Client Server News articles from February 2007

Client Server News archives from February 2007

Microsoft seeks patent on build-it-yourself 'Lego' operating system.
February 5, 2007... Imagine a completely deconstructed operating system that the user, or service provider, glues together out of just the pieces he needs and pays for it a la carte. Okay, now imagine Microsoft--which has repeatedly told antitrust authorities...

Dell dumps Rollins.
February 5, 2007... Michael Dell has come back to clean up the mess left by CEO Kevin Rollins, whose immediate resignation was accepted late Wednesday after the market closed. Rollins is gone from the Dell board as well as its executive suite. His...

HP tattletale gagged.(Hewlett-Packard Co. is suing former vice president Karl Kamb)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... The ex-HP VP that countersued HP claiming it paid the former president of Dell Japan to gather and turn over Dell's printer plans to HP, the ones Dell was using to enter the printer market, has been told to pull his suit by the Texas federal...

Intel & IBM claim to have hit on a modern day philosopher's stone.
February 5, 2007... Intel has figured out a way to make its 45nm chips more threatening to AMD--at least this year and adding to its current momentum--while at the same time reinforcing Moore's Law, which says transistor counts double every two years. It...

Adobe to have PDF standardized.(Adobe Systems Inc., Portable document software)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Adobe said Monday that it's going to send PDF to ISO for de iure standardization via AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management International. PDF is pretty much a de facto standard thanks to the fact that Adobe has...

HP's hail Mary play.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... HP is going to drop a few million on an advertising spot on the Super Bowl broadcast this weekend. It'll be its first Super Bowl ad. Reportedly the commercial is one that uses the tagline "The computer is personal again," part of the campaign...

Symantec diversifies again, buys Altiris.
February 5, 2007... Although Symantec anticipates having to cut $200 million of its own costs, can 5% of its staff and buy back a billion-dollar worth of its stock to keep the price up, it's going to buy Altiris, the $200 million-a-year provisioning and management...

IBM buys Softek.
February 5, 2007... IBM Global Services is acquiring privately held Softek Storage Solutions Corporation on undisclosed terms. Investcorp, Columbia Capital, Needham Capital Partners and Updata Partners acquired Softek from Fujitsu 22 months ago in a...

Is Oracle feeling acquisition lust again?(plans to buy Business Objects S.A.)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... There's been talk on Wall Street that Oracle might buy BI maven Business Objects, which explains why Business Objects' stock jumped. The smart money seems to think that it's too pricey now for Oracle's tastes, up more than $10 a share in the...

IPO-bound MySQL targets oracle.
February 5, 2007... MySQL has introduced what it calls an all-you-can-eat one-year "Enterprise Unlimited" subscription to its database for $40,000. The "unprecedented low price" looks like it's meant to dislodge existing site licenses for Microsoft SQL...

Dual-license db4objects adds a third.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... db4objects, one of those dual-license companies--commercial or GPL--has come up with still a third license to accommodate people whose main work is covered by the Apache, BSD, Lesser GPL or Eclipse license, not the GPL. It's a way for them...

Solid sketches out its MySQL roadmap.(Solid Information Technology Corp. enhanced solidDB for MySQL)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Having turned out an up-market storage engine for MySQL capable of heavy transaction loads supporting a lot of concurrent users, Solid Information Technology has sketched out its plans to add new features to solidDB for MySQL. It says that...

Liberty alliance courts open source.(Linux Watch)
February 5, 2007... The Liberty Alliance, the heavyweight consortium put together years ago by Sun to void Microsoft's Passport, has put together a thing called the openLiberty Project meant to supply resources and support to open source developers building...

Centeris move into cross-platform identity management.(Likewise Identity 3.0)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Centeris, which manages Linux servers in a Windows network, has introduced Likewise Identity 3.0, a cross-platform identity management system created in response to user demand for greater breath around Active Directory integration, a core...

