Client Server News articles from June 2004

Client Server News archives from June 2004

SCO's Papa Loses Appeal of Microsoft Settlement Dispute to Novell.
June 7, 2004... The Canopy Group, the VC operation backed by the fortune made by one-time Novell CEO Ray Noorda, has lost its appeal of an internecine legal dispute with Novell over how to divvy up the reported $290 million settlement that Canopy got from...

Can Sun Really Open Source Solaris?
June 7, 2004... Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's new president and latest loose cannon, a volume kind of guy, said at a press conference in Shanghai the other day at a SunNetwork Conference, that Sun was going to open source Solaris. "I don't want to say when...

NEC Beats HP & Hitachi to Itanium Blade Server.
June 7, 2004... NEC Solutions America is about to introduce the very first 64-bit Itanium-based blade server from a brand-name vendor. Come to think of it, it will be the very first blade server that NEC has ever sold the states. NEC figures that when the...

Sparc Roadmap Retracts; TI Out as Fab.(Texas Instruments Inc.)
June 7, 2004... In the face of a shrinking market increasingly too small to sustain two independent Sparc development operations and with an wary eye on the mounting cost of such things, Sun and Fujitsu said Tuesday that they are going to abandon separate and...

Good Ole Intel Comes Through.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... The Wall Street punters, who simply love to fret, were biting their nails this week over how things were going at Intel - which was due to deliver is mid-quarter update on Thursday after the market closed - because semi sales elsewhere had...

Google Upgrades Search Appliance.(Brief Article)
June 7, 2004... Google has released new versions of its search appliance, the integrated hardware/software device that lets companies, schools and government agencies deliver "Google-quality" search results on their intranets and public web sites. Google...

Sun Unleashes Widget Barrage.
June 7, 2004... Sun staged another one of those God awful quarterly "Network Computer" product launches on Tuesday and made a slew of (like more than 30) disjointed, hard-to-digest-in-one-bite announcements like the fact that: [cedilla] It's come up with...

ServerWorks & AMD To Whip Up Opteron Chipset.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
June 7, 2004... Broadcom's ServerWorks arm is going into the Opteron server chipset business much to the delight and encouragement of AMD. Samples are due in the fall. The two say they're aiming to achieve "optimum price/performance metrics." ...

Microsoft Debuts New Accelerators.
June 7, 2004... Microsoft has released two new Office 2003 Business Intelligence Accelerators. The Scorecards Accelerator is a web-based program designed to simplify the measurement of key performance metrics by automating the manual collection and...

Hang 'em & Hang 'em High.
June 7, 2004... To the Editor: I enjoyed your coverage of [former Informix CEO] Phil White's sentencing in CSN today. As an Informix employee at the time, I thought I'd send you some of my own reactions. I'm tremendously disappointed in the leniency...

Sun Beefs Up its Storage Portfolio.
June 7, 2004... Sun is moving to strengthen its storage business, a laggard compared to its rivals. On Tuesday at one of these newfangled quarterly product launches that Sun has affected, it rolled out a bunch of storage systems, some software and a...

Seagate To Fire 7%, Take $50m Charge.
June 7, 2004... Seagate will be laying off 7% of its workforce of 42,000 - about 2,940 people - by the end of the year to boost profitability. The layoffs, which will be spread across several departments, aren't expected to impact new product...

IBM To Support Intransa Customers.
June 7, 2004... IBM Global Services will provide worldwide service and support to storage start-up Intransa's customers. San Jose, California-based Intransa provides a highly available IP storage system called the IP5000 that offers 2TB-24TB of raw storage.

Brocade Debuts Multiprotocol Router.(Brocade Communication Systems Inc.)
June 7, 2004... Brocade's Silkworm Multiprotocol Router hit market Thursday. It's supposed to be able to connect isolated SANs and extend the benefits of SANs over multiple networks without changing the configurations of existing SAN fabrics. The...

SCO Kisses Off Rogue VC.
June 7, 2004... SCO has mollified its estranged and publicly critical VC, BayStar Capital, by agreeing to buy back the 40,000 shares of SCO preferred stock that BayStar currently owns, both the 20,000 BayStar bought last year for $20 million and the 20,000...

Red Hat Moves To Strike Out at Turbolinux & Red Flag.
June 7, 2004... Red Hat has named ex-IBMer Stephen McWhirter, a Lotus legacy, VP of Asia-Pacific operations, his own little fiefdom. He was previously responsible for IBM's Asia-Pacific sales and is credited with $1 billion in net new revenues. He had been...

