Client Server News articles from December 2004

Client Server News archives from December 2004

Open source start-up seeks to revive the object database.(db4objects Inc. expectations and plannings)
December 6, 2004... Imagine, an open source start-up that broke even before it incorporated. Now there's a twist. The name of this prodigy is db4objects Inc and, as the name suggests, it's an object database house. Object databases fizzled in the 90s....

Intel ups guidance sharply.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Intel raised its Q4 forecast at its mid-quarter update Thursday evening. Wall Street figured it would do that but apparently Intel pulled out a few stops and is now saying it should clear between $9.3 billion and $9.5 billion in revenues, up...

Infineon execs pull jail time.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Four executives of Infineon AG and its North American subsidiary have pleaded guilty to an international conspiracy to fix DRAM prices, the Justice Department said Thursday. Each is going to jail for four-six months and each has been fined...

Decision on EC stay due by Xmas.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Microsoft will know by Christmas whether it's going to get its way and get the European Commission's antitrust decision against it shelved until after the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg hears its appeal, a process that could take years....

BEA thinks ill of its sales chief & dumps him.(employee terminations)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... BEA, which has suffered a serious executive exodus lately along with an exodus of sales, has parted company with Charlie Ill, its head of worldwide sales--who, rumor says, has been something of a figurehead lately anyway. According to BEA,...

Didn't their mamas tell them it's not nice to be a tease?(cell microprocessor product development)
December 6, 2004... IBM reiterated Monday that it's going to start pilot production of the Cell microprocessor that it's been developing with Sony and Toshiba since 2001--the supercomputer-on-a-chip that's supposedly God's gift to content and convergence--in the...

Oracle to PeopleSoft: who needs ya.
December 6, 2004... Oracle co-president Chuck Phillips has been going around saying Oracle is in merger talks with companies other than PeopleSoft, which still refuses to talk at all outside a courtroom. Phillips refused to name names. Could be BEA and Siebel. ...

Fujitsu pairs with IBM on standards.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... In the name of multi-vendor interoperability, IBM and Fujitsu are collaborating on autonomic computing standards--both existing and new self-managing standardization efforts--beginning with the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Event...

IBM, forgets to take its meds, decides to sell rival database.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... In one of those little curiosities that keep life vaguely interesting, IBM--of all people --is going to sell Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) on Linux database worldwide on its OpenPower servers starting next quarter. It's hard to...

IBM forms consortium to push Linux-on-power.(Linux Watch)
December 6, 2004... IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Bull, Cadence, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Sony and eight other friends of IBM are starting an open standards community around Power chips and boxes called Power.org. Evidently the push would include the...

Amdahl to advise MPT.(Linux Watch)( Massively Parallel Technologies )
December 6, 2004... Supercomputing whiz Gene Amdahl has been tapped for the board of advisers of the high-performance computing outfit Massively Parallel Technologies (MPT). Amdahl, an authority on parallel processing, came up with "Amdahl's Law" in 1967,...

Wal-mart picks up Xandros.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Walmart.com, which pioneered Linux PCs, is now selling cheap Microtel boxes with the Xandros brand of desktop Linux Continued from page 5 that Xandros bought off Corel. Walmart's Linux wares include Microtel boxes with Xandros, Linspire,...

OSDL adopts open Posix test suite.(Linux Watch)(Open Posix Test Suite)(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs has integrated the Open Posix Test Suite (OPTS) into the library of tests that run against new Linux kernel builds. OPTS is an open source project designed to make it easier to port applications from other...

Oracle certified on SLES9.(Linux Watch)(SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Oracle has certified its Database 10g, Application Server 10g, RAC, Collaboration Suite and E-Business Suite 11i on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9), the operating systems Novell released in August that's based on the 2.6 Linux kernel....

Mandrakesoft back in the black.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Mandrakesoft returned to profitability in its fiscal year ended September 30. The French Linux house earned $1.85 million, or 39 cents a share, on sales of $6.88 million. The year before, it lost $2.64 million on sales of $5.18 million....

Sun drafts new SCO-sensitive open source license.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Without saying it has anything to do with its avowed determination to open source Solaris 10, Sun has sent over a newfangled open source license to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the keeper of such things, for its approval. The...

HP debuts identity management app.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has rolled out a new identity management application so enterprises can provide their partners with secure access to information that resides on different systems. Dubbed OpenView Select Federation, the new product is the...