Novell open sources build service.(openSUSE Build Service)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Novell has open sourced its openSUSE Build Service, a framework that will let developers create and compile packages for multiple Linux distributions including Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. The widgetry includes KIWI, a system imagining tool...

Red Hat to subcontract service.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Red Hat now has an invitation-only Certified Service Provider (CSP) Program in North America, on its way to making the affair global. Partners are supposed to use Red Hat methodologies for core builds and deployments, health checks and...

Linspire to open Click 'N Run to other Linux desktops.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Linspire says it's going to standardize software installation across Linux distributions by expanding its CNR, a k a Click 'N Run, download and software management service to support the more popular Linux desktop distributions beginning with...

Novell scores a desktop win.(Linux Watch)
February 5, 2007... France's PSA Peugeot Citroen, the second-largest carmaker in Europe, is going to be taking up to 20,000 copies of its Linux desktop off of Novell as well as 2,500 Linux servers.

Anti-Microsoft league complains to EC about Vista.(Microsoft Windows Vista violates anti trust law)
February 5, 2007... Hours before Vista appeared on store shelves Tuesday, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, Linspire, Adobe, Nokia and RealNetworks, banded together as the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), were reminding the European Commission of...

VMware Converter 3 out.(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... VMware has gone gold with its wizard-driven Converter 3 migration toolkit, which is supposed to automate the physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion process for creating VMware virtual machines. There is a free...

Judge goes easier on guy who nailed Sanjay.(Sanjay Kumar and Ira Zar guilty for securities fraud)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... The sentences getting handed out in the waning days of the CA stock fraud case are getting less severe. Last Friday, the company's former CFO Ira Zar was sentenced to seven months in jail, seven months home detention and two years supervised...

Intel blamed for tying a can to One Laptop Per Child box.
February 5, 2007... At Davos this past weekend, Nicholas Negroponte blamed Intel for the poor take-up of his AMD/Linux-based One Laptop Per Child machine, suggesting that Intel has discouraged third-world leaders from buying the thing. Non-Intel critics of...

FalconStor's prospects in China promising.(contracts with Chinese Academy of Sciences)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... In what looks like a honey of a deal, the Chinese Academy of Science, one of those so-called key influencers, is going to be pushing FalconStor's Prime Vault data protection to major accounts throughout China. No value was put on the...

Kazeon turns discovery maven.(IS1200-ECS Information Server )(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Kazeon has started pushing its search technology toward lawyers, claiming it can pare the cost and time it takes to do legal discovery by maybe 90%. It reckons its IS1200-ECS Information Server is the industry's first product that can...

Now, that's Cheek & he's not even french.(Microsoft Corp.'s facility in Romania which helped Romanian information technology industry)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... So Bill Gates was in Bucharest to open a Microsoft technical center and is told by Romanian president Traian Basescu that Romania owes its vibrant technology industry to pirated software. "Piracy helped the young generation discover...

Body count from the price war.(server chips market share)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... AMD may be bleeding all over the rug but it can salve its wounds with the balm of market share. According to Mercury Research, AMD bought itself a record 25.3% of the market for server chips in Q4 at the expense of its ASPs, which melted an...

Invasion of the virtual servers.(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... IDC estimates that 2.3 million virtual servers were deployed last year compared to 7.7 million physical ones. It also figures that 76% of the enterprise will adopt or is planning to adopt x86 virtualization in the next 12 months. Forrester,...

WebCGM 2.0 standardized.(BILLY GRAMS)
February 5, 2007... W3C and OASIS have jointly standardized WebCGM 2.0 for technical illustrations in electronic documents. WebCGM is heavily used in defense, aviation, architecture and transportation. The 2.0 rev offers heightened interoperability.

Negotiated settlement?(Cisco Systems Inc. filed case against Apple Inc. for trademark infringement)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... We may be deprived of the spectacle of Cisco and Apple litigating over the name iPhone. The AP reported Thursday night that the pair was going to talk again to see with they can come to terms. They're serious enough that Apple won't have to...

