Client Server News articles from February 2009

Client Server News archives from February 2009

Why the Biggest Antitrust Case Ever May Never Get to Court.
February 2, 2009... Wanna bet that Intel has found a way to get AMD to drop its cherished antitrust suit against the semiconductor giant - and that AMD handed Intel the six-gun to blow it away like in a Sam Peckinpah movie? It all revolves around AMD's...

Supremes Asked To Review Key Patent Decision.
February 2, 2009... The US Supreme Court was asked Wednesday to review the infamous Bilski business methods patent decision handed down en banc in October by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit limiting patents to things that "transform an article to a...

Euro Court Tells Intel To Go Suck an Egg.
February 2, 2009... Intel has lost its unprecedented bid to get the European Commission to consider what Intel figures is exculpatory evidence that the agency refuses to seek in the AMD-leveraged antitrust action that the EC has brought against the semiconductor...

Symantec Gets the Cloud Bug.
February 2, 2009... Symantec is going with the flow about "liberating" users from the physical desktop and pushing them into the cloud. It's put out a beta of some newfangled GoEverywhere widgetry - complements of what it calls its incubator - that's designed...

Apple Gets its Man.
February 2, 2009... Apple has sorta kinda gotten its way - like it got its way with the iPhone trademark. It wanted IBM VP and MPU maven Mark Papermaster, portrayed by IBM as a walking library of IBM trade secrets, to start running its iPod and iPhone...

IBM Layoffs Top 4,000: Report.
February 2, 2009... Despite its record Q4 earnings, up 12%, and upbeat guidance, IBM quietly laid off over 2,800 people in the US and Canada last week. The jobs affected include engineering positions in the company's highly profitable software unit and slots in...

Win7 Beta Availability Extended.
February 2, 2009... Late last Friday Microsoft extended the deadline for the public beta of its next-generation desktop operating system, Windows 7, perhaps because it hasn't hit its 2.5 million download bogie although it claims to have enough feedback to meet its...

GDrive: Where the Rubber Supposedly Meets the Road.
February 2, 2009... The chattering classes - both the blogosphere and the established press - are atwitter over the rumor - this particular one revived a few days ago by TG Daily - that Google is finally going to unveil its unconfirmed S3-like online storage...

Lenovo Acquires Hush-Hush Start-up.
February 2, 2009... Lenovo said Wednesday that it has acquired Seattle-based start-up Switchbox Labs Inc for some undisclosed sum, and that Switchbox co-founders Michael Sievert, Robert Dickinson and Blake Ramsdell will join Lenovo. Sievert, an ex-Microsoft...

VMware's Q4 Revenues, Earnings Up 25%.(Financial report)
February 2, 2009... Virtualization market leader VMware, which is fighting a two-front war against the recession and Microsoft, made 36 cents a share on revenues up 25% to $515 million in the fourth quarter, better than Wall Street thought it would. Estimates only...

10% of Citrix Virtually Gone.
February 2, 2009... Citrix, VMware's rival, is going to cut 10% of its staff, about 460 people give or take as well as consolidate facilities and reduce contract workers to save $50 million a year. It said so when its Q4 results turned out to be worse than...

Cloud Reaches Washington, D.C.
February 2, 2009... CSC and Terremark Worldwide, two old beltway bandits, have thrown in their lots together to offer cloud computing services to the US government. That means they'll approach federal agencies about buying their IT infrastructure requirements...

Bartz to Ballmer: 'Don't Hold Your Breath'.
February 2, 2009... Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, there all of eight days and already sounding a bit like her predecessor, the company's eminence grise, Jerry Yang, said Tuesday that "I didn't come here to sell the company." The occasion was her first post-earnings...

Virtualization Start-up Gets More Funding.(xkoto)(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... xkoto, the database virtualization start-up, has gotten another $3 million in financing from its backers, GrandBanks Capital and GrowthWorks Canadian Fund. That makes a total of $13 million since it was founded in 2005. Apparently it's not...

AOL To Cut 700 Jobs.
February 2, 2009... Complaining that ad budgets have tightened by "hundreds of millions of dollars," and as part of its turnaround plan, now in year two, AOL is going to cut over 10% of its staff, about 700 people, skip pay raises this year and consolidate...

IBM Aims Cloud at Schools.
February 2, 2009... IBM said Monday that six universities in Qatar, Japan and Sub-Saharan Africa have started using its Blue Cloud to advance research initiatives previously constrained by time, resources and maxed-out systems. It's unclear exactly what IBM is...

