Client Server News articles from January 2009

Client Server News archives from January 2009

Satyam's Books as Cooked as a Christmas Goose.
January 12, 2009... The books of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, India's fourth-largest outsourcer, are a tissue of lies - and have been for years - made up out of whole cloth by the company's founder and chairman Ramalinga Raju and his younger brother, its managing...

Windows 7 Hits Public Beta.
January 12, 2009... At the opening keynote of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Wednesday night, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, making his first appearance at the show in a slot that used to be reserved for Bill Gates, announced the widely anticipated,...

AMD Proposes To Join the Cloud Brigade.
January 12, 2009... AMD and an equally ambitious Hollywood-type outfit called OTOY are proposing to push HD content through a so-called AMD Fusion Render Cloud, a massively parallel supercomputer said to be unlike any other ever built. The widgetry is being...

Dell Blight Sickens Ireland.
January 12, 2009... Ireland has suffered through the British, the potato famine, mass migrations and now the latest blight - Dell, the country's biggest exporter, accounting for 5% of its gross domestic product, deciding to pull up stakes and transfer all its EMEA...

Things Turn Nasty at Lenovo.
January 12, 2009... Business at Lenovo, the world's fourth-largest PC supplier and the repository of IBM's old PC unit, went from bad to worse the second half of last year because of crippling demand reduction, even in China, its home market, robbing the company...

Intel Says its Q4 Stunk.
January 12, 2009... Intel said Wednesday morning that its Q4 results, due out next week, are gonna be lousy - which won't come as a surprise to anybody given all the warning signs; it was just a matter of how bad; now we know. Intel, a harbinger of how things...

Sun Acquires Belgian Cloud House.
January 12, 2009... Sun, which has got a speckled record, to say the least, with acquisitions has acquired Q-layer, a three-year-old cloud computing company in Belgium that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. Sun said...

EMC To Cut 2,400 Jobs.
January 12, 2009... Bracing for a long and worsening downturn, EMC late Wednesday said it's going to can 2,400 of its people, roughly 7% of its workforce, to save about $350 million this year and $500 million next year. The move does not impact VMware, which...

VMware Fights Fire with Fire.
January 12, 2009... VMware has imported another ex-Microsoft veteran to fight Microsoft, its worst enemy. This time it's Tod Nielsen plucked out of Borland, where he's been CEO for the last three years, to be VMware's chief operating officer, a specially...

Wounded Borland Cuts Staff 15%.
January 12, 2009... With its CEO whisked off to VMware to be COO, Borland named CFO Erik Prusch acting president and CEO and then confessed that its Q4 results won't be anything like it imagined. It looks like it's suffered a $10 million-$30 million shortfall if,...

Intel & Adobe Putting Flash on TV.
January 12, 2009... Adobe and Intel plan to collaborate on porting Adobe's Flash widgetry to Intel's Media Processor CE 3100, a way to put Flash-enhanced web content and rich Flash applications on television. The chip is bound for cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray...

Meg Whitman Reportedly Wants To Be Governor of California.
January 12, 2009... Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, wants to be governor of California. At least that the interpretation being given the fact that she's suddenly severed all her board ties, stepping down as a director of Proctor & Gamble, Dreamworks...

'It's Not Cancer, It's a Hormone Imbalance': Jobs.
January 12, 2009... The reason Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been looking like a wraith is due to a mysterious new hormone imbalance that was hard to diagnose but now has been and Jobs expects to fatten up by summer. Jobs released a statement saying so Monday...

Michael Dell Part of Group Buying Busted IndyMac Bank.
January 12, 2009... Michael Dell is going to try to turn a buck on the mortgage mess. He's part of a consortium of seven private equity investors that signed a letter of intent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on New Year's Eve to buy the...

Xobni Gets Cisco Investment.
January 12, 2009... Despite VCs currently being gun-shy, particularly of Web 2.0 social networking stuff, the little e-mail software start-up Xobni, whose name is inbox backwards, has managed to close a $7 million B round in which Cisco, a new best friend,...

EMC Buys SourceLabs Pieces for its Cloud Infrastructure.
January 12, 2009... For reasons it won't explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs - what exactly it won't say - and hired some of its people - who exactly it won't comment on - for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. That's the unit that'll be...

Ingres Standardizes on Salesforce CRM.
January 12, 2009... Ingres, the open source database company, is using Salesforce CRM. Apparently, it's been using it for the last couple of months. It integrated Salesforce CRM with the Intacct financial management system from the Force.com AppExchange. It...

