Client Server News articles from January 2002

Client Server News archives from January 2002

Be's Last Gasp May Be an Antitrust Assault on M'soft.
January 7, 2002... Microsoft may have to face another antitrust suit, this one lodged by the remnants of Be Inc, the spoiled operating systems house, claiming that Microsoft caused its death. In a New Year's Eve statement announcing the expected resignation...

Microsoft Has Court Date Monday.
January 7, 2002... As predictably as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, the nine states that refused to sign the deal Microsoft cut with the Justice Department are fighting Microsoft's notion of pushing off the remedy hearing they've been...

AMD Dumps Duron Server Chip.
January 7, 2002... About a month ago AMD quietly put its Duron MP chip on the back burner and now says it won't bring the widget to market. AMD says there's nothing wrong with the chip and that it's qualified and ready for production. It's just that the...

Microsoft Wants To Push Off Remedy Hearing 4 Months.
January 7, 2002... This story ran over the holidays. On the Friday before Christmas Microsoft asked Judge Colleen Kollar- Kotelly to push back the beginning of the antitrust remedy hearing that the non-settling states are insisting on for "at least four...

On to the HP Proxy Fight.
January 7, 2002... The Walter Hewlett-Hewlett-Packard proxy fight over the future of the company is warming up. Bill Hewlett's son and heir submitted his proxy statement, co-signed by former HP CFO Edwin van Bronkhorst and the William R Hewlett Revocable Trust,...

HPQ Asks EU To Sanction Acquisition.
January 7, 2002... HP and Compaq, which have been chatting up the authorities informally to avoid any kind of GE-Honeywell-style problem, have now formally asked the European regulators to approve their combination. The European trustbusters have until January 31...

Mozilla Muddles into 2002.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 7, 2002... The open source Mozilla browser folks got out another beta, rev 9.7, just before the holidays. The thing actually came out on time according to the latest Mozilla schedule. Of course the schedule has been pushed back three years or so. ...

Northwood To Bow.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 7, 2002... On Monday Intel is expected to formally introduce its fastest Pentium 4 yet, 2.2GHz and 2GHz widgets developed under the code name Northwood. The chips are the first P4s built on a 0.13 micron process, compared to the current P4s' 0.18, and...

Microsoft Unwraps Korean Xmas Present.(3.2% stake in KT)(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Microsoft bought itself a little Christmas present - a $500 million stake in the Korean phone company KT, which used to be known by the more descriptive name Korea Telecom. The investment was expected since early November (CSN No 426). The...

Symantec Hires ex-Reciprocal CEO.(John Schwarz)(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Symantec has picked up John Schwarz, the former president and CEO of failed digital rights management house Reciprocal that crashed and burned in November when the little company couldn't pay back the $10 million it owed Microsoft. Schwarz...

Sax Readies .NET GUI Builder.(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Sax Software Corporation is in beta with a .NET version of SmartUI, a Visual Basic add-on that builds user interfaces. The .NET version of SmartUI, scheduled for release by the end of next month, will let developers build applications with...

Oracle To Shed A Few Hundred Jobs.(Company Operations)(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Oracle says it's going to cut 400-800 jobs, 1%-2% of its workforce, mostly from North American consulting and sales to cut costs and lift its operating margin back to 50%. It's supposed to have something to do with the previously announced...

DRAM Prices Soar as Micron-Hynix Talks Continue.(dynamic random access memory)
January 7, 2002... Memory prices have more than doubled in the past month, escaping much notice by increasing just pennies at a time. In the single biggest jump Hynix, alive only by the grace of God and a Korean government bailout, began the New Year with a...

Starbase Bets on Mustang Founder for Turnaround.(Jim Harrer)(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Starbase, struggling to put the brakes on six months of plummeting sales and show its first profit in years, has turned its management over to Mustang Software founder Jim Harrer. Harrer, who was named to the company's board in December...

Musical Chairs.(Microsoft Mobility Devices Div)(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Microsoft Mobility Devices Division general manager Rogers Weed, who recently led the launch of the Pocket PC 2002, has been made a vice- president and put in charge of the so-called "PC Experience Solution Group," the unit responsible for...

Hewlett-Packard & the Itanium.
January 7, 2002... Hewlett-Packard is claiming hegemony in Itanium workstations and saying that it's put out more of the wee beasts than anybody else, beginning in the third quarter of last year, the first full quarter the things shipped. HP got Dataquest...

VCs Back Transformed Israel Infiniband Storage House.
January 7, 2002... Israeli start-up Voltaire has landed $13.2 million in new venture capital to fund its transformation into an Infiniband-based data center and storage networking company. The cash will pay to build up sales and marketing for nVigor, a...

SANgate Finds Itself a New CEO.
January 7, 2002... SANgate Systems has hired Patrick Courtin as its CEO. The start-up's previous incumbent Doron Kempel was forced to quit in late November when his former employer, storage giant EMC, came after him with a court decree for failing to abide by...

EMC Gets a Shot in the Arm.
January 7, 2002... Storage powerhouse EMC got an adrenaline boost Thursday when Salomon Smith Barney upgraded its stock to a "buy" from "outperform." EMC's shares were the most actively traded stock on the Big Board and closed up about 12% to 16.59. ...

Compaq To Offer Legato Backup Implementation.
January 7, 2002... Compaq Global Services and storage management software vendor Legato Systems will provide backup implementation services for customers deploying Legato's NetWorker product.

Microsoft To Invest $1m So Globus Grids Stay Windows-.
January 7, 2002... Friendly Microsoft will give the open source Globus Grid Project a million bucks over the next two years to make sure Globus continues to work with Windows. The donation, which is "in the process of closing" according to Globus...

Flatrock Aims To Be God's Gift to Extranets.(Product Announcement)
January 7, 2002... A stealth start-up with the marvelously antediluvian name of Flatrock will shed its cloak of invisibility later this month and materialize on the scene as the solution to the extranet crisis. It claims it can deliver any application to any...

HP Teams with MSC on Linux Clusters.(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... MSC.Software Corporation has begun selling turnkey Linux clusters based on Hewlett-Packard's NetServers and Visualize Personal Workstations. HP, in turn, has designated MSC its "preferred" Linux distribution for technical computing. ...

The Devil's Darning Needle.
January 7, 2002... Well, it seems that Microsoft has this project code named Dragonfly that's intended to produce a programmable rules engine that real people without any particular programming skills can use. The actual rules engine, when Microsoft isn't...

An IrRational Report.(Brief Article)
January 7, 2002... Rational Software got an unwelcome present over the holidays from the widely read %$#@&!company.com - an erroneous and unsubstantiated report that Rational is dumping its SiteLoad, Robot and Visual Test products and laying off related staff. To...

Hijacked E-mail & Valentine's New Jihad.
January 7, 2002... Okay, try this for irony. Brian Valentine, senior vice-president of Microsoft's Windows Division, a title that makes him overlord of its operating systems, has gone on a jihad to stamp out every single one of the security holes that have made...

Microsoft Under Pressure To Declare a Dividend.
January 7, 2002... A story in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal put pressure on Microsoft stock. The "Heard on the Street" piece said that some investors and tech analysts such as Steve Milunovich at Merrill Lynch were pushing the Redmond "cash machine," which is...

Wyse Declares Jihad on IBM-Neoware Axis.
January 21, 2002... "This is war, man." So says the big-talking VP of market strategy at Wyse, Jeff McNaught. McNaught and his gang are grinding their battleaxes and hurriedly girting on their armor so they can menace and destroy the sparkling new...

Fancy That, QuickBlade Specs.
January 21, 2002... A gaggle of smeary "Compaq Confidential" slides on its pending QuickBlade widgetry have been thrown over the transom on our fax. Their age and provenance are un-known though we suspect they're pretty shop-worn and have been making the rounds...

Microsoft Goes on Anti-Hacker Crusade.
January 21, 2002... Three weeks ago we said that Microsoft had quietly taken the cross and was hell-bent on a new all-out, take-no-prisoners crusade to stamp out every one of the security holes that have made it the butt boy of every hacker with time on his hands...

API Networks Snuffed.
January 21, 2002... After suffering slow agonies and burning through God knows how many tens of millions, API Networks Inc, the three-and-a-half-year-old Compaq-Samsung joint venture originally set up to mass-market Alpha chips, is shutting down. After the Alpha...

Recession-Proof Microsoft Posts Record Revenues, Earnings Off 13%.
January 21, 2002... Bucking the recession that's whip lashed corporate America, Microsoft reported record revenues of $7.74 billion in its fiscal Q2 ended December 31, an 18% jump year-over-year. But net income fell 13% to $2.28 billion, or 41 cents a share,...

GraphOn Dumps Founders.
January 21, 2002... GraphOn founders, the husband-and-wife team of CEO Walt Keller and executive VP Robin Ford, have exited their 20-year-old baby, one of the Citrix wannabes, in a euphemistic search for new opportunities. GraphOn, which is supposed to...

