Client Server News articles from June 2007

Client Server News archives from June 2007

Think Symantec & McAfee are feeling a bit, well, insecure?
June 4, 2007... Gee, and Symantec and McAfee felt squeezed when Microsoft wandered into their space. Now Google has a toehold too. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. On May 11 Google quietly bought an outfit, a Mountain View neighbor...

Google takes the web offline.
June 4, 2007... Google, which has recently emblazed its shield with the new motto "Search, Ads and Apps," has come up with a new way to terrorize Microsoft--a technology for running programs like Google's word processor and spreadsheet offline like, like...

FTC to investigate Google's acquisition of DoubleClick.
June 4, 2007... The Federal Trade Commission, not the Justice Department, has started a preliminary antitrust investigation of Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad placement company DoubleClick, the one Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and AT &...

Dell to cut 10% of its people on better news.
June 4, 2007... Well, Michael Dell did promise to transform his stumbling company when he came back. And now it seems that transformation is going to involve shrinking its staff 10% over the next year to match its shrunken number two status. That would be...

CDW knocked down for $7.3b.
June 4, 2007... The prize for the gargantuan deal of the holiday-shortened week goes to private equity house Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, which is buying CDW, which sells computer gear to companies and the government over the web, for $7.3 billion, less the...

Yahoo loses key man.(Farzad Nazem has resigned)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem has resigned, effective June 8, a move that was taken badly by observers if for no other reason than the lousy timing. He's the guy responsible for Yahoo's new snatch-the-chestnuts-out-of-the-fire Panama advertising...

They're erasing all memory of Stratton Scalvos at Verisign.(William Roper promoted and Edward Mueller appointed)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... The award for the mystery resignation of the week goes to Verisign, which came back from the long Memorial Day weekend with the news that its CEO Stratton Scalvos had stepped down--no reason given. In his place the Verisign board installed...

SEC charges four ex-Mercury officers.(Securities and Exchange Commission)(Mercury Interactive's Amnon Landan, Sharlene Abrams, Douglas Smith and Susan Skaer)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... The SEC has filed civil charges of fraud against ex-Mercury Interactive CEO Amnon Landan, ex-CFOs Sharlene Abrams and Douglas Smith, and ex-general counsel Susan Skaer for backdating options from 1997-2005, falsifying documents, manipulating...

Brocade to challenge Emulex & QLogic.(Brocade Communications Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Brocade has decided to get into the billion-dollar Host Bus Adapter (HBA) market, a declaration that certainly got the attention of Emulex and QLogic, which own it. In their collective opinion, Brocade's foray won't have an impact on their...

BMC buys early warning system.
June 4, 2007... Right before it posted its numbers Tuesday, BMC said it was buying privately held ProactiveNet Inc and its "early warning system," which is supposed to take real-time and proactive analyses and automatically identify the probable cause of a...

Toshiba, Intel loyalist, to use AMD chips.
June 4, 2007... Toshiba, one of the die-hard Intel faithful, is going to use AMD chips in a reported 20% of the products it ships to the US and Europe, apparently beginning with three entry-level Satellite notebooks based the Turion 64 X2 dual-core mobile...

HP shrinks NonStop for emerging market telcos.
June 4, 2007... HP has a new entry-level Integrity-based fault-tolerant NonStop server for small and mid-sized telecommunications operations in emerging markets for which large-scale fault-tolerant systems are out of reach. The always-on NS3000AC Server...

Microsoft's halo only stretches so far.(Linux Watch)
June 4, 2007... Now that its long but ultimately uneventful backdating investigation is finally over and it's filed all its missing statements, Novell has returned to making conventional SEC submissions and posting its results. On Wednesday it posted its April...

VA changes its name again.(VA Software Corp. changes its company name as SourceForge Inc.)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Having forsaken the software business for media and ad sales a few weeks ago, VA Software thought it best to change its name. It's calling itself SourceForge Inc after its good neighborly SourceForge.net open source development hosting...

Fedora 7 out.(Red Hat Inc. launched new linux operating system)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Fedora 7, the newly available cut of Red Hat's community project, usually a view of things to come, supports the creation of custom distributions and simplifies the creation of appliances. Red Hat says it's the first appliance development...

HP rustles HDS' top bull.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... HP has poached the CEO of rival Hitachi Data Systems David Robertson to run its own less-than-scintillating storage business, whose growth was up only 1% last quarter. Robertson will report to the head of HP Enterprise Servers and Storage Scott...

Salesforce-Google deal imminent.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... Salesforce has been making noises that sound like it'll announce that anticipated, supposedly anti-Microsoft deal with Google on Tuesday June 5. It's assumed to have something to do with Google's online productivity apps.

StarOffice, road warrior.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... Singapore Airlines is going to carry StarOffice for the use of its passengers as part of its KrisWorld inflight entertainment system. Remembering heightened security, Sun says passengers won't have to open their laptops and will be able to...

IBM runs up king-sized debt.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... IBM borrowed a king-sized $11.5 billion so it could buy back 8% of its shares for $12.5 billion, tickle its earnings per share 13%-14%, make its stock popular again, add to the shares it has on hand for options and jack the price up. It's part...

Reiser murder trial delayed again.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... Linux programmer Hans Reiser can stew in his jail cell a while longer. His trial for murdering his wife has been delayed again because his lawyer is trying another murder case. Reiser's trial is now supposed to start on June 11.

IBM trims IGS staff.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... IBM, whose huge Global Services growth engine appears to have run out of juice and faces serious competition from India, cut 1,573 service jobs Wednesday, mostly in North America. That makes 3,720 job cuts at IBM so far this year starting from...

HP's dirty tricks look practiced: Fortune.(Hewlett-Packard Co.'s case against former employee, Karl Kamb)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Fortune magazine has been poking around those court-sealed charges that HP bought Dell's printer plans from a former senior Dell executive before Dell entered the printer market and got a previously mum Dell to say that "The more we look into...

Apple starts selling DRM-free songs.(digital rights management)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Ahead of its own May 31 deadline, Apple Wednesday delivered its promised DRM-free music service called iTunes Plus, still a little light on the $1.29-a-song music--only a few albums were initially available. It will operate along side the old...

AMD names ex-Microsoft Canada president to its board.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... AMD has named Frank Clegg, the president of Microsoft Canada from 1991-1996 and again from 200-2005 and now the chairman of Navantis Inc, a Microsoft Gold partner, to its board. Before Microsoft, he was with IBM Canada.

Apple may have cut quanta in on iPhone.(Apple contracts with Quanta Computer Inc.)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Quanta is supposedly gonna make some Apple iPhones according to both Taiwan's Commercial Times and Economic Daily News. The company is said to have an order for five million units starting in September. If true, it's apparently only an Apple...

Intel, Microsoft & Dell push NAND.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 4, 2007... Intel, Dell and Microsoft have formed an Intel-led Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Working Group to push the adoption of NAND-based Flash memory in PCs by conjuring up a standard software programming interface to be used by...

Graying lions love-in.(D: All Things Digital conference)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... "I'd give a lot to have Steve's taste.... The way he does things is just different, and it's magical."--Bill Gates during an hour-and-a-half sit-down on stage with Steve Jobs and the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg