Client Server News articles from July 2003

Client Server News archives from July 2003

SCO To Try To Slap a Tax on Linux.
July 14, 2003... The SCO Group is going to try to levy a licensing fee on all commercial Linux users of the 2.4 Linux kernel, sources say. An announcement is believed to be imminent. SCO believes most of the Linux plagiarisms of its Unix code occurred in the...

Opteron Start-up Reportedly on the Block.
July 14, 2003... Newisys, the star-studded Texas server start-up that bet the farm on AMD's new Opteron chip, reportedly canned 20%-25% of its people the other day in preparation for being acquired. Sources suggest the potential acquirer is a contract...

Sun & Microsoft Agree on SCO License.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... The other big company - other than Microsoft - that has anted up and started paying the SCO Group a license fee has accidentally been discovered to be Sun Microsystems. Sun and Microsoft together are supposed to pay SCO $13 million this year....

Eolas v Microsoft Trial Starts.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... The Eolas Technologies patent suit against Microsoft, filed in February 1999, has finally made it to federal court in Chicago. Opening arguments were just the other day and Microsoft expects the jury trial to run five or six weeks. Eolas,...

Beware the ServerWorks GC-LE Chipset.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... There's a bug in some of the ServerWorks Grand Champion LE chipsets that's bad enough to hang the servers they're used in. The company says that - after IBM found the problem - ServerWorks ran up a software utility that will let OEMs screen out...

Microsoft Cans Stock Options.
July 14, 2003... Microsoft, the company that practically invented the industry's stock option culture and turned thousands of people into millionaires, said late Tuesday that it would abandon stock options in favor of simply giving employees restricted shares....

Oracle-PeopleSoft Deal Sways on the Fence.
July 14, 2003... Prudential Financial doesn't think Oracle will get PeopleSoft because of PeopleSoft's potentially lethal poison pill, its increasingly imminent takeover of JD Edwards which raises all sorts of anticompetitive flags if the second-largest...

Sherlund Calls Dividend Rumors 'Baloney'.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... The Financial Times, which got it from Les Echos, which apparently got it from Microsoft's Paris office, wrote that Microsoft has been thinking about a one-time $10 billion dividend that would work out to roughly a dollar a share to burn up...

HP Buys Identity Management Software.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... HP is acquiring the SelectAccess identity management software of troubled security software vendor Baltimore Technologies. HP paid $13.6 million cash. After the acquisition, the identity management technologies in SelectAccess are to...

Speech Server Betas.
July 14, 2003... Microsoft has released the first beta of its Speech Server software. In conjunction with the Speech Application SDK, Speech Server is designed to let existing or new web applications be accessed by speech and let enterprises merge their...

IBM Develops Privacy Compliance Language.(Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language or EPAL)(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... IBM has introduced a new language called Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL) to automate the enforcement of privacy policies among IT applications and systems. IBM says EPAL will let developers extend the specific privacy rules...

Identity Integration Server 2003 RTMs.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Microsoft has released its Identity Integration Server 2003 to manufacturing, anticipating shipments in August. As its name implies, Identity Server is designed so administrators can integrate identity information from multiple repositories...

Federated Enough To Win Over the Liberty Alliance?
July 14, 2003... Microsoft, IBM, BEA, RSA Security and Verisign materialized the first public draft of the seminal WS-Federation specification on Tuesday, built on its little friends WS-Security, WS-Policy, WS- Trust and WS-SecureConversation, not to say an...

Price of Microsoft Protocols Becomes an Issue.
July 14, 2003... Those complaints that started with Sun over how much Microsoft wants to charge other companies for the access to its precious communications protocols that its antitrust settlement with the government demands it allow have snowballed enough to...

VMware Claims Great Breakthrough.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... VMware, the virtualization maven, says it's beta testing some new widgetry intended to manage distributed, heterogeneous computing environments as a single pool of hardware resources. Meant for Intel servers, the software is called Control...

BMC Pre-Announces.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... BMC Software said it's only going to do someplace between a penny to four cents a share on revenues of $305 million-$312 million in its first fiscal quarter, way less than the eights cents on $327 million that someone like Credit Suisse was...

Small Business Server 2003 RC Out.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Microsoft has put out the release candidate of its Small Business Server 2003. Built on Windows Server 2003, Small Business Server 2003 comes in two flavors - Standard and Premium Editions. The Standard Server includes Windows Server...