Novell's EMEA Boss Changed.
January 12, 2009... Novell is moving the furniture around again. It is replacing Volker Smid, who has been president of EMEA for the last two years, with Javier Colado, currently VP and general manager of partners, reporting to CEO Ron Hovsepian. Smid, as...

OLPC Cuts Back, Dreams of Zero-Cost Widget.(One Laptop Per Child)(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... One Laptop Per Child, the quixotic MIT effort to computerize the children of the third world, has cut its staff and contractors by roughly 50% to keep costs in line. Founder Nicholas Negroponte said the remaining 32 people will take salary...

SCO Files Reorg Plan.
January 12, 2009... SCO Thursday filed its Chapter 11 reorganization plan with the bankruptcy court in Delaware. The notion of getting $100 million from the oil-rich Arabs has disappeared down the same rat hole as $150-a-barrel oil - yes, folks, even Dubai...

Groklaw Goes Silent.(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... Declaring victory, Groklaw, the industry's favorite hate site, the most patented propaganda campaign since Josef Goebbels blew his brains out in 1945, has gone silent "at least for the foreseeable future." It claims it's gone into what it...

Even Google Makes Layoffs.
January 12, 2009... The AP, God bless it, was rooting around SEC filings and discovered one sent in by Google on December 15 but not filed electronically and after some difficulty finally managed to lay its hands on a paper copy only to be rewarded with the...

HP Pays for Techno-Junk.
January 12, 2009... HP US is offering folding money for your recyclable techno-junk, the stuff you've been meaning to donate to charity or just get rid of because your wife can't stand it anymore. If it still works and hasn't been dropped off a 10-story building...

Microsoft Layoffs Rumored.
January 12, 2009... According to a blog nobody ever heard of before called Fudzilla, which itself might serve as a caution but was widely picked up by generally serious people, Microsoft is supposed to announce on January 15, a week before its earnings report,...

Chinese To Get E-Commerce Clouds.
January 12, 2009... Alisoft, the software subsidiary of Alibaba.com, the big Chinese B2B e-commerce portal that Yahoo owns a piece of, has cut a strategic cooperation deal with the municipal government of Nanjing to build China's first "e-commerce cloud computing...

Muglia Promoted.
January 12, 2009... Microsoft has promoted Bob Muglia, making him president of its $13 billion-a-year server and tools unit, one of only four divisional presidents at the company. The Wall Street Journal suggests that Microsoft is trying to divert attention away...

CA To Acquire Orchestria.(Brief article)
January 12, 2009... CA is going to buy privately held Orchestria Corporation on undisclosed terms. The data loss prevention shop is CA's third security-related acquisition in the past three months. Orchestria's specialty is monitoring which users have access to...

EMC Gives VMware Aid & Comfort.
January 12, 2009... To give its daughter company a leg up, EMC has become a gold-level VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC) to try to accelerate VMware's penetration of the enterprise through its global services. EMC will offer strategy, design, implementation and...

Google Launches Reseller Program for Google Apps.
January 19, 2009... It was resellers that made Microsoft great and so, following in those well-trod footsteps, Google said Wednesday that it's recruiting resellers to push its Google Apps to businesses of all sizes everywhere in the world, taking Microsoft on...

PC Growth Disappeared in Q4.
January 19, 2009... For the first time in six years - with the last five averaging 15% increases - worldwide PC shipments were down a marginal 0.4% in Q4 according to IDC, a faster decline than the researcher had anticipated. It had projected growth of 6.5%. In...

Salesforce.com Concocts a Service Cloud.
January 19, 2009... With its revenue growth projected to slow this year to half of what it was Salesforce.com, the CRM software-as-a-service pioneer, has come up with a new trick that adds a new revenue stream. It's rigged up a thing it calls a Service Cloud,...

Intel Hides Under the Bed on Q1 Guidance.
January 19, 2009... Intel, that industry bellwether, reported its fourth quarter Thursday and the results were no worse than it warned they'd be last week when it reduced its expectations for the second time. Unfortunately it doesn't appear there'll be any relief...

Ballmer May Find Bartz As Resistant as Yang.
January 19, 2009... "Let's give this company some friggin' breathing room. It's been too crazy - everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn't do, what's best for them. That's going to stop." With those immortal words Carol Bartz, an...