Like Oliver, SCO Wants 'More'.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)
June 7, 2004... SCO told the Utah court charged with hearing its multibillion-dollar suit against IBM last Friday that from what it can piece together from the discovery IBM has produced so far the evidence that IBM ripped off SCO's Unix code and put it in...

Mono Beta 2 Debuts.
June 7, 2004... Novell has put out the second beta of Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET Framework for Linux, Unix and Windows whose sponsorship it acquired when it bought Ximian. It's the last beta before the formal release of Mono 1.0. ...

Apache Foundation OKs Geronimo.(Apache Software Foundation)
June 7, 2004... The Apache Software Foundation has made the Geronimo app server an official project. The idea is to put out a certified, open source Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server under the Apache license next quarter. Of course,...

Lindows Back in Business in Benelux.
June 7, 2004... Microsoft is going to have to pay Lindows 944 euros, which works out to something like all of about 1,100 bucks, after Microsoft failed to convince a Dutch court to enjoin Lindows from any use of the name Lindows. It was Microsoft's second...

HP To Support MySQL, JBoss.
June 7, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has stepped up its commitment to open source software by inking deals with MySQL AB and JBoss to certify, support and co-market their open source software on its industry standard servers running Linux. MySQL, which offers...

Sun & Microsoft Talking.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Microsoft Corp.)
June 7, 2004... Sun CEO Scott McNealy doesn't want to talk substance, but said that Sun and Microsoft have been talking weekly in the wake of the great Sun-Microsoft settlement a few weeks ago. Scott mumbled something about directory interoperability, the...

DOJ v Oracle Suit on Tap.(United States. Department of Justice)(PeopleSoft)
June 7, 2004... The Justice Department's suit to block Oracle's notion of acquiring PeopleSoft starts on Monday, June 7 and is expected to run a month. Oracle's strategy is understood to revolve around convincing the court that Microsoft, Oracle's hereditary...

EC Appeal To Start.(European Commission)
June 7, 2004... Microsoft is expected to appeal the European Commission's antitrust decision to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg in the next few days. The president of the appeals court has already hinted that Microsoft may not get the stay it wants...

Intel Hits Major Milestone.
June 7, 2004... In Q1, revenues generated by x86 servers came to more than the money spent on RISC boxes. The crossover started last year, but fluctuated. IDC now says the crossover is permanent. It took years, but Intel finally did it.

Microsoft Reorgs ERP Reporting Structure; Brings Ballmer.
June 7, 2004... In Microsoft is training its big guns on its business software interests. On Thursday it removed a reporting layer from between Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and the so-called Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) unit wherein dwells the...

Gateway Hires International Chief.
June 7, 2004... Gateway has tapped Blue Martini's managing director of Asia-Pac William Evans, an ex-Objectivity guy, to be its senior VP of international. He will be responsible for Gateway's sales, marketing and operations outside the US.

Siebel Claims Demand for OnDemand.
June 7, 2004... Siebel says it's closed 175 deals for its new hosted CRM OnDemand product since the start of the second quarter including 62 new OnDemand customers.

Web Services Software To Reach $11b in '08.
June 7, 2004... Worldwide spending on software for web services projects will hit $11 billion by 2008 compared to $1.1 billion last year, according to IDC. IDC thinks web services are moving to the forefront of most IT departments' thinking as a critical...

In the Manner of Trajan & Hadrian, Charles Wang Seeks To.
June 7, 2004... Leave 'Real' Mark on History The cultural legacy he left behind at Computer Associates having proved "corrupt" in the words of the government prosecutors who are trying to bring the outfit to book after a two-year investigation, CA...

Thought for the Day.(Benjamin Franklin)
June 7, 2004... "One of the greatest tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts." - Benjamin Franklin

CA Bosses May Have To Cough Up Any Ill-Gotten Gains.(US$ 2.2 billion premature bookings case)(Computer Associates International Inc.)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Sam Wily, the Texan who tried to run off Computer Associates' compromised management a few years ago and take over the company only to settle for a cheap $10 million greenmail payoff to go away, has come back to haunt the company. Wily's...

RLX Raises Bar on Server Management.
June 14, 2004... Blade pioneer RLX Technologies has sexed up the new 6G generation of its server management software to provide what it believes is "unparalleled" policy-based automation. The company says it has also given the stuff comprehensive remote...

Merrill Wants To Break Up HP; Suggests It Buy Sun.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
June 14, 2004... Merrill Lynch wants to do to HP what Thomas Penfield Jackson and the Clinton-era Justice Department wanted to do to Microsoft - break it up. Merrill's top research analyst Steve Milunovich issued an opinion Monday, the day before HP's...