Exchange Server 2003 RTMs.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Microsoft has RTM'd Exchange Server 2003. Microsoft said it'd kept pricing for Exchange Server 2003 unchanged from Exchange 2000 in view of the "tight economic times." The Standard Edition costs $700 and the Enterprise Edition $4,000. ...

EMC To Acquire Legato in $1.3b Deal.
July 14, 2003... Ending months of rumors and speculation, EMC announced plans Tuesday to acquire storage software house Legato Systems in a $1.3 billion stock transaction. Mountain View, California-based Legato provides software for backup and recovery,...

iVivity Gets $13m, Names New CEO.
July 14, 2003... Storage start-up iVivity has secured $13 million in a Series B round taking its total financing to about $25 million. The Atlanta start- up also named David Coombs, a storage veteran, as its new CEO. The money comes from iVivity's existing...

Microsoft Sees Storage Growth.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Citing new data from IDC, Microsoft is tooting its horn that the market share of Windows-powered NAS devices is continuing to grow. Microsoft claims that Windows-powered NAS appliances grew 8% in Q1 over Q4 to account for 41% of the NAS...

Sanera Lands $35m, Loses CEO.
July 14, 2003... Storage start-up Sanera has raised $35 million in third-round funding taking the total amount wending its way through its bank account to a whopping $101 million. Sanera's existing investors ArrowPath, CMEA Ventures, Enterprise Partners...

Veritas Spends More on Precise Than Thought.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Veritas completed its acquisition of Precise Software for $609 million in cash and stock, higher than the original price of $537 million announced in December. The final deal includes $400 million in cash and 7.4 million Veritas shares. ...

OSDL Picks Up Number Two Linux Guy.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab, which just gave Linux creator Linus Torvalds a new home to help it become the center of the Linux universe, has gone and hired Andrew Morton, reportedly the number- two guy in Linux development. Not exactly...

Lindows Dreams Up New Lure.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... In order to entice more people to try its Linux desktop operating system, Lindows.com has come up with a LindowsCD that just pops into a CD-ROM and lets them get a taste of Linux and what we gather is StarOffice without disrupting their Windows...

Keeping It in the Family.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... The SCO Group has named K Fred Skousen, currently advancement VP at Brigham Young University, to its board. A CPA, Skousen has previously been dean of the Marriott School of Management, director of the School of Accountancy at BYU and visiting...

Sun Reportedly Moving Some Development to China.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... The rumor mill says Sun Microsystems is moving some of its software development to the People's Republic of China. It's reportedly forming a group of Chinese nationals that would do stuff like write device drivers for the resurrected Solaris...

Now What Do You Suppose They're Up To?(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Well, well, well. The "Big 61/2" - IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, Computer Associates, Intel and Novell - were closeted away a few days ago under a strict NDA, provided compliments of IBM, reportedly discussing a broad range of Linux-related issues.

Stand By for Another Xeon.(3.06MHz Xeon DP )(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Intel on Monday is reportedly supposed to come out with another in its seemingly endless string of Xeon chips. (Intel must have drunk from the same cup as George Forman. Each of his pack of sons is named George.) Anyway, this new tootsie is a...

10i.(Oracle's database )(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Prudential says it expects Oracle's new database rev (10i) this fall with enhanced management capabilities and streamlining to lower the total cost of ownership, a hot button with customers these days.

Oh, So That's Why.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... "People ask why we offered so little for PeopleSoft. Well, we thought we could get it for that. Why not give it a whirl? I didn't graduate from college, and I know that's held me back. But I know paying less is better than paying more." -...

Athlon64 Debut Set.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... AMD is supposed to release the hybrid 32/64-bit Athlon64 chip, the desktop and mobile versions of Hammer, on Monday September 22, according to an internal document the company inadvertently e-mailed around to lots of people. (However, we...

TCP/IP Biggie Goes To Work for HP.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... David Reed, who contributed significantly to TCP/IP technology, has gone to work for HP Labs as an HP Fellow reporting to Patrick Scaglia, vice-president of the Internet and Computing Platforms Research Center. Reed's networking research into...

Mainframe Linux Consolidation Short-Term: Meta.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... "Users face more art than science when trying to build a quantifiable Unix/Intel-to-Linux/mainframe business case. Increasingly sophisticated modeling of prospective mainframe Linux- base consolidation can quickly confirm or deny potential...

Japanese Government Toys with Running Linux.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... According to Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the Japanese daily, whose coverage is sometime, um, hit or miss, Fujitsu, IBM Japan and Oki Electric have pulled down a $1.6 million contract to design a Linux- based payroll system by March for roughly...