Google threatens to move against Office.(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Google's threat to Office is supposed to be unleashed "soon" according to a story in Monday's Boston Globe. Google VP and general manager of the enterprise David Girouard in town giving a speech to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership...

Microsoft's got the best rep.(best reputation)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... This is gonna come a shock to its many critics, but the American company with the best reputation is Microsoft, according to annual poll by Harris Interactive and the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft beat Johnson & Johnson, whose baby products...

ClearCube shifts to pure channel play.(BILLY GRAMS)
February 5, 2007... Under its new CEO, ClearCube, the PC blade people are going 100% channel sales, a policy on which the company's future hangs since it means replacing about 40% of its business. ClearCube's channels include OEMs like Lenovo.

Backdating watch.(Securities and Exchange Commission accused Novell Inc. for stock options backdating)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... The SEC is reportedly stuck over what to do about backdaters. Meanwhile, Novell has gotten a second notice from the Nasdaq telling it it's non-compliant because it hasn't filed its financials with the SEC since last April. Novell is supposed to...

Database great missing, feared lost at sea.(Microsoft Research's database researcher Jim Gray)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Jim Gray, 63, the famed database researcher and head of Microsoft Research's eScience Group bent on making the Internet a world wide telescope, took his sailboat out of San Francisco Bay on Sunday to scatter his mother's ashes near the Farallon...

It works!! It works!!!(P.A. Semi Inc. developing energy efficient power chips)
February 12, 2007... Start-up semiconductor house P.A. Semi Inc has confounded the doubters and naysayers who claimed it could never develop a freaking complicated 2GHz Power chip--with every feature currently known to man--that typically consumes just 5W-13W--or...

EMC to monetize VMware.(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... EMC is going to IPO 10% of VMware this summer. It'll give VMware a recruiting and retention incentive and money that's not EMC's to grow on. It's also supposed to increase the visibility into VMware's performance and signal that the...

FTC orders Rambus to slash its royalties.
February 12, 2007... As payback for its "unlawful monopoly" and in the name of "restoring competition," the Federal Trade Commission Monday ordered Rambus to cap the patent royalties it charges for its SDRAM and DDR SDRAM licenses. The cap, which does not cover...

Michael Dell climbs back in the saddle.(Dell Inc.)
February 12, 2007... Boomerang CEO Michael Dell's immediate solution to his company's deepening crisis is to scrub all bonuses for 2006, but he promised people above-market raises. For an incentive, he's offering a shortened vesting period of three years for future...

HP acquires Bristol technology.
February 12, 2007... HP, which is on a software management tear, said Monday that it's buying privately held Connecticut-based Bristol Technology, which these days monitors complex business transactions such as insurance claims and inventory management across...

VMware monetizes its freeware.(VMware Server)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... VMware has brought out a $1,500 SMB bundle meant to monetize the free VMware Server. The new package includes VirtualCenter with VMware Server and enterprise-class support. VirtualCenter offers centralized management and rapid server...

Intel flat in graphics.(PC graphics devices sales)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Roughly 83.5 million PC graphics devices shipped from major suppliers last quarter, up a mere 0.9% sequentially and up 5.1% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research, which counts such things. Intel was first but flat sequentially...

IBM throws a security blanket around virtualization.(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... IBM's Research Labs say they've figured out a way to embed what they call "Fort Knox-like" mainframe-like security directly into virtualization and management software that are already deployed inside data centers. They call the stuff...

First returns in; Vista sales promising.
February 12, 2007... US retail PC sales jumped 67% year-over-year the first week Vista was out, according to Current Analysis. They were up 173% compared to the week before. Seventy percent of consumers opted for the pricey Premium Edition of Vista. Retail revenue...

Gateway still a mess.(Gateway Inc.'s earnings for fourth quarter)(Financial report)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... But for the grace of an $11.8 million tax credit, Gateway would have been unprofitable again in the fourth quarter. However, as it is, the company managed to return an $8.8 profit, or two cents a share, on revenues down 9% year-over-year,...

