Client Server News articles from January 2003

Client Server News archives from January 2003

Charlie's Back & He's Got a Plan.
January 12, 2003... Charlie Northrup, the guy who may one day be recognized as owning the patent on web services, has wrestled two more patents out of the Patent and Trademark Office. He says it wasn't easy because the PTO understands the potential...

Microsoft Said To Offer EU Governments Free Software.
January 12, 2003... Microsoft has or is about to offer to supply the governments of EU countries with an unlimited number of free software licenses to settle the European antitrust case against it, according to a source who was reportedly briefed by Microsoft. ...

IBM Allies with Topspin.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Poor little orphan Infiniband may get a shot in the arm Tuesday when IBM is supposed to say that it'll be integrating Topspin Infiniband switch technology in its servers and TotalStorage products as well as reselling the switch to other people...

Start-up Claims its Chip Will Change Blade Server Design.
January 12, 2003... A little year-old start-up, whose name says a lot, thinks it's going to blow open the blade market. NextIO Inc out of Austin, Texas says blade servers haven't lived up to their promise, but it's going to fix that with its secret new class...

NT4, Win2K Retirement Creates Hole for Apple To Slip Thru.
January 12, 2003... Apple thinks Microsoft has handed it an opportunity to sell its Mac OS X-PowerPC-based servers. It thinks that with Microsoft putting NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 out to pasture - Windows 2000 is supposed to retire on April 1 - it's got a...

SEC May Sue IBM.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... It looks like the SEC may take IBM to court. IBM got a Wells Notice saying SEC staff is considering recommending that the SEC bring a civil action against IBM for violating the securities laws. It seems that IBM allegedly aided and abetted...

Sun Huffy Over, IBM Absent From Key Web Services Work.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Microsoft, BEA and Tibco, well, mostly Microsoft actually, have written a protocol they call WS-Eventing for "web services to subscribe to or accept subscriptions for event notification messages." In other words, real-life events like...

Hey, Buddy, Where Ya Get That VLIW Technology You've Got There?(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Sometime in August - they're still working on an exact date - HP is scheduled to be in court explaining exactly how performance- enhancing VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology that it licensed over a decade ago from the now-defunct...

Microsoft Eats its Losses.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Right before Christmas, Microsoft agreed to write a $60 million check so the patent infringement case brought against it by Imagexpo LLC, a little-known subsidiary of $5 billion-a-year SPX Corporation, would go away. When the two sides...

IBM Slims Down its Blades.
January 12, 2003... Having wrestled with thermal issues, IBM says it's got the slimmest Intel-based blade server on the market, a four-way Xeon MP box designated the HS40. It says it provides three times the power in three-quarters of the space as HP blades...

Crusoe's Footprint Shrinks by Half.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Transmeta, which decided in the fall of '01, after the bottom fell out of the Japanese ultra-light notebook market, that it really needed to go after the embedded market, is bringing out two tiny x86 Crusoe chips this month that are supposed to...

Opteron Gets its Wheels, Goes Mobile.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... AMD on Tuesday finally delivered itself of the mobile version of its 64-bit hybrid chip, which appeared in three speeds, the 3200+, 3000+ and 2800+, which is AMDspeak for 2GHz, 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz respectively. The parts are priced in...

CA To Sell Accpac.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Computer Associates is selling its Accpac subsidiary to the UK-based Sage Group, which goes by the name of Best Software in the US. Although the total value of the cash transaction was put at $110 million, CA will only get $88 million for...

Intel Puts $200m Behind Convergence.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Intel, generally recognized as the biggest VC in the Valley - with the recent scars to prove it - has set aside $200 million to put into companies developing innovative hardware, software connectivity and technologies supporting this newfangled...

Microsoft Talks up TV Software.
January 12, 2003... Microsoft talked up its TV Foundation Edition 1.5 software for network operators at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Key enhancements in the stuff, which is slated to go to cable operators in the spring, include fully integrated...

Gateway Flubs Q4.
January 12, 2003... Gateway warned investors Monday that fourth-quarter revenues fall short of projections. It now anticipates doing about $880 million instead of $925 million-$975 million. Gateway expects to post an operating loss, excluding restructuring...

Java Tools Group Formed without IBM or Borland.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... There is now a Java Tools Community (JTC), put together by folks in the Java Community Process (JCP) like BEA, Sun, Oracle and SAP and meant to represent the interests of the tools people in the standardization process. The JTC is supposed...