Well, That's One Way To Outstrip Microsoft.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... Geez, it looks like Oracle might have 30 states pawing over its hostile bid for PeopleSoft. Why, that's more states than lashed out at Microsoft. It's not yet a done deal that they'll combine against Oracle in a suit or even launch formal...

Classic Ellison "If I said to you, 'I'll give you $10 for your dog and then I'll.(Brief Article)
July 14, 2003... shoot it,' what would you do? Would it make any difference if I offered you $20?" - PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway after Oracle raised its bid to $19.50 a couple of weeks ago. "I think at one point, 'Craigey' thought I was going to shoot his...

XML sucks: a little start-up goes up against J2EE and .NET in the web services runoff.(Clear Methods Inc. on extensive markup language)
July 21, 2003... Two-year-old Massachusetts start-up Clear Methods Inc says web services are having trouble getting off the ground because of XML, one of key props web services are supposed to be based on. Clear Methods CEO Mike Plush, a veteran of...

Big Shake-up inside Oracle.(Chuck Phillips replaced Mark Jarvis )(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Senior VP Mark Jarvis is out and Chuck Phillips is in as the head of marketing at Oracle. Phillips, the ex-Morgan Stanley analyst who changed his career a few weeks ago when he joined Oracle as an executive VP without portfolio, has been...

Microsoft sales up 11%: cash hoard reaches $49b.
July 21, 2003... The Microsoft earnings train continues to chug along relentlessly. The software titan reported a net income of $1.92 billion, or 18 cents a share, on revenues of $8.07 billion in its fourth quarter ended June 30. Excluding a charge of...

Yahoo buys overture; ball now in M'soft's court.(Overture Services Inc. acquired)
July 21, 2003... Yahoo is buying Overture Services Inc for $1.63 billion in cash and stock, a fact that can't make Microsoft any too happy. Microsoft uses Overture for paid search (it charges people to be ranked high in searches) and after Yahoo bought...

OK, now what's Oracle gonna do?(J.D. Edwards and Co. acquired by PeopleSoft Inc.)
July 21, 2003... On Monday the Justice Department blessed the PeopleSoft-JD Edwards acquisition deal by giving the pair an early escape from the normal Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period. With that reprieve in its pocket, PeopleSoft expected its $1.8 billion...

Sanmina buys Newisys.(Sanmina-SCI Corp. acquires)
July 21, 2003... Told ya so. Told ya so. Sanmina-SCI has admitted that it's going to take over Opteron server designer Newisys in a few days. No surprise really given that we knew the buyer was a contract manufacturer and Newisys has been using Sanmina as...

Neoware gets $25m in funding.(Neoware Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Neoware, the thin client house, has picked up $25 million worth of private equity funding by selling 1.5 million shares at $17.50 each, something like a 10% premium to the market price. The source of the money wasn't named. The company also...

Unisys puts JVM on Windows mainframe.(Java Virtual Machine for its 32p ES7000 machine)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Well, this news ought to bring a bit of color back to Sun's cheeks. Unisys has got a Java Virtual Machine for its 32p ES7000 machine, making the 7000, it says, "the only Java computer platform that takes advantage of Microsoft's most powerful...

BlueArc rakes in $47 mil, to IPO in '04; Dell not in round.(initial public offerings)
July 21, 2003... NAS systems vendor BlueArc Corporation has raised a whopping $47 million in Series D funding taking its total backing to a hefty $157 million. The San Jose, California concern, which declined to disclose its valuation for the round, said...

EMC profits up; beats estimates.
July 21, 2003... EMC earned $82 million net, or four cents a share, on revenues of $1.48 billion in the second quarter. The results were in line with EMC's recent upbeat projections (CSN No 507). EMC's profits came in a penny higher than the Street...

Wall Street holds its nose over EMC/Legato deal.(EMC Corp.'s acquisition of Legato Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... "We believe the Legato deal is more analogous to the potential Oracle/PeopleSoft acquisition than it is to the PeopleSoft/JD Edwards transaction. In other words it is more for customer acquisition than a product build out. This addresses the...

Montilio gets $4m.(Drive Bay)
July 21, 2003... Israeli storage start-up Montilio has completed a $4 million funding round. Evergreen Partners, Cedar Fund and Intel Capital participated. Montilio plans to use the proceeds to complete product development and do pilot projects with customers.

Quantum names Belluzzo Chairman.(Drive Bay)
July 21, 2003... Quantum's board has named its CEO Rick Belluzzo, the guy who failed to hold on to his job as president of Microsoft, to the additional post of chairman crediting him with accomplishing a lot in a short time. Belluzzo succeeds Michael Brown, who...