Carly Tries Scare Tactics.
January 21, 2002... HP CEO Carly Fiorina gave an interview to USA Today - in itself an interesting choice of vehicles - and told the paper that if the Compaq acquisition doesn't go through, HP's printer and imaging business, its crown jewel, will be hurt, its PC...

HP & Compaq To Bribe People To Stay.
January 21, 2002... Why, prithee, are HP and Compaq planning to pay $579 million in so- called "retention bonuses" to get thousands of mid-level employees to stay on the good ship HPQ for a year or two, when there are practically breadlines of out-of-work people...

New Moon Aims To Eclipse Citrix Monopoly.
January 21, 2002... New Moon Systems, the up-and-coming Citrix competitor, has signed its first distributor for Canaveral iQ and it just so happens it's Unique Co-operative Solutions Inc (UCSI), which was Citrix' founding distributor and reportedly continues to...

Nice Move, Walter.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Ooooooo. What's this? At press time Business Week was reporting that it had found out that merger opponent Walter Hewlett, a member of HP's executive compensation committee, is applying pressure on the SEC to get the watchdog agency to...

Otellini Achieves Godhood.
January 21, 2002... Intel has named Paul Otellini, 51, the guy who runs its chip business, president and COO. The apotheosis makes him the heir apparent of Intel CEO Craig Barrett, 62, who was COO and president before succeeding the inimitable Andy Grove....

AOL Mimics .NET Alerts.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... AOL has launched an "alerts" service similar to Microsoft's .NET Alerts. The way AOL tells it, it's not trying to one-up the Empire, but simply add more features to its existing "AOL Anywhere" program. One key difference is that...

"Billion-Dollar" Microsoft Class-Action Settlement Rejected.
January 21, 2002... This story is unchanged since it broke a week ago. Microsoft isn't going to be able to wiggle out of that great swat of class-action lawsuits it was hit with claiming it overcharged for Windows with the flick of the controversial charitable...

Web Services Already a Checkmark Item: Gartner.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Following conventional wisdom, Gartner says web services will dominate new applications deployment in Fortune 2000 companies by 2004. It advises companies to start putting teams of developers together doing relatively simple things this...

Dell Filches Compaq Service Guy.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Dell has poached the head of Compaq's $3 billion professional services unit, ex-IBMer Jeff Lynn. He takes over Dell's Technology Consulting, equal in size to the Compaq unit, and is supposed to raise its profile, bringing in higher-margin...

Express Software Inventory/Usage Kit Upgraded.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... Express Software, in a major upgrade to its flagship integrated software inventory and usage offering Express Software Manager, has re-jiggered the software to use Microsoft SQL Server and Crystal Reports. Express said the upgrades result...

Reynolds Goes .NET.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Microsoft has got Reynolds and Reynolds running interference for .NET and Passport. The ISV has built its new Generation Series solutions suite, a mass of some hundred ASP-style programs including web services due out in April, on the Microsoft...

Commerce Server Betas.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... Microsoft's Commerce Server 2002 beta is now publicly available for anyone to paw over. Microsoft holds the thing up as its foundation for global e-commerce. It's tightly integrated with Visual Studio .NET, not to mention the .NET application...

Canadian Start-up Hurls NAS Sledgehammer.(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... Canadian Maximum Throughput is gearing up to launch its so-called Sledgehammer NAS system next month. In typical start-up hyperbole, the three-year-old Montreal concern describes the thing as the "fastest NAS box on the planet." A single...

Compaq Licenses Storability Software.
January 21, 2002... Compaq has licensed managed storage service start-up Storability's AssuredStorage Management System (ASMS) so it can deploy storage as a utility-like service. Storability launched ASMS in September to complement its managed service. ASMS...

Scale Eight Lands MSN Music Deal.
January 21, 2002... Managed storage services house Scale Eight has landed a marquee deal from Microsoft's MSN Music to provide the infrastructure for storing and delivering several hundred thousand digital music files to users. The deal is reportedly valued...

Compaq is Tops in Europe.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Compaq is giddy about overthrowing EMC as Western Europe's storage revenue leader citing an IDC report projecting it was the number one storage vendor there last year no matter how you cut it: revenues, terabytes and units shipped. In a...

LSI Logic Restructures.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... LSI Logic is cutting 1,400 positions, 20% of its workforce. The Milpitas, California concern said reductions on the storage side amount to about 140 positions, 70 each in the storage components and storage systems. The rest are being...