IBM Snags Via.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... IBM Microelectronics, which - God knows - has to keep the fires under its ovens stoked, apparently made Via Technologies a handsome offer and has waltzed it away from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's biggest contract chip...

Mythic Entertainment Sues Microsoft.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Now online games publisher Mythic Entertainment is suing Microsoft, which has become a veritable suit magnet. It's charging trademark violation and unfair competition. Mythic's suit, filed in federal court in Virginia, claims that...

Siebel Beats its Forecast.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Siebel Systems reported preliminary fourth-quarter results above its projections. Total revenues for the quarter are expected to come in at about $365 million and licensed revenues at $150 million. Siebel expects EPS of eight cents. ...

Now, Microsoft is on Your Hand.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... At first, people looked at Microsoft technology on a screen. Then, Microsoft gadgets like PDAs started moving into consumers' hands. Now, we're expected to wear the stuff. At the Consumer Electronics Show this week, Microsoft supremo Bill...

Wowed by its Success, HP Licenses iPod.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Impressed by the success of Apple's iPod, Hewlett-Packard plans to introduce a HP-branded digital music player based on the thing. HP will also pre-install Apple's iTunes jukebox software and a desktop icon to the iTunes store on its...

Veritas Shores Up Utility Computing with Ejasent.
January 12, 2003... Three months after Forrester analyst William Martorelli questioned the viability of four-year-old Ejasent Inc as a standalone company, he got his answer. Veritas said Wednesday that it was buying the privately held Ejasent for $59 million...

Intransa Gets $8m.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... IP storage start-up Intransa has raised $8 million in VC funding taking its total financing to $49 million. The San Jose, California outfit plans to use the C round money to drive market adoption of its IP SAN products and push global...

Overland Ups Guidance.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Overland Storage has raised its revenue and earnings guidance for its second fiscal quarter ended December 31. The San Diego, California concern now anticipates revenues will be about $67 million and EPS will come in at 23 cents on a GAAP...

IBM CEO Pushes Linux Desktop Internally.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... The press has gotten its hands on an internal memo written by IBM CIO Bob Greenberg in November that says that IBM CEO Sam Palmisano "has challenged the IT organization, and indeed all of IBM, to move to a Linux-based desktop before the end of...

SCO To Detail its Case against Linux to IBM by Monday.
January 12, 2003... At press time, the SCO Group expected that by Monday January 12 it would turn over to IBM all the evidence it had of Linux' alleged infringement on SCO-owned Unix IP that IBM asked for in its motion to compel discovery last month, thereby...

Well, That $2b Didn't Go Very Far.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Sun is kill off what's left of the Linux-based Cobalt appliance line that it spent $2.2 billion in stock buying three years ago. Ah, well, we said at the time that it was paying a lot for a little. Guess Sun kinda evened things up when it...

Red Flag & Miracle Linux Buddy Up.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... China's Red Flag Software and Tokyo-based Oracle-majority-owned Miracle Linux have formed a joint venture to create a unified Linux platform for Asia that would harry Microsoft at least on the server side. At least that's what they hope....

Red Hat Raises Half-a-Billion Dollars.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Red Hat, which has always been so proud of its debt-free status but, at the same time, hates like hell to spend the money it's salted away in the bank, has borrowed $500 million that it said it might use to make acquisitions. It's sold off a...

Novell Makes SuSE & Ximian Play Together.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Novell, which is in the process of buying SuSE, said Tuesday that the Ximian Desktop 2, which it already owns, now support the latest SuSE client editions, SuSE Linux Desktop and Linux 9.0. The upgraded Ximian 2 also includes the Ximian...

Happy Anniversary, Richard.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... This past Monday was Richard Stallman's 20th anniversary. Twenty years ago he quit his job at MIT and started developing the free GNU operating system. Twenty years and a complete GNU system suitable for production use has never been...

SCO Board Shrinks.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Steve Cakebread, who's been on the board of the SCO Group since July of 2000, stepped down on December 22, citing time constraints. Apparently he won't be replaced, leaving the company with a board of eight, five of them independent. Meanwhile,...

They're Mine. No, They're Mine. No, They're Mine.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... SCO Group spokesman Blake Stowell says the company is having a word with the Copyright Office about those Unix copyrights that Novell registered on September 22 and October 14 of last year, the ones whose existence was only revealed at...