Adobe Adds Video Streaming to Scene7.
February 2, 2009... Adobe has added video streaming to its Scene7 hosted media publishing platform. Called the Scene7 eVideo Streaming Solution, the widgetry leverages Flash so users can upload, transcode, edit, manage and stream content on the web. It's...

Symantec Posts Whopping $6.8b Paper Loss.(Financial report)
February 2, 2009... Symantec, which is still run by the guy who may be the next commerce secretary, wrote off $6.8 in goodwill Wednesday when it reported its fiscal Q3 results. That works out to $8.23 a share. Excluding that massive item, equal to roughly half...

SAP To Sack 3,000-3,500.
February 2, 2009... Digging in for the long haul, SAP is going to cut 3,000-3,500 jobs after its earnings dipped 1.6% to 1.89 billion euros ($2.49 billion) in 2008 although revenues were up 13% to 11.6 billion euros. It expects the move to save it 300...

Gmail Inches Toward Offline Support.
February 2, 2009... Eighteen months or so after Google Gears debuted, a period of time scarred by several major Gmail outages, Google's cloud-accessible-only e-mail is finally getting invested with offline support. English-speaking US and UK Gmail users who...

Start-up To Commercialize Lucene Search.
February 2, 2009... Eighteen-month-old Lucid Imagination rose above the covering ground fog Tuesday to announce its existence as the first open source company to commercially support the Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies. The Java-based Lucene search...

CodeArmor Now Sniffs Out Pirated Linux Apps.
February 2, 2009... V.i. Labs has moved its CodeArmor Intelligence widgetry onto Linux as well as Windows. That's the stuff that lets ISVs gather intelligence on the pirated use of their software and recover lost revenue, a subject near and dear to Microsoft's...

Talend Raises $12m.(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... Talend, the open source data integration software house, has secured $12 million in Series C financing to help fuel growth. The round is being led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in MySQL, and existing backer AGF Private Equity...

SCO Hikes Prices.
February 2, 2009... Ahead of any auction of its assets, SCO has doubled the price of older versions of its OpenServer and UnixWare operating systems so it can "continue to focus on upgrading and maintaining the latest versions of SCO Unix." The current...

Sun Sinks Deeper over the Horizon.
February 2, 2009... Sun lost $209 million, 28 cents a share, in the December quarter, half way through its fiscal year, because of a $222 million restructuring charge that it's taking to cover the firing of those 5,000-6,000 people, the 15%-18% of its workforce it...

Intel Said To Be Throwing SaaS Blanket Across Europe.
February 2, 2009... Intel is building a SaaS platform "that will soon blanket Europe," according to the financial blog Seeking Alpha. Intel reportedly confirmed that the widgetry involved its own Multi-Site Director along with managed services software from...

Recession Means Fewer Lawyers.
February 2, 2009... Saying it's fallen prey to the downturn, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Silicon Valley's star law firm, terminated 45 of its 660 lawyers and 68 staff including secretaries and paralegals on Monday. It's also freezing associate salaries,...

Symantec CEO Likely Headed for Obama Cabinet.
February 2, 2009... It's looks more and more likely that Symantec's outgoing CEO John W Thompson is going to be named secretary of commerce in the Obama administration. No other names are floating around. Apparently all the IBM veteran has to do is survive the...

Well, That's the First Billion.(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... As of December there were over a billion Internet users in the world, according to comScore, complements of Asia-Pacific in general and China in particular. Asia-Pac accounts for 41% of this global audience, followed by Europe's 28%, North...

Intel Chairman To Retire.
February 2, 2009... Intel chairman and former CEO Craig Barrett, 69, is going to retire in May and hand the job to independent director Jane Shaw. Intel hasn't had a non-executive chairman since Arthur Rock, the company's original financier, the guy who gave...

Bluehouse Adds HyperOffice Wing.
February 2, 2009... HyperOffice has been showing off a new version of its Site Publisher that plugs into IBM's Bluehouse suite of hosted online business services. Site Publisher, a SharePoint alternative, lets folks collaborating in the cloud design, build,...

IBM Buys Outblaze Assets.
February 2, 2009... IBM is buying the strategic messaging service assets of Outblaze, the Hong Kong-based online messaging and collaboration service, for Bluehouse, now in open beta. Terms were not disclosed. Outblaze's hosted multilingual e-mail service...

Changes in EMC Boardroom.
February 2, 2009... EMC has named former Goldman Sachs CIO and co-administrative officer Randy Cowen to its board, serving on its compensation and M&A committees. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has resigned his directorship so he can pay more attention to his own...