Microsoft forbids virtualization of junior editions of Vista.(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Hmmm. It seems that Microsoft has put the entry-level versions of Vista, namely the Home Basic and Home Premium editions, out of bounds to VMware or the Windows-on-Mac-running Parallels. Microsoft's End User License Agreements (EULAs)...

In the footsteps of Y2K.(United States government plans for Daylight Savings Time)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Oh, great, now Daylight Savings Time has become a problem. It seems that since the United States government, in its infinite wisdom, has moved the start of Daylight Saving Time to March rather than April, there could be a problem with...

AMD adds new energy-efficient Opterons.
February 12, 2007... AMD Wednesday added new low-power Opterons to its portfolio. The entry-level 1000 Series 1218 HE, 2218 HE and 8218 HE are spec'd at 68W maximum and use the company PowerNow technology to reduce energy consumption during idle times. It also said...

Microsoft and Sun offer competing ODF translators.(Sun Microsystems Inc., OpenDocument Format)
February 12, 2007... Sun said Wednesday to stand by because the first part of its OpenDocument Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003 should be available--God willing and creek don't rise--in the next few days. The thing is called the StarOffice 8...

FSF rattles GPL 3 under Novell's nose to spook it.(Free Software Foundation, General Public License)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Ticked off over the patent codicil in the controversial rapprochement between Novell and Microsoft, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been making noises to Reuters about slamming its rewrite of the GPL down on Novell's fingers and...

GroundWork clears third round.(GroundWork Open Source has raised funds from venture capital firms)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... GroundWork Open Source, the network monitoring and management ISV, an open source competitor to, oh, HP Open View, has raised a $12.5 million third round that it describes as being oversubscribed. It hooked JAFCO Ventures, which led, and SAP...

Norway goes with Sun for e-Government.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Norway is deploying open source Solaris 10-run x86 and T1-based Sun Fire servers as the basis of a nation-wide eNorway 2009 initiative that's meant to provide Norwegians with web-based portal access to government services including voting. ...

Red hat claims Microsoft victory.(will migrate its servers from NT to Red Hat Linux and appointed Gery Messer)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Red Hat says the Swedish Armed Forces, which hasn't taken the field since the early eighteenth century, is going to join the Red Hat-Microsoft skirmish and migrate its servers from NT to Red Hat Linux for security reasons. Red Hat has so far...

Gigaspaces gets round.(BRM Capital, Intel and FTVentures)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Gigaspaces, the transaction-intensive middleware house, as raised a C round worth $5 million led by BRM Capital and joined by Intel and newcomer FTVentures. So far the company has raised $13 million. It wants to expand and enter Asia Pacific,...

Greenplum gets money, new CEO.(Bill Cook)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Greenplum, the start-up with the Postgres database for business intelligence and data warehousing, has closed on $15 million in funding, a $4 million line of credit and a new CEO, Bill Cook, imported from Penguin. Before Penguin he was senior...

Linspire to move to Ubuntu.(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Linspire, nee Lindows, the desktop Linux house that we gather has been struggling, says it's going to transition off its version of Debian and replace it with Ubuntu, another Debian derivative, under a technology pact with Canonical, the South...

Red hat updates its security.(Red Hat Certificate System 7.2, network security software)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Red Hat is touting its new Certificate System 7.2, a complete public key infrastructure (PKI) that's supposed to guarantee the identity of users and insure private communications in heterogeneous environments. The new release--Red Hay...

IBM x86 boss gone.
February 12, 2007... Susan Whitney, the head of IBM's x86 servers, has retired.

IBM cuts position in Lenovo.
February 12, 2007... IBM has cut the 15% position it got in Lenovo when it sold its PC operation to the Chinese company by 3.5%, selling it to person or persons unknown for $123 million, a 7% discount off Lenovo's share price. After bone-exposing cost cutting,...

Microsoft to license three more protocols.(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Microsoft, evidently looking over its shoulder at the European antitrust authorities, who are now debating the legality of Vista, is going to open up its instant messaging, email and collaboration protocols to competitors in the name of...