SAP Rewriting All its Software.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... SAP is rewriting all its software to cut costs, both its own and its customers' airy maintenance costs, figuring on getting an edge on Oracle and PeopleSoft in the marketplace in the process, according to a scoop the Financial Times got. The...

A New Product Category is Born.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Transmeta has come up with a new product category, which it calls Ultra-Personal Computers or UPCs, which are PDAs able to run the full version of Windows XP and of course it's got the chips to support them. It fancies these UPCs synchronized...

Sun Peeks Out from Behind the Cloud.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Merrill Lynch thinks that after a three-year hiatus Sun's installed base is starting to upgrade and that it looked strong closing the quarter. Merrill figures Sun is still losing market share to Dell and IBM so it attributes any strength to...

Dan Niles Turns Banker.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Dan Niles, Lehman Brothers' star analyst and head of its computer hardware and semiconductor research, is quitting the sell-side to dabble in equity investment. He is going to be CEO of Neuberger Berman Technology Management, a new business...

Twin Listings.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... There's this idea floating around about stocks being listed on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. The story has HP's name attached to. HP CEO Carly Fiorina wouldn't say whether it was true or not. HP's on the Big Board.

Oracle Lacks Direction: Butler.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Oracle lacks direction, according to the Butler Group. The market for managing the nice neat structured data that fits in nice neat relational rows and columns is pretty well saturated, while 80% of the data people handle, all the unstructured...

Greed, Greed, Greed, Greed, Greed.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... Okay, so let's understand this. According to HP CEO Carly Fiorina, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." Which is her way of saying that it's perfectly okay for IBM and HP and Dell to ship jobs to China, India,...

Next IDF Scheduled for Mid-February.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... The next Intel Developer Forum is set for February 17-19 in San Francisco at the Moscone Center West. Intel said that alongside the traditional three-day systems conference, it's going to run a two- day solutions conference on the 17th and 18th...

WebTV Co-founder Dead at 39.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
January 12, 2003... Phil Goldman, one of the three Apple refugees who started WebTV and sold the overpriced venture to Microsoft for $425 million in 1997, died on Christmas Day. The reason for his death at 39 has yet to be explained. He was known to be a fitness...

Tim Berners-Lee Knighted.(Brief Article)
January 12, 2003... London-born, Oxford-schooled Tim Berners-Lee has been dubbed a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire for creating the World Wide Web.

Judge Lets Eolas Verdict Stand.(patent infringement by Microsoft)
January 19, 2003... The judge who oversaw the Eolas jury trial this summer that found - much to the consternation of the web community - that Microsoft's browser infringes Eolas' patent and awarded the little company $521 million in damages turned down Microsoft's...

Egenera Courted To Go Public.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Egenera has taken in a fourth, reportedly oversubscribed, round worth $30 million so it can capitalize on the roll that it's on, it said. The company is supposed to be in the grip of "explosive growth." Anyway, the company's valuation was...

HP To License its IP.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Hewlett-Packard has set up a new IP licensing organization to leverage its large patent portfolio. It said all its patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are up for grabs. The move is a tad inconsistent since HP supported W3C's...

Free Bug Bites Microsoft.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Fighting fire with fire, Microsoft is going to give away its $99 Services for Unix interoperability-cum-migration add-on. It lets Unix and perforce Linux apps run on Windows and lets Windows hook to a Unix network and co-exist in a...

DOJ Yanks Microsoft's Leash.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The Justice Department has tightened up one of the loose screws on Microsoft's antitrust settlement. It's made Microsoft change the "Shop for Music Online" feature in Windows XP. See, the way it was it invoked Microsoft's Internet...

Intel Bolsters Itanium's 32-bit Skills.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Intel has released the so-called IA-32 Execution Layer (EL) software that's supposed to make the 64-bit Itanium chip competitive in running the Windows operating system and 32-bit apps. Without the emulation software, which was delayed in...

Sun Claims Big StarOffice Deal.(SourceNext to distribute StarSuite 7.0 (StarOffice))(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Sun Japan has signed up computer distributor SourceNext Corporation to handle StarOffice, which is evidently called StarSuite 7 when it's in Japanese, saying the "multimillion" arrangement is the biggest distribution deal that StarOffice has...