Stanford Prof To Be Nvidia's Chief Scientist.
February 2, 2009... Arming for its war against Intel and AMD, Nvidia has tapped the chairman of Stanford University's computer science department Bill Dally as its chief scientist and VP of Nvidia Labs, replacing David Kirk, who'll become an Nvidia Fellow. The...

Dell Anticipates $280m Charge.(Brief article)
February 2, 2009... Giving fair warning, Dell said Wednesday that it's figuring on writing off $280 million in the quarter ending in January, a charge that will cut its earnings by 11 cents a share. The allowance includes $135 million for closing its Irish plant,...

Stealth Start-up Virtualizes Server Memory; Claims First Mover Advantage.
February 9, 2009... RNA networks, a three-year-old Oregon start-up, claims to have done what nobody else has done before and make it possible to share server memory. It calls its breakthrough "memory virtualization" and says it's the third wave in...

Amazon: The Developers' Collections Agency.
February 9, 2009... Amazon has added another Web Service - collections - and it's specifically for developers, a first. It's opened up its Flexible Payments Service (FPS) and a thing called Amazon FPS Quick Starts aggregates various FPS APIs into a simplified...

Lenovo Runs Red; CEO Out.
February 9, 2009... Lenovo, which has been getting whacked by Acer, lost $96.7 million in the December quarter, the Chinese company's first loss in three years, and so its American CEO, Bill Amelio, a Dell refuge, was thrown on his sword while senior VP of...

Microsoft To Push Two Main Win7 SKUs.
February 9, 2009... Microsoft - which has yet to get its tit out of the legal wringer it got caught it because of the famous "Vista Capable" promotion - has started trying to discriminate between Windows 7 SKUs now, a year ahead of the operating system's...

The Woz Gets a Job.(Steve Wozniak)
February 9, 2009... Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, 58, who hasn't had a real job since, oh, 1985, when he left Apple, has joined storage start-up Fusion-io as chief scientist and technical advisor to its R&D team. He'll also strategize with the executive team....

Google Wants Out of AOL Deal.
February 9, 2009... Google wants Time Warner to spin off AOL into its own public company or buy back Google's 5% let's-keep-Microsoft-out stake in the joint at fair market value, a demand it's justified in making by the terms of their three-year-old arrangement....

Citrix Claims to Cut the Cost of Desktop Virtualization.
February 9, 2009... Citrix says it's improved the scalability of XenDesktop, its desktop virtualization widgetry, so the thing can now host twice as many virtual desktops per server than it could last week. Where the ratio with XenServer was 30-50 servers to...

Dell's Got a New Little Virtualization Friend, Xsigo.
February 9, 2009... Dell has tapped Xsigo to provide I/O virtualization so it can connect servers to multiple networks and storage and optimize data centers. Dell, which now says it offers virtualized solutions end-to-end, is supposed to resell all of Xsigo's...

$10 Indian Laptop a Lot of Hooey.
February 9, 2009... Photo: K.V. Poornachandra Kumar Source: The Hindu The world's press spent billions of pixels this week in feverish anticipation of the Indian government pulling off what was supposed to be a $10 school laptop. They were spent for naught....

Yahoo Closes Pioneer Cloud Storage.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... Yahoo is shutting down its pioneering decade-old Briefcase cloud storage. It's telling users they have to clear out their files by March 30 when Yahoo intends to delete any that remain, warning that it won't be unable to retrieve any of...

Google Brings Down the Internet; Thank God for Yahoo.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... The great and mighty Google screwed up royally Saturday morning plastering practically every one of its search results, even its own sites and services, with the warning, "This site may harm your computer," making every web site in its database...

Ma.gnolia Dies; Takes User Data with It.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... Ma.gnolia, one of those chi-chi social bookmarking sites like Delicious, has gone down and doesn't look like it's going to get back up any time soon, indicating the hazards of storing data online without a local backup. This is the message...

Xenocode Upgrades.
February 9, 2009... Xenocode, the six-year-old Seattle-based lightweight application virtualization player full of Microsoft veterans, has updated its Virtual Application Studio authoring environment. Its stuff is supposed to completely eliminate software...

Appirio Gives Salesforce a Facebook Virus.
February 9, 2009... Appirio, a Sequoia/Salesforce.com-backed start-up, has developed the widgetry to link Salesforce's core business applications - and them that use them - with the Facebook crowd figuring Salesforce users could benefit from viral contact with...

RightScale & New Relic Deliver Rails Performance Management in the Cloud.(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... RightScale, the cloud manager, has integrated its platform with New Relic's real-time RPM Ruby-on-Rails application performance management software. So RightScale users should be able to detect, diagnose, and fix performance problems with...