Microsoft sets up research unit in India.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Microsoft is opening its third offshore research center in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley. Set to open in January, the Bangalore center is expected to have a staff of two-dozen people in its first year conducting basic and applied...

No SP5 for Win2K.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Microsoft made it clear the other day that there would be no Service Pack 5 for Windows 2000 and that all customers can expect is an "Update Rollup" for SP4 in mid-'05. "Because Microsoft believes the Update Rollup will meet the needs of...

Microsoft betas blogs.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Microsoft's MSN network is expanding its portfolio with a beta of a free blogging service called MSN Spaces. Available in 14 languages and 26 markets, Spaces follows Microsoft's well-worn tradition of hooking its various products together...

EC probe snagged.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... The European Commission has reportedly hung its investigation of the Microsoft-Time Warner acquisition of ContentGuard on a hook pending further information since Thomson joined the deal last week. The EC is worried the DRM house will give...

IBM to peddle PolyServe software.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... IBM will resell PolyServe software including its Matrix Server shared data clustering software for Linux and Windows. IBM plans to push the software through its direct channel to its eServer BladeCenter and xSeries customers in the US. ...

HP to boost virtualization, HA with Veritas apps.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has signed a multi-year deal to OEM some Veritas Storage Foundation applications to extend the virtualization and high-availability capabilities of the HP-UX 11i operating system and Serviceguard software. Veritas' Storage...

NEC Soft OEMs SANmelody.(Drive Bay)(Original Equipment Manufacturer)(Storage Area Networks)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... NEC Soft is OEM'ing DataCore's SANmelody disk server software in a new storage system called MelodiousStor. DataCore, a storage ISV, says NEC Soft is using its software to address storage consolidation as well as backup, disaster recovery,...

Sun buys managed services start-up.( SevenSpace )(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Sun is acquiring privately held SevenSpace to expand its managed services to mixed environments such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft. The amount of cash Sun is paying wasn't disclosed. Ashburn, Virginia-based...

Microsoft 'investigating' WINS security issue.(Windows Internet Name Service)
December 6, 2004... Microsoft said the other day that it's investigating reports of a security problem with its Windows Internet Name Service but seemed to acknowledge the existence of the vulnerability. The security issue, said to affect NT Server 4.0, NT...

HP expands management apps portfolio.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Hewlett-Packard is expanding its Open-View management software portfolio with a new "business-triggered" automatic services and application configuration product called Automation Manager. The new program debuted at HP's Software Universe...

Beijing cancels Microsoft order.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... According to press reports, Beijing's municipal government awarded Microsoft a $3.6 million three-year contract in mid-November reportedly to replace pirated software, only to pull it a few days later. Supposedly the city was bowing to...

Is Oracle a one-trick pony?(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Prudential believes that Linux-based server farms are going to give Oracle's main database business a "healthy tailwind" over the next two years. However, it thinks Oracle's stock will be stuck in the low teens until it can prove it can...

Consoles to ace out PCs.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Peering into its crystal ball, Merrill Lynch says that game consoles will beat out PCs as the centerpiece of the family room. PCs--even the newfangled Media Center boxes--can't win because they are too complex and unstable. Merrill thinks...

New SleepCat rev due.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... SleepyCat Software, makers of the Berkeley DB, is about to pop a new version of its native XML database that includes support for Xquery 1.0, the emerging standard for XML data access as well as performance and usability enhancement. The thing...

Another bad day at black rock for Intel.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... The other day chip groupie Nathan Brookwood tripped over the fact that AMD started delivering its so-called Winchester chip in mid-September without making any noise about it, not even so much as an announcement, because "they didn't think it...

Gartner claims we're gonna be three giants shy.(Brief Article)
December 6, 2004... Gartner is betting that slower growth rates and thinning margins will force three of the top 10 PC vendors to exit the market by 2007. Gartner says PC unit growth will hit only 5.7% a year from 2006 through 2008, only half the 11.3% it's...

After fruitless struggle, IBM dumps its PC unit in Lenovo's lap.(Lenovo Group Ltd.)
December 13, 2004... In a tacit admission of failure, IBM, the archetypal capitalist that pioneered the personal computer two decades ago, is selling its loss-ridden PC unit to Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker partly owned by the communist Chinese government, in a...

The platformization of Intel.
December 13, 2004... At its fall analyst meeting on Tuesday, Intel president Paul Otellini showed working machines run by the anticipated dual-core Smithfield desktop chip and the Yonah laptop chip. Smithfield, the mystery processor Intel trotted out at IDF in...