Carly Runs with the Bulls; May Get Gorged.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... HP CEO Carly Fiorina peered into her crystal ball for the benefit of Wall Street the other day and bullishly predicted that the company's per-share profits, currently dependent on its printing interests, would grow better than 20% a year for...

'Complexity' Killed World-Changing Microsoft-SAP Merger.
June 14, 2004... Knowing that the news was going to come out in the wash this week at the Oracle-PeopleSoft trial in California, Microsoft and SAP decided to hang their own laundry and put out press releases of their own Monday morning before the lawyers...

Ah, What Might Have Been.
June 14, 2004... Dazzled by Microsoft's ability to think outside the box and approach SAP with a merger offer, Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund, Microsoft's closest and most influential Wall Street follower, in market parlance, the Microsoft "axe,"...

IBM Figures an Oracle PeopleSoft Would Cost it Millions.(International Business Machines )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Gee, the Oracle trial is turning into a veritable information goldmine. After outing Microsoft's little secret about proposing merger to ERP giant SAP to fend off the proposed Oracle-PeopleSoft tie-up, it appears that IBM is sweating...

Fancy That, Somebody Thinks Microsoft Isn't Anti-Competitive.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Competitive After six years of kicking the case around, Brazil has unanimously decided that Microsoft's Money software, not exactly one of Redmond's Panzer divisions, didn't chew up a like-minded local Finance package sold by a company...

Microsoft Appeals Mario's Stern Verdict.
June 14, 2004... Microsoft filed its expected appeal of the European Commission's antitrust decision on Monday. Later this month, in a separate filing, Microsoft said it will ask the European Court of First Instance (CFI) to stay the EC's order demanding...

Canadian Kids To Use StarOffice.
June 14, 2004... Sun says it's cut a StarOffice 7 deal with the Ontario Ministry of Education covering 2.5 million students. Terms were not disclosed, but even the school system called the cost "minimal." Presumably that means it's getting the software for the...

AMD To Create Cheap New Chip Brand.(Advanced Micro Devices)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD is creating a cheap new processor brand called the Sempron to compete against Intel's Celeron chip. AMD discontinued its previous value brand, the Duron, a cut-down version of the Athlon XP, about two years ago; Duron's smaller caches...

Cognos PowerPlay a Billon-Dollar Product.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... The buttons are popping off Cognos' shirt because it's sold a billion dollars worth of its PowerPlay OLAP software. Few companies, let alone single products, ever hit the billion-dollar mark, it preens. To celebrate, the Canadian company has...

Dell Tops its Line with Four-way Itanium Box.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Dell, which got kinda Itanium-shy after a bad experience with the original Merced chip, has brought out a high-end four-way Itanium2 server dubbed the PowerEdge 7250, expecting the thing to be used in database, engineering and ERP environments...

AMD Scores Chinese Coup.(Advanced Micro Devices )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD has persuaded Legend, which is supposed to be the biggest of the Chinese OEMs, to give up its steady diet of Intel chips and design AMD's 64-bit Athlon 64 and 32-bit Athlon XP chips into a home PC line called the Feng Xing V. Legend started...

IBM Betas Masala Search.(International Business Machines)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... IBM is beta testing a search mechanism code named Masala - a word more at home on a curry house menu - that searches a corporate intranet. Once it passes muster the widgetry will become the next version of IBM's DB2 Information Integrator...

S&P Frets over Google.(Standard & Poor's)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... After doing a pre-IPO survey, Standard & Poor's has its doubts about Google's ability to expand outside its core market and into comparative shopping, social networking and e-mail. For instance, the survey found that few people are interested...

Microsoft Files Eolas Appeal.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Microsoft has finally appealed the $500 million-and-rising decision a district court made in favor the so-called Eolas patent, the one W3C director Tim Berners-Lee got the Patent Office to re-examine because if it's left standing it's going to...

EC Testing Intel's Teflon Coating.(European Commission)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD has been whining again to the European Commission about what a bully boy Intel is - it's got new examples of Intel's Brown Shirt tactics -and that bestirred the EC to dust off a semi-dormant four- year-old investigative of Intel that AMD...

AMD Launches Geode Design Kit.(Advanced Micro Devices)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... AMD has put out a thin client reference design kit based on its low- end Geode GX processors. The design kit is meant to enable the rapid development of thin clients like blade PCs, information appliances, kiosks and point-of- sale...

Microsoft CRM To Get Feature Pack.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Microsoft plans to release a feature pack for its CRM 1.2 product. Due in August, Microsoft promises it will provide deeper integration with Office 2003, support mobile users through the CRM Mobile 1.2 component and offer enhancements like...