VMware Open Sources Virtual Desktop Code.
February 9, 2009... VMware is going open source. It's conjured up View Open Client, an open source client for virtual desktop infrastructure meant to be used by data centers for hosting user desktops and making personalized user desktops accessible from most...

SCO's Appeal Hits the Fast Track.
February 9, 2009... It's beginning to look as though we may get to hear this year if the federal appeals court buys the idea that Novell owns Unix. SCO's appeal of the Utah district court's 2007 summary judgment finding in Novell's favor has been put on an...

MySQL Creator Finally Does Leave Sun.
February 9, 2009... After coming thisclose to quitting six or seven months ago because he felt MySQL 5.1 wasn't ready to be released, MySQ co-founder and creator Monty Widenius has finally parted way with the company that made him rich. He's going to run his...

IBM To Build World's Most Powerful Computer.
February 9, 2009... IBM is going built a supercomputer most powerful than ever built before for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration. Worthy of its name, Sequoia, which will run Linux, will be based on future IBM BlueGene...

DOD Creates its Own Sourceforge.(Department of Defense)(Brief article)
February 9, 2009... The US Defense Department has created forge.mil, its own Red Hat-based security-defended knockoff of Sourceforge accessible only with smartcards for those who would edit or contribute open source code and a DOD, CAC or ECA certificate. It's...

Brother Buys Linux Patent Protection from Microsoft.
February 9, 2009... Brother has signed one of those broad patent cross-licensing deals with Microsoft that exert Microsoft's alleged Linux rights. The agreement is said to cover Brother's "current and future product lines, including multifunction products,...

Canonical Aims at the Server.
February 9, 2009... So Canonical, which is associated with Linux on the desktop, hired RedMonk to count noses last November and December and RedMonk posted a questionnaire on Canonical's web site geared to Ubuntu Server users and almost 7,000 of them responded and...

Intel Sues its Insurance Company.
February 9, 2009... Intel is suing American Guarantee & Liability Insurance Company, a union of Zurich Financial Services AG, demanding that it pay out on a $50 million policy and pick up some of the legal bills created by AMD's antitrust suit. Intel, which says...

CSC Kicks Off Cloud Initiative.
February 9, 2009... Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), the big consulting and outsourcing services company, has put in train a company-wide cloud computing and software services initiative to deliver SaaS and managed cloud solutions. The operation will be run by...

Dell To Offer SUSE on Thin Clients.
February 9, 2009... Novell says that Dell's going to preload SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client onto its three-month-old OptiPlex FX160 thin client. Novell quotes IDC projecting that the Linux thin client market will grow from nearly a million units last year to...

Sun Behind the Cloud.
February 9, 2009... Sun, which has suggested often enough that it wants to be a cloud player, is apparently going to flesh out its plans on March 18-19 at its CommunityOne conference in New York.

USPS Investigating Amazon.
February 9, 2009... Amazon has told the SEC that it's being investigated by the US Postal Service and the Postal Service Office of Inspector General for "compliance with Postal Service rules," but that's all it's saying.

Novell Cuts 3%.
February 9, 2009... Novell Friday laid off a tad under 3% of its workforce, less than 100 of its 4,200 people. It said Monday that James Robinson the former chairman of Bristol-Myers- Squibb and former CEO of American Express turned VC, would not seek re-election...

Arthur Rock, Madoff Investor.
February 9, 2009... Arthur Rock, the mythic VC who backed the fledgling Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Apple, was also a Madoff investor according to the Madoff customer list made public the other day in bankruptcy court filings. He had five trusts with...

Netbooks Salvage Europe's Q4.
February 9, 2009... PC sales in Western Europe were up 12% to 20.1 million units in the fourth quarter on the back of netbook demand according to Gartner, which said, "If it wasn't for mini-notebooks, the overall Western European market would be showing a decline....

Sun's Board Changes.
February 9, 2009... Sun has put erstwhile Fannie Mae CIO and member of the executive team Rahul Merchant on its board. He is also the ex-CIO of Merrill Lynch. The appointment is part of Sun's deal with major shareholder Southeastern Asset Management to add two new...

Oracle To Buy mValent.
February 9, 2009... Oracle is buying Massachusetts-based mValent, which automates configuration management for Java and Windows apps, on undisclosed terms to combine its widgetry with Oracle Enterprise Manager. mValent has collected at least $14 million in VC from...

Microsoft Asked if Foreigners Will Be Fired First.
February 9, 2009... After Microsoft announced that it's going to lay off 5,000 people over the next 18 months starting with an immediate 1,400 jobs and goodness knows how many contractors, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent Steve Ballmer a letter,...