Bill Clinton, yes, that Bill Clinton, shills for new Google rival.(Accoona Corporation)
December 13, 2004... Former Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer is now the chairman of Jersey City-based Accoona Corporation, a new search engine house that claims to deliver smarter, more relevant results than Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Accoona, a Swahili word...

Commerce one patents go to mystery bidder.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... That batch of potentially key Commerce One e-commerce patents that went to court-ordered auction the other day over the objections of folks like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the cyber-liberties watchdog that claimed the bankrupt company...

Aw shucks, the spitball era is over.
December 13, 2004... Eight months into their new post-settlement rapprochement and Sun and Microsoft figure their relationship is now "more mature" than it used to be--which apparently means they're not going stick each other braids in the inkwell anymore. ...

Penguin breaks into blades.(Linux Watch)
December 13, 2004... Penguin Computer is going into the blades business. The little Linux house, currently run by former DEC-Compaq big-shot Enrico Pesatori, has bought in a third-party design that it's calling BladeRunner that it can use to create an...

Thunderbird flies.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... On the heels of its Firefox 1.0 web browser, which threatens to take away market share from Microsoft, Mozilla has released its Thunderbird 1.0 e-mail client, which competes with Microsoft's Outlook Express and Qualcomm's Eudora. It is...

Euro software patents in limbo.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... The European Union won't be able to decide whether or not to adopt the controversial American model of software patents until next year, according to anti-patent watchdog nosoftwarepatents.com. It seems the EU Council now lacks a qualified...

Linux server revenues to cross $9b in '08.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
December 13, 2004... The growing adoption of Linux by customers worldwide for enterprise workloads, hosting ISV applications and databases will yield Linux server revenues of $9.1 billion in 2008, according to a new study by IDC. Linux server revenues are...

Novell to commercialize Open-Xchange.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Novell is supposed to start selling and doing training, maintenance and support for Netline Internet Service's Open-Xchange collaboration server, the engine behind SuSE's Openexchange Server. Novell is also supposed to add the thing to its...

PalmSource embraces Linux.(Linux Watch)(China MobileSoft)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Palm OS merchant PalmSource is buying mobile phone ISV China MobileSoft (CMS) in a $22.6 million stock deal to tap into the huge Chinese market and the growing popularity of Linux. Nanjing-based CMS offers a range of mobile phone software...

Open source circa 560 A.D.(Linux Watch)(a copyright infringement case by Columba in ancient time)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Once upon a time, back in sixth-century Ireland, there lived a monk named Columba with a mad passion for books who wasn't above pinching the books of other monks so he could copy them, a little habit that did nothing for his reputation. In...

CA names chief compliance officer.(Patrick Gnazzo appointed at Computer Associates International Inc.)
December 13, 2004... Computer Associates has hired itself a chief compliance officer like it pledged it would when it settled with the government to keep from getting branded a rogue company in court. The chap it's hired is Patrick Gnazzo, who was chief...

Vintela integrates J2EE boxes with Active Directory.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Vintela, one of Microsoft's recent investments, has pushed its Single Sign-on for Java (VAJ) product out the door. It integrates J2EE servers with Microsoft's Active Directory so usernames and passwords don't have to be re-entered. Vintela...

Siebel lusts after SMBs--again.(Small and Medium Sized Business)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Siebel is going to take another crack at the SMB market, a road it's been down before with little success and this time it's up against stronger competition and Microsoft. This time it's recruiting market-savvy resellers as well as hiring...

AMD to put PowerNow mojo in Opteron.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... AMD says it's gonna put its PowerNow power management mojo, the stuff it uses in notebook chips, in its Opteron processors in the first half to decrease overall power consumption and provide performance-on-demand. It claims it will put less...

IBM taunts EMC with SAN Volume Controller upgrade.(Drive Bay)(Storage Area Networks)
December 13, 2004... IBM has upgraded its SAN Volume Controller storage virtualization software to support EMC's Clariion CX300, CX500 and CX700 disk arrays. IBM executives claim that with the upgrade--the fifth release of the software--SAN Volume Controller...

HP launches new storage gear.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has rolled out a bunch of storage offerings that includes a new disk array that enables concurrent attachment of both SCSI and SATA disk enclosures behind a single controller shelf. HP said the new Modular Storage Array...

Hitachi sets sights on SMB market.(Drive Bay)(Small and Medium sized Business)
December 13, 2004... Hitachi Data Systems is going after the global SMB market with a low-end, channel-only version of its mid-range Thunder storage system. Piggybacking on the Windows Server 2003 market, the new Thunder 9520V modular workgroup storage system...