Jobs Takes Medical Leave.
January 19, 2009... Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Wednesday in a company e-mail that he's going to take a medical leave of absence until June and that COO Tim Cook will take over day-to-day operations as interim CEO. The news has set off speculation that Jobs won't...

Amazon Investment Lays Foundation for Spanning Clouds.
January 19, 2009... Two-year-old Engine Yard, the cloud start-up where Amazon has parked some investment money, is broadening the application-centric widgetry used to power its own proprietary cloud to - you guessed it - Amazon's EC2, its first step, it says, to...

Bull To Peddle Cassatt Cloud-Making Software.
January 19, 2009... Bull is going to push Cassatt widgetry - software from BEA co-founder Bill Coleman's start-up - to improve the effectiveness of data center infrastructures of large European organizations. It's going to hit on select lines of business, sectors...

Windows 7 Beta Release Suffers Hic-cups.
January 19, 2009... The launch of the public beta of Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating on which so much depends was halted in the middle of the downloads last Friday when Microsoft said it underestimated the server power it would need to service demand. Well,...

COBOL Meets EC2.
January 19, 2009... Most code in the world is still COBOL. That being so, Micro Focus has enabled enterprise COBOL apps to run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), expecting to save legatees millions of dollars as clouds become more and more popular as a...

Satyam Execs Arrested.
January 19, 2009... Ramalinga Raju, the founder and disgraced ex-chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, India's fourth-largest outsourcer, who confessed last week to cooking the books, was arrested Friday, along with his younger brother, the company's managing...

Adobe Creates a 'Sandbox in the Sky'.(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... Adobe Monday announced that it's made its long-standing LiveCycle ES software accessible through Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), figuring that this "sandbox in the sky" scheme will create more LiveCycle ES...

IBM Claims Advances at Microsoft's Expense.
January 19, 2009... IBM said Thursday that its Lotus Notes licenses were up five million to 145 million, "including purchases by many industry leaders exchanging Microsoft licenses for Lotus collaboration software." It cited Minolta, Toshiba, Bank of New York...

Seagate Plans 10% Layoffs, Starts at the Top.
January 19, 2009... Hard disk maker Seagate, which expects its revenues to be down $500 million in its latest quarter and whose stock is in the proverbial toilet, has done what a lot of people think a lot of companies ought to do and has fired its top two...

IBM Collects Record Number of Patents.
January 19, 2009... IBM has won the patent race again. Despite its schizophrenic attitude toward patents, it got 4,186 US patents last year, making it the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 American patents in a single year, nearly triple the number...

Nortel Seeks Bankruptcy Protection.
January 19, 2009... Nortel Networks, the big multibillion-dollar Canadian telecommunication equipment house whose fall from grace has been long in the making, filed for bankruptcy protection in both Canada and the states Wednesday morning. The petitions...

Red Hat Raids Intel.
January 19, 2009... Red Hat raided Intel for a guy to run its North American sales and came back with Greg Symon, who had been running the global software relations organization within Intel's Software Solutions Group. Symon started the unit. Red Hat expects him...

Microsoft Layoffs Rumor Won't Die.
January 19, 2009... The Wall Street Journal Wednesday waded into the 10-day-old speculation that Microsoft, in an atypical move, might make significant workforce reductions. Like everybody else, the Journal couldn't come up with anything solid, only that the...

Bartz Issues First Threat.
January 19, 2009... According to Valleywag, the hit-or-miss gossip blog, Yahoo's shiny new CEO Carol Bartz told an all-hands meeting her first day on the job that she'd "dropkick to fucking Mars" anyone whose company gossip ended up on the blogs.

Microsoft Puts Money in Touch Screen Start-up.
January 19, 2009... Anxious to fan touch screens into a commodity, Microsoft, whose new Windows 7 operating system supports multi-touch widgetry, has led a $24 million round in Israeli start-up N-trig, which has now seen $52 million touch its bank account. HP and...

Dell Buys Microsoft Expertise.
January 19, 2009... Dell has acquired Allin Corporation's Microsoft-based IT consulting and software solutions business for $12 million in stock. The deal includes four offices in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Jose and Walnut Creek, California and about 100 Allin...

Toshiba Wants To Be Big Cheese in Hard Drives.
January 19, 2009... Toshiba is trying to buy Fujitsu's loss-making hard drive business, a reportedly $340 million-$450 million deal that would create the largest maker of small hard drives in the world owning a third of the market. The widgets are used mostly...