Symantec CEO Will Not Be Secretary of Commerce.
February 9, 2009... After looking for a while there like a shoe-in, Symantec's outgoing CEO John W Thompson is NOT going to be secretary of commerce in the Obama administration. Instead the new president crossed party lines again and picked Republican Senator Judd...

Mike Homer Dead.
February 9, 2009... Mike Homer, the feisty VP of marketing at Netscape during its heyday, who wrote its first business plan and agitated against Microsoft, died Sunday of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare infectious neurodegenerative disorder that seems to be...

Cisco Pushes 'City-as-a-Service'.(Cisco Systems Inc.)
February 16, 2009... Cisco has taken a piece of a really ambitious grid-turned-cloud company in Oz called Majitek that intends to turn all the devices and systems in an entire city into money-making utility services. This, it appears, is "intelligent...

IBM Takes to Amazon's Cloud.
February 16, 2009... IBM, which has its own burgeoning clouds, has decided to use Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to deliver its software to clients and developers in a new hourly "pay-as-you-go" monetization model that protects uses against demand surges (if...

Okay, How Bad Is It?
February 16, 2009... IDC says there was a "precipitous" drop in the number of PC processors shipped worldwide between the third quarter and the fourth quarter last year - the worst, in fact, since it started tracking such things in 1996 - and it holds out scant...

Microsoft May Not Have a Product But It's Got a Roadmap.
February 16, 2009... Ten months after plunking down a lavish $1.2 billion in cash for the publicly traded, financially compromised Norwegian ISV Fast Search and Transfer Microsoft has produced a roadmap of where it's going in enterprise search. The roadmap,...

Start-up Google-izing Office.
February 16, 2009... Ahead of Microsoft launching Office 14 - which is supposed offer live collaboration - and despite the free hit-or-miss Office Live Workspace, a funded year-old start-up called DocVerse founded by a couple of ex-Microsoft SharePoint and SQL...

Cisco-VMware Rumors Resurface.(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... The peripatetic rumor that Cisco might make a bid for VMware is afoot again, this time set off by Cisco's move Monday to raise $4 billion in bond debt when it's already got something like $29.5 billion in the bank, mostly, as it happens, in...

AMD Stumbles on Way to Joint Venture.
February 16, 2009... AMD is living through every hostess' worst nightmare. You throw a party and nobody comes. In AMD's case it was its shareholders meeting Tuesday and it couldn't raise the quorum it needed to rubberstamp its all-important cash-providing...

Intel Spits in Chicken Little's Eye.
February 16, 2009... Intel apparently thinks we're going to get out of this monster recession alive and, providing against the day that demand returns, says it intends to spend $7 billion over the next two years to upgrade four US plants so it can build...

IBM Wheels Out New Cloud Unit.
February 16, 2009... Remember we said cloud computing was so important to IBM that the business was reporting directly to CEO Sam Palmisano? Well, the company disclosed Tuesday that it's had a hush-hush cloud unit being run by Erich Clementi (told ya so)...

The Executive Suite at Salesforce Shrinks.
February 16, 2009... Seems SaaS and its attendant on-demand cloud may not be as recession-proof as it was cracked up to be. Seems the president and chief strategist of Salesforce.com Steve Cakebread resigned to "pursue other professional opportunities" on...

When Virtualization Isn't Virtualization.(Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to include Citrix's XenDesktop 3 with its blade computers)(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... HP is going to bundle Citrix' new XenDesktop 3 with its Blade PCs, a first-time event that's supposed to strengthen HP's client virtualization portfolio even if virtualization has nothing to do with it no matter what they say. Marketing...

If You Squint, NetSuite Made Money.(Brief article)
February 16, 2009... One has to take comfort where one can these days. NetSuite, the Larry Ellison SaaS company competing with Salesforce.com, managed to eek out its first profitable quarter ever, up a penny a share in Q4 if you ignore the write-offs. This...

RightScale Follows Amazon EC2 to Europe.
February 16, 2009... In keeping with its multi-cloud manifesto, RightScale, the cloud manager, has added support for Amazon's weeks-old EC2 Europe cloud. Amazon Web Services global and European Amazon EC2 customers can now access RightScale's automated cloud...

NEC To Abandon What Remains of its EMEA PC Biz.
February 16, 2009... NEC is pulling out of the PC business in EMEA, intending to shutter its assembly plant in France where it also makes servers and leave what remains of its 1% PC share to the likes of HP, Dell and Acer. It will outsource server production. ...