Candera turns off the lights.(Drive Bay)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... The lights have gone out at four-year-old storage start-up Candera. The richly funded Milpitas, California outfit is shutting down and selling its IP. Candera's core offering was a network storage controller designed to move...

External storage revenues hit $3.4b.(Drive Bay)(Industry Overview)
December 13, 2004... External disk storage systems revenues grew 3.5% year-over-year to $3.4 billion in the third quarter marking the sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth according to IDC. However, growth was slower in both external...

BEA goes to the devil.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... BEA has unveiled Diablo, its next-generation WebLogic Server 9.0, the cornerstone of its upcoming WebLogic Platform 9.0 designed to connect disparate systems and run the applications that large companies use to run their business. Diablo...

RC1 for Windows Server 2003 SP1 arrives.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Microsoft has put out a release candidate for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1. Besides consolidating Windows Server 2003 updates, SP1 adds enhancements and new features to improve security, reliability and administration. The new...

Dell cuts server, workstation prices.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Dell has cut the price on certain of its servers, workstations, desktops and notebooks for American corporate and institutional customers citing decreasing component costs. The company cut the price of its PowerEdge 4600 dual-processor...

Archivas gets more funding.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Archivas, the archiving start-up with the object-based file system designed to store fixed content and provide "unlimited" online storage, has picked up a second round of financing worth $10 million, raising its funding to $16 million. The...

Microsoft debuts second SQL server 2005 beta.
December 13, 2004... Microsoft has launched a second beta of its SQL Server 2005 software as well as a beta of a free database management tool. The second beta, or Community Technology Preview as Microsoft calls it, lets users test and experiment with new...

Opteron hype is, well, hype.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... AMD brags that 25% of the Fortune Global 100, including Microsoft, BNP Paribas and Bell Helicopter, are now using Opteron systems. The Microsoft Treasury, which oversees the company's vast $60 billion in assets, had to split up its...

HP has toyed with breaking up.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... HP CEO Carly Fiorina told Wall Street critics, who would like to see the company's profits-producing printer division spun out, that the board has given serious thought to breaking up the company three times. She didn't say why the subject came...

Next, the world.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Intel is trying to figure out what else it can turn into silicon. It's looking at 3D and animated graphics, data mining, network processing and speech recognition and synthesis.

Intel raises dual-core projections.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Intel has changed its forecast and now expects to exit 2006 with upwards of 70% of its desktop shipments being dual-cores, up from 40% a mere two months ago. It figures that by then dual-cores will account for upwards of 85% of server shipments...

Dell disses Lenovo.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Michael Dell wouldn't answer when CNBC asked him if he tried to buy IBM's PC business. At Oracle OpenWorld, he gave the IBM-Lenovo tie-up the same odds of succeeding as other industry mergers. In other words, someplace between zilch and the...

Longhorn watch.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Credit Suisse says it's picked up a tom-tom beat from Microsoft to its OEMs telling them to expect Longhorn in the spring of 2006. CSFB notes that Microsoft has "a propensity to miss deadlines." Microsoft has already promised a beta in the...

Gateway, Toshiba were interested.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... When the pending IBM-Lenovo deal was leaked to the New York Times last Friday, there was supposedly another interested party in the wings. The Wall Street Journal then said there were two. BusinessWeek identifies them as Gateway and Toshiba. It...

PeopleSoft may have run out of places to hide.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... PeopleSoft is supposed to turn up in the Delaware Chancery Court on Monday to explain why it's turned down Oracle's $24-ashare bid, which the judge has indicated he regards as a legitimate offer with a built-in premium for stockholders. In a...

Ellison claims he's not a vandal.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Evidently laying the foundation for Oracle's defense when it appears in court next month to answer charges that its run on PeopleSoft singed PeopleSoft to the tune of a billion dollars, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison this week claimed PeopleSoft was...

CA freezes India plans.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Computer Associates' new CEO-in-waiting John Swainson has reportedly frozen the company's shiny new plans, announced in October before he came on board, to build a 1,000-man development crew in India by the end of the year pending a review of...

Dell calls Red Hat overpriced.(Billy Grams)(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Judy Chavis, director of business development for Dell's Enterprise Product Group, told CNET that Red Hat needs to lower its prices, making a point that Sun has been trying to make to carve out a space for its free Solaris 10. She's quoted as...