StorageTek Beefs Up Disaster Recovery Services.(Business Contingency Planning Services)
January 21, 2002... StorageTek has bolstered its disaster recovery services to help businesses protect their data against catastrophe. Sensing new opportunities in the wake of 9-11, the Louisville, Colorado concern has packaged up a set of disaster recovery...

eBay Deploys New StorEdge System.(eBay has deployed multiple Sun Microsystems StorEdge 9960 storage systems)(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Sun crows that eBay has deployed multiple StorEdge 9960 storage systems. Sun and its storage partner Hitachi Data Systems are jointly supporting the stuff.

BakBone Cuts Estimates.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Storage management ISV BakBone Soft-ware has reduced its revenue estimates for fiscal 2002 ending March 31. The San Diego outfit cut revenue growth projections to 100%-110% over the last fiscal year citing a slowdown in North American...

Dell Lands NFL Storage, Server Deal.(EMC Clariion and Dell PowerEdge)(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Dell has bagged an exclusive $2 million contract from the National Football League to install Power-Edge servers and co-branded Dell- EMC Clariion storage over the next 12 months. The storage called for is a SAN configuration due in by the end...

GlassHouse Breaks its Cocoon of Silence.
January 21, 2002... GlassHouse Technologies Inc has emerged from stealth mode as a professional services provider focused on enterprise storage. Founded in August, the Boston start-up has been quietly selling its wares since October. GlassHouse co-founder and...

Storewidth Conference Opens March 25.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Futurist George Gilder will host the chi-chi second annual Storewidth conference March 25-27 in Laguna Niguel, California. In Gilderspeak, storewidth refers to the interface between storage and bandwidth and the challenges involved in...

MontaVista Secures Heady Investment.
January 21, 2002... This story is unchanged from the flash we sent out Tuesday. Reports suggest that embedded Linux house MontaVista has defied the rotten economy and raised a substantial investment round from a bunch of marquee names just like in the good old...

Lindows.com Tries To Get Microsoft Suit Thrown Out.(LindowsOS brand name challenged)
January 21, 2002... Lindows.com filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss Microsoft's trademark infringement suit against it claiming the court lacked jurisdiction. The San Diego start-up said it had no presence or conducted any business in the state of Washington,...

Aduva's Ambitions.(intending to expand its services to IBM 390 mainframes)(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Aduva, the Linux provisioning and configuration management people, is looking longingly at HP, Compaq, Dell and NEC, all of which kick into the Intel 64 Fund, hoping that since the fund just put money into its $14 million third round, the...

IP Metrics Debuts Linux Port of NIC Express.(NIC Express for Linux)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... IP Metrics Software is offering a Linux version of its NIC Express network traffic management software, previously available only on Windows. The Dallas start-up claims that NIC Express for Linux 1.0 is the first hardware- and...

Penguin's Back with New Boxes.(Penguin Computing's Relion 115, Relion 125)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... Penguin Computing is back. It's come out of hibernation and added three new products to its Relion server line. The company, which went through a major crisis in October that wiped out its top management and a big chunk of its staff,...

VA Replaces CFO.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... The restyled VA Software Corporation has finally dumped its CFO Todd Schull, who's "resigned to pursue other interests," it says by way of cover story, and replaced him with Kathleen McElwee, who had the same job at 3DO. She's also done turns...

Fancy That, Linux/Intel TCO is Lower than Unix/RISC.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... As one might surmise, Linux on Intel has a lower TCO than Unix on RISC chips on Internet/intranet/extranet and collaborative workloads, but now it's official according to a Red Hat-sponsored IDC study. "Associated costs with Linux are not...

FreeBSD Goes Home.(Wind River Systems OS)
January 21, 2002... Wind River Systems is transferring its FreeBSD operations including the FreeBSD Mall, a FreeBSD software publisher and services provider, to Bob Bruce. Bruce's involvement with FreeBSD dates back to 1993 when his old company Walnut Creek...

Transmeta Q4 Gruesome; Believes It Has 5800 in Hand.
January 21, 2002... Battered, bloodied, but still standing thanks to its bank account, Transmeta says it can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's pretty sure it's going to be able to start shipping its vaunted 0.13-micron 5800 chip in volume in early...

Transmeta Dabs Skunk Scent behind its Ears.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Because of its financial crisis and the suspicion it's takeover carrion, Transmeta's board dropped a poison pill the other day before it reported its earnings to ward off any unsolicited acquisition bid. The company said it wasn't reacting to...