Oracle Moves the Furniture in its Executive Suite.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Oracle, which has been a worry since its last president, Ray Lane, got booted out in 2000 and all power was obviously invested in CEO and sometime-loose-cannon Larry Ellison, has given its CFO Jeff Henley Larry's title of chairman and named...

Founder's Wife Marched Out of CA by Guards.(Nancy Li)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Nancy Li, the wife of Computer Associates founder Charles Wang, who stuck around running a CA subsidiary after the CA board reportedly dumped Charles as chairman 14 months ago, quit the other day in a breach with the company. She was...

SEC May Sue CA.
January 19, 2003... Computer Associates said Monday morning that it had gotten one of those Wells Notices from the SEC basically saying that unless CA can somehow talk its way out of it in the next two weeks the SEC is going to take it to court for flouting the...

Microsoft Changes its Position on Old Windows Support.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Remember that paid support that Microsoft was supposed to withdraw from Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition and Windows Millennium Edition? Well, it's not going to. Nope. It's going to extend it until June 30, 2006 instead to pacify...

EU Suspends Oracle-PeopleSoft Probe.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The EU has stopped weighing the proposed $7.3 billion Oracle- PeopleSoft takeover while it waits on Oracle to produce some unidentified additional information. The EU's antitrust people were supposed to say yes or no by the end of March....

RealNetworks, IBM Strike Digital Media Deal.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... RealNetworks and IBM have teamed up to provide a cross-platform digital media management system that will let businesses create, secure and deliver digital audio and video services to consumers. The partnership brings together RealNetwork's...

W3C Coaxes Devices To Identify Themselves.(World Wide Web Consortium)
January 19, 2003... The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been working on the problem of how the heck all these different devices that are popping up everywhere are supposed to get web content in a format suited to what they can do and what their users prefer....

Microsoft Debuts Smart Retailing Initiative.
January 19, 2003... Microsoft has rolled out a new initiative to extend its presence in the retail sector and enable retailers to compete on more than just cost. Dubbed the Smarter Retailing Initiative, the effort is supposed to help retailers improve how...

IBM Tops Patent List Again.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... IBM topped the corporate patent list for the eleventh year in a row with the 3,415 US patents it got last year. The US Patent and Trademark Office said IBM was ahead of Canon, the next biggest patent holder, by 70%. IBM said it was the...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
January 19, 2003... We incorrectly described the HP BL40p blade server as a 9U. It's a 6U. It takes two four-way blades.

Intel Scores on IT Spending.(Q4 2003)
January 19, 2003... The great Intel chip machine rolls on. The company's record fourth-quarter revenues came in slightly above its month-old guidance hitting $8.74 billion, up 12% sequentially and up 22% year-over-year thanks to better-than-anticipated...

Sun Losses Narrow.(December quarter 2003)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Well, Sun did better in the December quarter than it was supposed to. It only lost $125 million, or four cents a share, on revenues of $2.89 billion or $99 million, three cents a share, on operations. Revenues were up 13.9% sequentially...

IBM Sees IT Spend Improving.(Q4 2003)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... IBM came in with strong results for the fourth quarter earning $2.7 billion, or $1.55 a share, on revenues of $25.91 billion, better than expected. By comparison the year before, it did $1.02 billion, or 59 cents a share, on revenues of...

SAP Sales Disappoint.(Q4 2003)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... German software house SAP said Tuesday that preliminary results indicated that fourth-quarter sales were down 3% year-over-year. By the same yardstick total revenues fell from $2.9 billion to $2.8 billion. Software revenues also fell 3% to...

StorageTek Sees Solid Q4.(2003)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... StorageTek said it expects fourth-quarter revenues and earnings to be higher-than-anticipated because of strong sales, particularly in automated tape. The company expects revenues to exceed $650 million and EPS to be above 55 cents per...

More Than Just the Fortune 1000 Subject To SCO's Linux.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Tax Despite the PR nirvana that LinuxWorld would seem to represent, the scuttlebutt suggests that the SCO Group won't drop an attention- riveting end-user suit in the middle of it. Instead it's broadening the target of its claims and...

HP Claims Linux Leadership.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... HP is going into LinuxWorld as the market leader despite IBM's pioneering and investment. HP says its Linux business in 2003 was worth a bit over $2.5 billion, up from $2 billion. HP's recently christened worldwide Linux marketing director...