Another HP exec defects to EMC.(Mark Sorenson of Hewlett-Packard Co. joins EMC Corp.)(Frank Harbist)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... HP storage software VP Mark Sorenson has joined EMC. An EMC spokesman confirmed that Sorenson had come on board and said his title and responsibilities would be announced soon. Sorenson used to work for EMC's software chief and CTO Mark Lewis...

Storage software revenues down 9%.(Drive Bay)
July 21, 2003... The storage software business experienced a 9% decline in revenues in Q1 compared to the preceding quarter, according to IDC, which attributes it to normal seasonal patterns and says it was in line with its forecasts. The researcher...

IBM acquires Aptrix.
July 21, 2003... IBM has acquired privately held Australian content management software provider Presence Online dba Aptrix. It did not disclose financial terms of the transaction. Aptrix technology will form the basis of IBM's new Lotus Workplace Content...

IBM gets its first 'First' in Intel.(International Business Machines Corp.'s server revenues)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... IBM has observed HP and Sun out talking about how they're taking share from one another, not to mention IBM, then scratches its head and asks how it's possible. Amid all the rest of braggadocio, IBM says revenues from its Intel servers were up...

'We're clean'--Dell.(Dell servers are not effected by Grand Champion-LE chipsets problem)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... In the wake of ServerWorks' admission that some of its Grand Champion-LE chipsets are bewitched (CSN No 507), Dell claimed to be "instrumental in determining the root cause and resolution for performance issues" in the widget--well, at least...

SteelCloud goes to M'soft for OS.(Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... SteelCloud says it's cut an OEM deal with Microsoft for a "special" embedded version of Windows Server for its new line of network security appliances. It didn't say how it was "special" and we're still trying to find out. SteelCloud...

Egenera's helpers get organized.(Morse Group Ltd. and Raba Technologies)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Egenera now has itself an Accelerate alliance program composed of VARs, OEMs, ISVs, services organizations and system integrators to help with data center virtualization based on its BladeFrame system. The company's also got Morse Group Ltd in...

AMD to use Spansion brand.
July 21, 2003... FASL LLC, now the largest the Flash memory company in the world based on gross assets of $3 billion and a work force of 7,000 people, the Sunnyvale, California-based joint venture that AMD and Fujitsu have been reorganizing to give AMD 60%...

Dell loses exec to Fujitsu Siemans.(Fujitsu Siemens Computers appoints Garry Owen)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Fujitsu Siemens has recruited Garry Owen out of Dell EMEA, where he was head of enterprise product marketing, to do the same at Fujitsu Siemens in the UK. Owen will be peddling storage and Sparc as well as Intel servers, at least for a while...

PC market better than expected.(personal computers)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... So IDC says Q2 worldwide PC shipments were up 7.6% to 33 million units, better than it expected. It only figured on 4.1% in part because it overestimated the impact of the SARS outbreak and the market basically wasn't as tough as it...

Aduva claims a SCO safeguard.(OnStage 2.0)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... In a clever bit of marketing, meant to calm the nervous enterprise, Aduva, the Linux lifecycle people, is soon to start saying that if the SCO Group should prevail in its $3 billion suit against IBM and Linux is found to be riddled with Unix...

Linux looms bigger at Sybase.(Linux Watch)
July 21, 2003... Sybase broadened its Linux advocacy the other day. It pledged to have all of its "relevant" products on Linux next year, established a global professional services practice and set up a Linux Competency Center in Manhattan for testing and...

SuSE gets into Walmart.(sells SuSE Linux 8.2. Microtel personal computers)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Walmart.com has started selling PCs made by Microtel preloaded with SuSE Linux 8.2. Microtel has been providing walmart.com with boxes running either Windows or Lindows and after looking at the Lindows units Consumer Report told people to spend...

Wyse chases Linux market.(Wyse Technology Inc. introduces Winterm 5125XE and Winterm 5455XL)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Wyse has broadened its Linux thin client portfolio by two units, aware that according to IDC the worldwide Linux thin client market grew 82% last year. The new Winterm 5125XE runs server-based Unix, Linux, XWindows and Java programs. Wyse says...

SMBs ain't a piece of cake for Microsoft: Jupiter.(Small and medium sized companies)(Jupiter Research)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Jupiter Research says it's surveyed the small and mid-size business market and found that product fragmentation, customer dissatisfaction and the "surprising" acceptance of open source "pose serious problems for Microsoft." About 52% of...

Linux-friendly site created.(Linux Watch)
July 21, 2003... Lindows.com has created a new web site called Lfriendly.com to guide people to Linux-friendly vendors and says there's a price-searching engine to help save folks money. It's unclear how disinterested the thing is. It's supposed to include...

PeopleSoft posts results.(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... The hotly pursued-but-reluctant PeopleSoft posted its earnings Thursday and much to Oracle's chagrin didn't do as badly as Larry Ellison hoped. Oracle had pictured PeopleSoft as being in distress. It earned $36.5 million, 11 cents, which...

AMD narrows Q2 loss.(The Great Reckoning)
July 21, 2003... AMD lost $140 million, or 40 cents a share, on revenues of $645 million in the second quarter. The revenues were ahead of AMD's pre-announced projection of $615 million, which it gave in late June when it said it wouldn't meet its original...

Java Conversion tool upgrade debuts.(Mcrosoft Java Language Conversion Assistant 2.0 introduced)
July 21, 2003... Microsoft has upgraded its Java Language Conversion Assistant tool for converting Java code into Visual .NET. Microsoft says release 2 of the Java Language Conversion Assistant features enhancements such as enabling developers to convert...

Legato sued over EMC deal.
July 21, 2003... Storage software Legato Systems, which is being acquired by EMC, said two lawsuits had been filed seeking to block the acquisition. The suits have been filed against Legato and its board. Both suits were filed in the Santa Clara County...

Sonar echoes at CA.(Computer Associates International Inc.'s systems management software)(CA World)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... At the annual CA World jamboree, CA CEO Sanjay Kumar talked up a new program code named Sonar centered round on-demand computing. Kumar touted Sonar as going beyond automatic discovery of applications and devices to correlate or map...

Hold on. This could be important.(Microsoft Corp. lost the case against InterTrust Technologies Corp.)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Hold On. This Could Be Important Evidently Microsoft lost the Markman hearing running up to the big, long-pending InterTrust digital rights management patent infringement trial where it'll be in the dock. The Markman phase is when terms are...

Blades dull?(Dell Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... There's an unconfirmed rumor running around that Dell might shelve its blade effort. Maybe it's just IBM's wishful thinking. IBM claims to be the blade kingpin. Meanwhile, CNET is talking about the schedule for Sun's second blade design, an...

Get real.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 21, 2003... At a guess, we'd bet that Real Software Inc, developers of Realbasic, the object-oriented software development tool for writing for Windows or Mac or Mac OS X, is about to add a new platform, namely Linux.

A case of the pot calling the kettle black.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 21, 2003... The web site CorelRescue.com, which is attempting to rally dissident Corel stockholders and get them to buck the company's acquisition by Vector Capital, the outfit Microsoft sold its Corel shares to on the cheap, quotes Corel founder and...

Opteron reportedly improves.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 21, 2003... Reports suggest that recent batches of the 1.8GHz Opteron perform maybe 15%-30% better than the earlier versions that people have in their machines.

Ellison on demand.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 21, 2003... Oracle's irrepressible CEO Larry Ellison, on a jaunt to India a few days ago, called IBM's on-demand strategy a "pricing scheme."

Zip it.(Microsoft Corp is using Inner Media's DynaZip compression technology)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Evidently Microsoft is using little-know Inner Media's DynaZip compression technology as the backbone of the Windows Server 2003 Compressed Folder. Its stuff supports the .NET programming architecture and is compatible with the original PKZip...

ClearCube in at Lackland.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 21, 2003... Chalk up another small win for ClearCube and its bladesinsteadof-PCs technology. Lackland Air Force Base has deployed 200 of its blades at the headquarters that supports Air Force Security Forces. It reportedly figures the caged blades are,...

Athlon 64 due Sept 23.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 21, 2003... AMD has confirmed what we said last week. The Athlon 64, its 64-bit x86 desktop and notebook processor, will be launched in San Francisco on September 23, not the date of September 22 that was being bandied about.

Happy birthday, Intel.(turns 35 year old)(Brief Article)
July 21, 2003... Intel turned 35 the other day. Intel is having a Hallmark kind of year, the x86 is 25 and the Pentium is 10. Intel buried a time capsule to celebrate its birthday. Too bad it didn't contain an accurate record of what has REALLY happened since...

Where have we heard that one before?(Transitive Technologies binary translator)
July 21, 2003... A Los Gatos start-up rooted in the University of Manchester called Transitive Technologies claims to be the "first company in the world to create a modular dynamic binary translator that allows virtually any application to run on any...