Microsoft returns to normal.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... After it's blow-out $3-a-share pay-out, Microsoft has gone back to a eight-cents-a-share quarterly dividend payable March 10.

Ball in IBM, SCO court.(Brief Article)
December 13, 2004... Our lawyers, Jones, Waldo, Holbrook & McDonough, say that according to the rules IBM and SCO have until Monday, December 20 to reply to the motion to intervene in the SCO v IBM suit that we filed asking the court to open all the sealed...

Symantec buys Veritas, still has acquisition itch.(acquisition of VERITAS Software Corp. by Symantec Corp.)
December 20, 2004... Symantec, the consumer anti-virus house, is buying Veritas, the enterprise storage and backup manager, for $13.5 billion in stock. The price works out to roughly $30.75 a share, better than a $5 premium over Veritas' closing price on Friday...

Carly finds way to trim another $100m.(partnership serverance between Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp.)
December 20, 2004... HP, whose contributions made the Itanium so confoundedly complicated, has dropped out of the 10-year-old partnership with Intel that saw them develop the 64-bit chip. It was Intel's idea and the two of them reportedly kicked it around for...

IBM sets up server joint venture in China.(joint venture, International Systems Technology Company, between Great Wall Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief Article)
December 20, 2004... When last seen, IBM was in this sticky little situation of having just sold the PC side of its factory in China--the factory being a joint venture with Great Wall Computing--to Lenovo but not the server side. Needless to say, Great Wall and...

Microsoft buys spyware buster.(acquisition of Giant Company Software by Microsoft Corp.)(Brief Article)
December 20, 2004... Microsoft has acquired a New York City-based anti-spyware outfit called Giant Company Software on undisclosed terms. Whatever the arrangement, it apparently didn't take into consideration the fact that Sunbelt Software apparently co-owns...

M'soft bears down on IBM's fabled iSeries.(introduction of "Midrange Alliance Program" by Microsoft Corp.)
December 20, 2004... Microsoft has joined forces with a bunch of IT vendors to launch an assault aimed at getting customers of IBM's proprietary Power-based iSeries servers, the old, hysterically successful AS/400 boxes, to migrate to Windows. Dubbed the...

M'soft goes into the software-as-service biz with Bell Canada.(alliances and partnerships between Microsoft Corp. and Bell Canada)(Brief Article)
December 20, 2004... Microsoft Canada and Bell Canada have climbed into bed together so Bell can develop integrated IT-telecom solutions for the SME market using Microsoft widgetry. Bell is supposed to develop a line of new services and a wizard-type...

Apple bites back; harmony singing off-key.(enhancement of Apple iPod)(Brief Article)
December 20, 2004... Apple has gone ahead like it said it might and confounded Real-Networks' smart-ass Harmony scheme that picked the lock on Apple's copy-protection system so it could break Apple's iTunes monopoly and sell songs to iPod users. Harmony...

EC stay decision due.(cases between Microsoft Corp. and European Union European Commission)(Brief Article)
December 20, 2004... By Monday Microsoft is supposed to know whether the appeals court in Europe has been persuaded to stay the antitrust remedies imposed by the European Commission until after Microsoft's appeal is heard. If it does let Microsoft off the hook, it...

Gates to sit on Buffett's board.(appointment of Bill Gates as a board member at Berkshire Hathaway Inc.)(Brief Article)
December 20, 2004... Bill Gates is going to sit on the Berkshire Hathaway board, filing a vacancy created in July when Warren Buffett's wife died of a stroke. Gates and fellow billionaire Buffett, who has consistently shied away from high-tech investments saying he...

Linux has 985 bugs.(Linux Watch)(reports of Coverity Inc.)
December 20, 2004... Five ex-Stanford computer researchers now with a start-up called Coverity Inc chartered to develop a better way to build software have analyzed 5.7 million lines of Linux source code over the last four years and say the 2.6.9 production kernel...

OSDL looks under the sofa cushions for signs of Linux growth.(Linux Watch)(reports of Open Source Development Labs)
December 20, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs has gone into the soothsayer business and--based on research that it had IDC run up --says that the global Linux market will be worth $35.7 billion in 2008. It's the first time a major market researchers has...

Grid pioneers launch start-up.(Linux Watch)(formation of Univa Corporation)
December 20, 2004... The folks behind the open source Globus Toolkit used for building grids have set up a company called Univa Corporation to commercialize the thing and provide enhancements, services and support. The brainchild of Globus Toolkit creators...