HP gets itself a new lawyer.(Hewlett-Packard Co., Michael Hoston)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... HP has replaced its general counsel Ann Baskins, the one who oversaw the so-called Kona pretexting exercises and resigned minutes before she was supposed to testify before Congress about the company's boardroom spy caper. Poetically, it's...

EMC makes first use of RSA widgetry.(EMC Symmetrix DMX-3, data storage devices)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... EMC has moved some of the mojo from its $2.1 billion acquisition of RSA Security last year into its flagship Symmetrix DMX-3 storage to give it stronger authentication, authorization and audit capabilities, saying now they're embedded not...

IBM pushes off response to PSI suit.
February 12, 2007... IBM has begged more time to answer Platform Solution's mainframe antitrust tying suit. Its response isn't due now until March 8. Meanwhile, feisty little PSI is taking itself to the Share user group do this week to peddle its Itanium-based...

HP quits Nasdaq.
February 12, 2007... HP is going to pull out of the Nasdaq and remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It says it's to reduce the cost of exchange listing fees and the "administrative burdens associated with a dual listing." It doesn't think it will affect...

AMD gets IBM guy to run manufacturing.
February 12, 2007... AMD has named Douglas Grose senior VP of technology development, manufacturing and supply chain, succeeding the retiring Daryl Ostrander and responsible for all manufacturing--AMD's own and its contractors'--and for its process technology. ...

HP takes up with Transitive to harry Sun.
February 12, 2007... HP, as you might expect, is going to use Transitive-transcribed Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/x86 programs to shift Sun users to its ProLiant platforms. It is also certifying the 64-bit x86 version of Solaris 10 on seven of its servers: BL20p G4,...

Google dreams of Microsoft's Armageddon--Presently.(BILLY GRAMS)
February 12, 2007... The TechCrunch blog thinks it stumbled over and captured evidence of Google working on a PowerPoint knockoff dubbed Presently before it was purged from Google's Docs & Spreadsheets programming code. You'll remember that the web-based...

Mellanox IPOs.(Mellanox Technologies, initial public offerings)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Mellanox Technologies (MLNX), the Infiniband house, went public Thursday ultimately pricing the float at $17, five bucks more than expected, and raising $102 million on the six million shares. It added three bucks during the day to close up...

Now that's what I call an add-on.(Force10 Networks get $54 million add-on to its Series F investment)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Force10 Networks, which makes gigE and 10Gb Ethernet routers and switches, the natural-born rivals of Infiniband, got a $54 million add-on to its Series F round this week, pushing its Series F investment to $104 million so far. The company...

Troop movements.(BILLY GRAMS)
February 12, 2007... The president of Fujitsu's System Products Business Group and Software Business Unit Yoshiyuki Tanakura has resigned. He will be an executive advisor to Fujitsu Ltd.

Mainframe apps to be rehosted on Windows.(BILLY GRAMS)
February 12, 2007... New Jersey-based TmaxSoft Inc, whose OpenFrame widgetry currently migrates mainframe applications to Unix or Linux environments, reportedly without modifying the business logic, says it's begun work on a Windows version of the rehosting...

We might know the results of Microsoft's European antitrust appeal by September.(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Bo Vesterdorf, the president of Europe's Court of First Instance, which heard Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's 2004 antitrust decision against the company, says he's hoping to have a verdict before he leaves office in September....

webMethods joins Microsoft's Interop Alliance.(BILLY GRAMS)
February 12, 2007... webMethods has joined Microsoft's Interop Vendor Alliance, which is supposed to simplify and improve people's integration and interoperability with Microsoft's software.

Jobs comes out against DRM-protected music to take heat off iTunes-iPod lock-in.(Steve Jobs, digital rights management)
February 12, 2007... Steve Jobs, his music monopoly under pressure, wants the Big Four record companies that control 70% of music publishing, namely Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, to release their music without digital rights management so "any player can...