Good Lord, Compaq's Profitable.
January 21, 2002... Marriage preparations seem to agree with Compaq. It was profitable in the fourth quarter. It realized $92 million, five cents a share. The numbers include $36 million in expenses it said were related to its proposed acquisition by...

Unisys Meets Expectations.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Unisys pretty much hit its Q4 numbers. It earned $34.4 million, or 11 cents a share, before taking a $276.3 million charge to cover the termination of 3,750 positions worldwide. That of course threw it into the red. With the charge it lost...

Intel delivers Upbeat Q4; Guidance Dicey.(Company Financial Information)
January 21, 2002... Intel ended last year - Intel CEO Craig Barrett called it simply "a terrible year" - with revenues of $7 billion. Now, you can look at that number two ways. The half-empty view says it was down 20% year-over-year; the more buoyant half-full...

Visual Studio .NET is Upon Us.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... Microsoft has finally set the date. The all-important, breathlessly anticipated Visual Studio .NET launches February 13 at the developers' conclave at VSLive! 2002 at the San Francisco Marriott. Bill Gates and distinguished engineer Anders...

Foster To Show at CeBit.(Intel Foster microprocessor)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 21, 2002... Think Foster MP and CeBit. That's where the thing should bow. The fair runs March 13-20.

Overpriced.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... Merrill Lynch thinks that Microsoft, at around $69 one of the few survivors of the last gory year on Wall Street, is overpriced. So, it says, is Oracle (at around 17 bucks) based on P/E growth prospects.

Peekaboo.(IntelliFabric)(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... There's a stealth start-up going by the name of IntelliFabric Inc that's reportedly doing management software for InfiniBand. That's it. We don't know anything else, at least not yet.

Easy Compares.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... "The best that can be said of 2001 is that it lays down an easy comparison for 2002." - Bear Stearns on Sybase, but it's the universality of the remark that resonates with us.

Back to the Future.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... IDC is now predicting that when server sales for last year are toted up, the total will be less than sales were in 1995, when the worldwide server market was worth $57.5 billion. The total last year is expected to come in around $54.5 billion,...

Liberty Recruits Deloitte.
January 21, 2002... Still no movement from Microsoft, which has said it will join, but the Sun-born Liberty Alliance has enticed Deloitte & Touche on board as a sponsor. Deloitte is participating through its Enterprise Risk Services security people, the group...

Who Us?(IBM and open-source licensing)
January 21, 2002... At Christmas, we reported that IBM has this little disclaimer dangling from its 390 Linux that reads, "Elements of Linux for S/390 which utilise [sic] internal details of the S/390 system remain the intellectual property and copyright of IBM,...

Microsoft Cuts China Deal.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... That joint venture that Microsoft's been working on in China, its very first in the country, has finally gotten a name and it's a mouthful. It's called Zhongguancun Software Company apparently after the industrial park it's located in in...

Well, At Least That's Decided.(Brief Article)
January 21, 2002... No date for the actual shareholders' votes, which we've been expecting will be in March, but in case it matters Compaq and HP said Thursday that shareholders of record as of January 28 would be eligible to vote on the proposed merger.

Oh! Foo: Microsoft, IBM & BEA Band Together in the Name of an Application Server Standard.
January 28, 2002... Microsoft, IBM and BEA have quietly agreed to write a specification that would create an application server- and operating system-independent middleware layer above .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). It is reportedly not intended...

Is IBM Prepared To Eat its Children?(Web Services could cut into Global Services business)(Brief Article)
January 28, 2002... Pundits are beginning to notice that this web services business poses a quandary for IBM. See, the point of web services is to create reusable code that can be combined and recombined by, well, less-skilled developers. In fact, the promise -...

Mellanox Fields InfiniBand Blade Server Reference Platform.(Mellanox Technologies Nitro)(Product Announcement)
January 28, 2002... Mellanox has come out with Nitro, an anticipated OEM-oriented InfiniBand server blade reference platform that for one thing certainly upgrades its rhetoric and gets it to talking about the "revolutionary marriage of two of the most talked about...

NEC Japan Moves on Blades.(NEC Express5800/Blade- Server)(Product Announcement)
January 28, 2002... Told ya so. NEC Japan has gone to market over there with that blade server we said it was working on. The officially designated Express5800/Blade- Server is expected to hit the American market at some point. The widgetry can put two...

M'soft Says AOL Crafted States' Ghastly Remedies.
January 28, 2002... Bad tempers flared into a short-lived firefight this week between Microsoft and AOL when Microsoft stomped off to court Wednesday complaining to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that AOL was stonewalling and refusing to produce documents Microsoft...