AOL Launches New Business Services.(America Online)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... America Online launched a thing called AIM Business Services Thursday aimed at "At Work" users. The new fee-based services include a voice conference call feature based on technology from Lightbridge and a web meeting feature that...

Exception Noted.(Microsoft - Digital Research Inc. settlement)(Letter to the Editor)
June 14, 2004... One of our esteemed readers, who keeps us painfully accurate, has taken exception to our characterizing Digital Research Inc (DRI) as "Microsoft's very earliest competitor" last week in that story we wrote about how the Canopy Group had lost...

EMC Forms New Software Group; Predicts 70% Earnings Hike.
June 14, 2004... This Year EMC has set up a new Software Group that puts its so-called open software, worth about $125 million-a-quarter in trade these days, together with its Legato and Documentum acquisitions. The group excludes the software that...

HP Slips; EMC Gains.
June 14, 2004... EMC dislodged Hewlett-Packard to take the No. 1 place in external disk storage systems in Q1, according to IDC. HP's share of revenues fell to 18%, or $630 million, down from 19.3% year-over-year. While HP's actual revenues fell 0.7%...

Top Brocade Sales Exec Bolts to Maranti.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Brocade's VP of North American sales Greig Patton has jumped to rival SAN switch vendor Maranti Networks where he will be responsible for expanding its enterprise customer base. Maranti launched its CoreStor line of switches in December. It...

GlassHouse To Buy 2 UK Firms.(Source Consulting)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Storage consultant GlassHouse Technologies is expanding its reach in Europe with the proposed acquisition of UK storage services firms Source Consulting and Sagitta Performance Systems. Financial terms of the deals, which are expected to...

EMC Peddles E-Mail Archiving for Compliance.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... EMC is rolling out an integrated e-mail archiving widget for complying with the new government regulations. It combines EMC's storage and services with e-mail archiving software from its Legato unit. Dubbed EMC Proven Solution for E-mail...

Veritas Extends Itanium 2 Support.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Veritas said Tuesday that it had added support for Red Hat 3.0 on Itanium 2 to its storage management and clustering software. Its Foundation Suite 2.2 and Cluster Server 2.2 for Linux on Itanium are shipping now at prices starting at $1,500...

Yosemite Snags $10m.(Tapeware)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Tape backup vendor Yosemite Technologies has raised $10 million in a Series B round led by Trinity Ventures with contributions from existing investors Hummer Winblad and Altos Ventures. The Fresno, California start-up, which claims to be...

McData Debuts SAN Security Assessment Service.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... McData has introduced a security service to assess and document potential risks in a customer's storage network. McData says the new SANtegrity Security Assessment service will let folks address SAN security proactively rather than reactively.

EMC To Peddle ADIC Tape Products.(Advanced Digital Information Corp)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... EMC has agreed to resell ADIC's scalar tape libraries for near-line storage and offsite vaulting. In return, ADIC will resell EMC's Clariion CX networked storage arrays as part of its Pathlight VX virtual tape line, which combines disk and tape...

SCO Can't Sell "Linux Licenses" Worth a Damn.
June 14, 2004... SCO's notorious SCOsource licensing program brought in all of $11,000 in the company's second quarter ended April 30, a fact that should warm of the cockles of all the Linux hearts out there that begrudge the company its Unix IP claims. ...

Red Hat Protects Supposedly Invincible Code against.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Malware Linux, which according to modern myth is supposed to be virus-proof, is on its way to supporting the NX (No Execute) security widgetry that the x86 chipmakers are building into their processors. As its name suggests, NX is...

OSDL Picks Up Ex-Red Hat Guy To Run Asia.(Open Source Development Lab )(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Fresh from some minor recruiting/dues-paying victories in China, the Open Source Development Lab has hired Masanobu Hirano, the guy who tried to put Red Hat on the map in Japan as president of Red Hat Japan and general manager of Red Hat North...

Xandros Returns to Linux Roots, Offers Free Desktop OS.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... In a bid to expand its user base against an expanding retinue of rivals, little Xandros, Coral's heir and current Linux desktop hopeful, is offering a cut-down version of its desktop OS for free to personal users. The Canadian company is...

Open Terra Offers SuSE a Mobile Connection.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Open Terra and Novell have a deal that will make Open Terra's Java- based mSolve Enterprise Mobility platform available to SuSE and NetWare customers to create mission-critical mobile programs. The mSolve widgetry provides for rapid...