Acer Warns.(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... Acer has warned that its Q4 revenue will be down 5%-10%, blaming a softening in inventory. Netbook maven Asustek said it won't meet shipment forecasts and Compal, the second-largest contract manufacturer and supplier to HP, Dell and Lenovo, off...

Ex-Yahoo COO Named to Adobe Board.
January 19, 2009... Ex-Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, now the principle of the Quadrangle Group, the private equity house, had been named to Adobe's board of directors. A content kind of guy, he was the president of CNET Networks and CEO of ZDNet. Meanwhile,...

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow.(Michael Cannon and Mark Jarvis)(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... Michael Cannon, the ex-head of Dell's global operations scheduled to retire on January 31, will bail with a $10 million golden parachute, payable in three installments this year, according to the AP. Mark Jarvis, Dell's ousted chief marketing...

Microsoft Gets IPTV Win.
January 19, 2009... Guangzhou Digital Media Group, a Chinese TV provider, has agreed to use Microsoft's Internet Protocol television (IPTV) technology to deliver content to its customers. Singapore's SingTel TV provider is also using Microsoft's Mediaroom Anytime...

Virtual Iron Claims To Beat Trends.(Virtual Iron Software )(Brief article)
January 19, 2009... Unlike most other people, Virtual Iron Software says its Q4 revenues were up 65% year-over-year, claming its growth outpaced the server virtualization marketplace for the second consecutive quarter driven by a sequential 24% revenue increase...

Color Nvidia Grim.
January 19, 2009... Nvidia warned its fiscal Q4 revenues will be down a nasty 40%-50% quarter-over-quarter, say maybe ~$494 million, down 38%-39% from expectations. It cited weak demand and stocked inventories. Its quarter ends January 25 and January is slow.

Cisco To Harness VMware To Enter Server Biz: NY Times.
January 26, 2009... Cisco is going into the server business, according to a story in the New York Times. The virtualization-only blade server that others say is code named California will be bundled with Cisco networking hardware and VMware virtualization....

Ballmer, Bostock & Bewkes Meet.
January 26, 2009... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes met in New York last week, according to reports, after Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz coyly expressed reservations about selling off Yahoo's search to...

What's a CEO Worth?(chief executive officer)(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... HP CEO Mark Hurd's pay packet last year was worth $42.5 million including a $1.45 million salary and an $18.6 million performance-based cash bonus covering three highly profitable years. Since he arrived in 2005 and before the economic...

The Yahoo Freeze.
January 26, 2009... Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz froze salaries Wednesday.

Microsoft Dumps its Comcast Shares.
January 26, 2009... Microsoft has quietly sold its 7.26% interest in Comcast, making one wonder if it's raising money. The SEC filing didn't say when it sold its position in the cable TV operator or what it got for it. The Wall Street Journal did the arithmetic...

Zimbra Co-Founder Departs Yahoo.(Satish Dharmaraj )(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmaraj is on his way out of Yahoo and will be replaced by Zimbra exec Jim Morrisroe in March. Yahoo bought the AJAX-based open source/commercial e-mail and calendaring groupware for $350 million in September of 2007...

Intel Questioning AMD's x86 License.
January 26, 2009... AMD told the SEC that it rejected Intel's suggestion that its acquisition of ATI and its creation of the so-called Foundry Company manufacturing spin-off breached provisions in their age-old cross-license agreement. The terms of the pact,...

EC Asked To Nail IBM for Monopoly Maintenance.
January 26, 2009... T3 Technologies Inc, once the world's second-largest IBM mainframe systems integrator, filed a formal 500-page antitrust complaint with the European Commission Tuesday charging IBM with shutting it out of the market. T3, which sued IBM in...

Intel Starts Shutting Down Manufacturing.
January 26, 2009... With demand sucking wind and an inventory stockpile still to sell, Intel said late Wednesday that it would shutter five manufacturing operations - two assembly test facilities in Malaysia and one in the Philippines as well as a 200mm wafer...

Microsoft Cuts 5,000 Jobs.
January 26, 2009... In a surprise move Microsoft jumped the gun Thursday morning and posted its calendar Q4 results before the stock market opened rather than wait until after the market closed as scheduled. Bad news is evidently better eaten for breakfast....

Citrix Sets Out To Change Desktop Economics.
January 26, 2009... Citrix claims that CIOs want to stop supplying their companies' employees with computers and make it a "bring-your-own" affair so they can shed the cost of the hardware and the headaches of support. And Citrix says that its newfangled...

