

Google Won't Call LiMo.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... The LiMo Foundation has wracked up 11 more members, bringing its total to 50 companies. But Google has indicated that it feels no compunction to add Android to LiMo's successes, proclaiming "unification for the sake of unification is not...

Platform Computing Buys Scali MPI Business.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Platform Computing, the HPC management ISV, has acquired the Scali MPI business from Norway's Scali AS on undisclosed terms. MPI is an industry standard API specification for building high-performance parallel applications and Scali MPI...

VMware Joins the Linux Foundation.
August 11, 2008... VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a...

Canonical Teams with Yahoo's Zimbra.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Canonical is going to offer Yahoo's freebie open source Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 through its Ubuntu partner repository. Zimbra Desktop provides a centralized hub to manage multiple e-mail accounts and calendars online and offline. Users can...

gOS Revved.
August 11, 2008... gOS, the Linux OS whose credits include the $199 Wal-Mart gPC, trotted out a new beta rev called gOS 3 Gadgets at LinuxWorld this week on some newfangled netbooks and nettops. It's supposed to instantly launch Google Gadgets for Linux at...

Canonical To Resell Unison's Unified Communications.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Canonical is going to sell Unison Technologies' unified communications in its store. The stuff, which goes for $50 per user per year, or $36,000 for a perpetual one-server license with unlimited users, combines telephony, e-mail, instant...

Novell Channel Chief Leaves To Pursue Other Interests.
August 11, 2008... Novell's VP of global channel sales Pat Bernard has left the building - permanently. She's off "pursuing other interests" and will be replaced for the moment by Tim Wolfe, the head of Novell Americas. She only had the job since November. She...

SCO: What Now?
August 11, 2008... SCO and Novell are currently arguing over whether the July 16 decision handed down by Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball that SCO owes Novell $2.5 million because it overreached on a $9.1 million IP licensing deal it cut with Sun...

Whither Fujitsu Siemens?(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Disappointed with its performance, Siemens wants out of its nine-year-old Fujitsu Siemens Computers joint venture, according to the Wall Street Journal, throwing the ball into Fujitsu's lap since Fujitsu's got dibs on buying out Siemens' 50%....

No EMC-Cisco Deal.
August 11, 2008... Cisco's not trying to buy EMC. When asked the other day in an interview on CNBC because of week-old rumors Cisco CEO John Chamber replied, "We don't have any negotiations with any large companies at this time." He also pointed out that it was...

Zoho Claims One Million Users.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Zoho claims it's just gotten its millionth user three years after offering its first online application, Zoho Writer. Its portfolio has widened considerably since then. It says it took a year to hit 100,000 users, six months to get the second...

Rackspace To IPO.
August 11, 2008... The IPO-starved will be thrown a morsel today when Rackspace, the profitable Texas hosting company, goes public for something like $12-$16 a share in a Dutch auction. Backed by Sequoia and Norwest Venture Partners, the 10-year-old concern made...

Red Hat Eyes Clouds.
August 11, 2008... "The clouds will all run Linux." - Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in an interview with Cnet.

Another Great Microsoft Buy Back Prophesied.
August 11, 2008... UBS thinks Microsoft is going to buy back $20 billion worth of its stock over the next three months to tickle its share price. Microsoft has $3 billion left from that $36.2 billion five-year buyback authorization it got in 2006.

Google Tweaks Search Appliance.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Google has tweaked the architecture of its corporate, inside-the-firewall, Search Appliance so that one - not five - of the yellow boxes can index 10 million documents, up from oh, maybe, three million. It's also supposed to be two-five times...

Sun's xVM Server Inches To Release.
August 11, 2008... Sun says it's started the first part of its early access program for its xVM Server 1.0 virtualization widgetry, reportedly beginning with representatives of financial services, manufacturing, high tech and government. Sun says it'll be sending...

Moto Hires Phone Boss.
August 11, 2008... Motorola has hired Qualcomm COO Sanjay Jha as co-CEO to run its fading money-losing mobile devices unit, raising the question of whether it's bringing in the right skill set. The operation, which needs new phones, is expected to be spun off as...

RHEL 5.2 Certified.
August 11, 2008... Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 has gotten Department of Defense IPv6 Special Interoperability Certification from the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), giving it a government checkbox.

FTC Antitrust Chief Quits.
August 11, 2008... Jeffret Schmidt, the head of the Federal Trade Commission antitrust unit that's investigating Intel, is leaving the agency for private practice ahead of any change in administration come November. He's been replaced for the moment by...

Nvidia Pays Transmeta $25m for IP.
August 11, 2008... Transmeta - yes, it's still around - says it's licensed its LongRun and LongRun2 power management technology and all its patents and patent applications to Nvidia for a one-time fee of $25 million. The non-exclusive Intel-like agreement also...

Microsoft Looses BI Guy.
August 11, 2008... Bill Baker, the general manager of Microsoft's SQL Server Business Intelligence unit, is bound for Visible Technologies, a social media monitoring ISV, as CTO, according to CRN

Backdating Watch.
August 11, 2008... Wilson Sonsini, the great and powerful Silicon Valley law firm with an inordinate number of clients nailed for backdating, has paid Brocade $9.5 million to make its backdating-derived civil claims go away. Wilson Sonsini was Brocade's outside...

Where Are They Now?
August 11, 2008... Novell's ousted vice-chairman Chris Stone, instrumental in getting it in the Linux business, is now president and CEO of Massachusetts-based Linux-run HPC computer maker SiCortex Inc where Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe sits on the board....

Stupid Ass Mistake Cripples VMware Servers.
August 18, 2008... A time bomb reportedly left over from the beta of VMware's two-week-old update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2) caused product licenses to expire Tuesday. It also happened with a patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2. The experience...

The Cloud Needs Some Duct Tape.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Google's Gmail fell over and died Monday, serving up only a temporary 502 error message to both free and paid accounts and bringing life as they know it to a grinding halt for millions of people - including Google corporate. There were...

E7 Is Born.
August 18, 2008... At least 16 or 17 months ahead of the appearance of Windows 7, the next generation of the operating system, Microsoft has set up a blog hosted by senior engineering managers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky to discuss the project and ostensibly...

Google's Now in the Encryption Business.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that's supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications. It says Keyczar supports both encryption and...

Nvidia Hits the Wall.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Nvidia's fiscal Q2 revenues were down and that's why it lost $120.9 million, 22 cents a share, in the second quarter. Well, that and the $198 million one-time charge it took to cover costs stemming from those previously admitted defective...

Lenovo To Field Netbook.(Lenovo Group Ltd's IdeaPad S10 )(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Lenovo has gone into the netbook business with a one-inch-deep 2lb XP-based Atom IdeaPad S10 with a 10.2-inch screen. The company says it intends to add other models that target students. The widget can be had in black, white or glossy...

Intel Brands Nehalem.
August 18, 2008... Intel Corporation says its upcoming Nehalem desktop chips, due to start rolling out in Q4, will be branded Intel Core processors. The first members of the new architecture family, including an Extreme Edition, will have a telltale "i7' handle...

Dell Rejigs its Commercial Laptops.
August 18, 2008... While everybody is really waiting for Dell to push into the small and cheap market and go mano a mano with the Asus Eee, Dell unveiled the strategic redesign of its Latitude and Precision business laptops, a move that has to prove Dell's back...

Rackspace IPO Wracks Up.
August 18, 2008... Rackspace Hosting, the rare high-tech IPO these days and a chi-chi cloud purveyor at that, failed to hold up its end after it debuted Friday in a Dutch auction and dropped 20% to $10.01 from its offering price of $12.50, the low end of its...