Gentlemen, Cock Your Pistols.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Apparently figuring it can trounce the immediate competition, Lindows has burned Red Hat's free Fedora Core 2 developer-level code, Mandrake 10 Community Edition and its own Linspire 4.5 operating system on to eight CDs, christened them the...

Mercury Launches New Linux Servers.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Mercury Computer is introducing a new line of rack-mountable Linux servers based on IBM's PowerPC970FX chips. IBM, you will recall, is all hot these day to carve out a Linux fiefdom for its proprietary 64-bit chips. Mercury is offering the...

SCO Tale Takes Another Odd Turn.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... SCO stock has been found to be trading without SCO's knowledge or consent on three unregulated German bourses, another weird turn for a company already majoring in weird. The discovery was made in the last few days by a SCO stockholder....

DLT Snags DOD Deal.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... DLT Solutions has gotten a five-year Blanket Purchase Agreement worth as much as $29 million from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to provide Red Hat software to the Defense Department. That means it's gotten a hunting license...

OK, Suppose CA's Interim CEO Gets Itchy Feet.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Well, given the latest development, one can only wonder how much longer Computer Associates can impose on its reluctant interim CEO Ken Cron. Kenny was seconded from the CA board to take some of the heat off his predecessor Sanjay Kumar...

OK, This is Hard To Imagine But Try To Think Really Cheap.
June 14, 2004... Windows It seems we should be on the lookout for a Linux-engaging - not to say Linux-befuddling - HPC entry from Microsoft, based on the good ole Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. How it's implemented is still a matter of...

PTO To Re-examine Microsoft FAT Patent.(Patent and Trademark Office)(Public Patent Foundation)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... The newfangled Public Patent Foundation (PPF), a self-styled non- profit watchdog meant to protect the world from reckless patenting, whose three-man board includes anti-patent Free Software advocate Eben Moglen, has reportedly persuaded the...

IBM Takes Advice from Rival.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... IBM sidling up to blade rival RLX Technologies, whose widgets it once offered to sell then moved nary a one, to ask its advice on Infiniband merchants, according to RLX CEO Doug Erwin. Erwin told it to go with TopSpin, his choice for RLX,...

It's the Blades, Stupid, Not the Razor.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... HP has confirmed that it'll have an Opteron blade server next half. (We said it'd have a four-way Opteron Blade months ago, probably the low-heat parts that won't fry an egg.) It's also confirmed Itanium (Deerfield?) blades and it's suspected...

Symbol CEO Takes It on the Lam.(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... Symbol Technologies CEO Tomo Razmilovic was declared a fugitive Wednesday after his lawyer told a federal court in Brooklyn that he wouldn't be at his arraignment on charges of overstating Symbol revenues by more than $200 million and inflating...

Ex-Legato Sales Chief on Trial for Inflating the Stock.(Legato)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... The SEC is trying David Malmstedt, the erstwhile head of worldwide sales at Legato, for securities fraud. The government says he faked revenues in 1999 to inflate Legato's stock price. When Legato's real numbers were discovered the following...

Eclipse 3.0 RC Circulating.(Eclipse Foundation)(Brief Article)
June 14, 2004... A first Eclipse 3.0 IDE release candidate popped up over the weekend and judging by its advanced state the Java Lobby thinks a final release will turn up at JavaOne. Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation has named Mike Milinkovich its new executive...

Survival Tool-in-the-Making.
June 14, 2004... See www.gasbuddy.com.

Microsoft's 64-bit Opteron OS Will Be Late; Tell me you didn't see it coming.
June 21, 2004... Nocona, aka Yamhill, aka CT, aka Clackamas, the fabled server version of Prescott, the 32-bit Intel chip with the Opteron-aping 64-bit extensions, is due out to be announced on Monday, June 28 but there won't be any Microsoft operating system...

Prison Pinstripes.(Prabhat Goyal, Network Associates)
June 21, 2004... Former Network Associates CFO Prabhat Goyal has been indicted on 20 counts of securities fraud and obstruction of justice. He stands accused of hiding $330 million in losses at the company between 1998 and 2000 and inflating the amount of...

Grantsdale Arrives, Dragging Convergence Behind It.
June 21, 2004... Intel is supposed to come to market with Grantsdale on Monday, the 21st although OEMs jumped the gun and started announcing systems Thursday even if Intel's expecting fully fledged boxes to still be in short supply later this year. ...

Microsoft's Billions Burn a Hole in Wall Street's Pocket.
June 21, 2004... Microsoft's dear friend, Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund, is expecting Microsoft to announce its intention to reduce its fabulous $56 billion cash position either at its earnings call on July 22 or at its analyst get-together on July 29....