AMD Revenues Thin, Losses Continue.
January 26, 2009... Beset now by industry-wide lack of demand among its other problems, AMD lost $1.42 billion net, $2.34 a share, in Q4, less than the $1.77 billion loss it had the year before, but then its revenues of $1.162 billion were also down 33%...

Symantec CEO Bruited for Commerce Secretary.
January 26, 2009... The name of John W Thompson, the CEO of Symantec, is said to be on a short list to become secretary of commerce in the new Obama administration. And Reuters, quoting a Symantec spokesman, says he's talked to the Obama transition team. The...

Microsoft Offers Berlin Cloud Start-up a Helping Hand.
January 26, 2009... Zimory GmbH, a Berlin cloud spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, has been added to Microsoft's so-called Founder Initiative, a k a "Unternimm Was," which supports start-ups to accelerate their growth and technical development. ...

Adobe To Open Up Flash Messaging Protocol.(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Adobe says it's going to publish the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) specification designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video and data between Adobe Flash Platform technologies. Think AMF, SWF, FLV and F4V formats...

Jobs May Need a New Liver.(Steve Jobs )(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Bloomberg says that the SEC is reviewing Apple's disclosures about the health of its CEO Steve Jobs "to ensure investors weren't misled." Great, Apple has little credibility and the SEC is trying to redeem its own sunken reputation. ...

Apple Suffers Recession Disconnect, Posts Record Quarter.(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Despite the recession and consumer fears, Apple posted record numbers for the fourth calendar quarter, surpassing $10 billion in revenues for the first time in its life, hitting $10.17 billion, up 5.8%, on earning of $1.6 billion, or $1.78 a...

You Can Kiss Circuit City Good-Bye.
January 26, 2009... Circuit City Stores, the second-largest US consumer electronics chain, is going to liquidate its assets. It said Friday that efforts to sell or refinance its operations and keep its doors open had failed. It will now close its 567 remaining...

Egenera Upgrades Software.
January 26, 2009... Egenera, the hardware company trying to turn into a software house, has announced its next-generation virtual and physical infrastructure management software, PAN Manager 5.2. Open APIs let customers and third parties integrate PAN commands...

Microsoft Betas MED-V.
January 26, 2009... Microsoft has beta'd what it calls Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) 1.0, derived from its acquisition of Kidaro, the virtualization house. IT managers are supposed to be able to create and manage virtual XP and Windows...

Ex-Satyam CEO Accused of Stealing the Wages of Phantom Staffers.
January 26, 2009... The founder of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, Ramalinga Raju, has been accused of inflating the number of people who work for the big Indian outsourcer by 13,000 to siphon off their phony wages. The company is supposed to have 53,000 people,...

Google Shrugs Off Recession.
January 26, 2009... Microsoft has another reason to eat its liver. Google did fine in the fourth quarter. It did better than fine. Like Apple and IBM, it beat estimates in a lousy environment. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, "Search query growth was...

Novell Ships Social Networking-Based App for CMDBs.
January 26, 2009... Novell Tuesday came out with myCMDB, a web-based application that taps into social networking. It's supposed to enhance enterprise configuration management database (CMDB) usability, accessibility and accuracy. The widgetry hails from...

RightScale Goes Splunk.(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... RightScale says it's integrated Splunk IT Search technology into its cross-platform Cloud Management Platform and become a founding member of the new Splunk Powered Associate partner program. With Splunk's search widgetry integrated...

Zuora Seeks Cloud's Silver Lining.
January 26, 2009... Zuora, the Marc Benioff-backed on-demand billing and payments start-up, has announced what it calls the Z-Commerce Platform, a development platform dedicated to monetizing cloud computing services. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo describes the widgetry...

Microsoft Contributes Code to Apache.
January 26, 2009... Microsoft has kicked in software code to the great Apache open source project, specifically its Project Stonehenge, which is bent on building sample applications using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Stonehenge wants to inculcate best...

RHEL Moves to 5.3.
January 26, 2009... Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is out. It adds 150 updates and enhancements, including enhanced virtualization scalability, increased scalability of virtualized x86-64 environments, support for Intel's quad-core 45nm Core i7 Nehalem...

OK Labs Gets Funding from Citrix.(Brief article)
January 26, 2009... Open Kernel Labs, a k a OK Labs, the NICTA spin-out with the embedded virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband Internet devices, has gotten $7.6 million from Citrix, Chrysalis Ventures, which led the round, and Neo Technology...