Etagon Cans Hardware To Focus on Software.
January 19, 2003... A year ago Israeli start-up Etagon Inc, which happens to be headquartered in New York, was in the hardware business putting together an ambitious machine it described as a platform hosting appliance, a hardware-software cross between an...

Judge Slaps Down Cheeky Lindows Scheme.
January 19, 2003... The judge supervising Microsoft's $1.1 billion California settlement of those class-action allegations that it overcharged for Windows has pulled the plug on Lindows' scheme to route claims through the MSfreePC.com web site it set up for the...

MySQL Doubles Revenues Again; MySQL 5.0 Alpha Debuts.
January 19, 2003... MySQL AB doubled its revenues to $12.6 million (10 million euros) in 2003 for the second year in a row but it still wound up in the red for the year as a whole though things changed in the last few months, according to CEO Marten Mickos, when...

Novell Dares SCO To Sue SuSE Customers, Offers.
January 19, 2003... Indemnities Novell completed its $210 million cash purchase of SuSE Linux on Monday, and immediately announced that it would indemnify "qualified" customers of SuSE Enterprise Server if the SCO Group sues them for copyright infringement as...

Ex-United Linux GM Moves to OSDL.(Paula Hunter to Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The Open Systems Development Lab (OSDL) has reportedly hired Paula Hunter, who was the general manager of the United Linux effort, to be its new director of business development on the East Coast. Brian Grega, who OSDL named its biz dev...

OSDL Moves on Desktop.(Open Source Development Lav)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... For the benefit of LinuxWorld, OSDL on Tuesday is supposed to wheel out its new Desktop Linux working group initiative and say it's targeted at developing requirements and specifications for a range of Linux desktop environments for the...

Red Hat Turns eCos Over to Free Software Foundation.
January 19, 2003... Red Hat has turned the copyrights it held on the eCos embedded operating system over to the Free Software Foundation, which gave the world the General Public License. The FSF is supposed to work with the eCos community and its maintainers of...

OSDL, IBM, Intel Create SCO Defense Fund.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab, which has been looking for a way to get into the SCO fight in the name of good public relations and the height of its own profile, said Monday that it had started a legal defense fund to aid any users that the...

SCO Names CTO.(Scott Lemon)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The SCO Group, the company people love to loathe, has tapped Scott Lemon, a legacy from its Vultus acquisition and a Novell graduate, to be its chief technologist. He's supposed to be the company's mouthpiece for communicating its technical...

SGI Debuts Mid-range Linux Server.(Silicon Graphics Altix 350)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... SGI has introduced a mid-range Itanium 2 Linux server called the Altix 350 for technical computing as a database server, departmental server or throughput cluster. Pricing starts at $12,199. A four-processor configuration starts at...

SCO Details its Case against Linux to IBM.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The SCO Group said Tuesday that it had given IBM all the discovery material that IBM wanted and went to court to get. It amounts to SCO's previously unspoken case against Linux and is being kept under lock and key. IBM will riffle through...

Zend To Move to the US, Add Support Services.
January 19, 2003... Zend, the Israeli PHP specialist, is moving its headquarters to the US to be closer to its partners and customers. The 30-man outfit is also planning to expand its business by adding support services later this year. Zend CEO Doron...

PathScale Linux Compilers To Beta.(Compiler Suite)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... PathScale will launch a beta of its 64-bit Linux compilers for the AMD Opteron processor at LinuxWorld. The production version of the Compiler Suite is scheduled to ship in late March after a second broader beta in February. The...

IBM To Launch Linux POS Systems.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... IBM plans to launch a turnkey point-of-sale offering for retailers based on SuSE Linux. Blue's new Retail Environment for SuSE Linux combines its own SurePOS systems, xSeries servers and middleware with SuSE Linux optimized for retailers....

FreeBSD 5.2 Debuts.(operating system from FreeBSD Project)(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... The FreeBSD Project has put out FreeBSD 5.2, the latest rev of the OS. The upgrade features full tier-1 support for single- and multiprocessor AMD Athlon64 and Opteron systems, better integration with the Name Service Switch Subsystem,...

Dell Japan Feeling Feisty.(Brief Article)
January 19, 2003... Dell Japan is going to challenge NEC for the top spot in Intel servers, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, and is beefing up its staff. It plans to increase the number of bodies it's got by 20% by the end of March, a move that would give it...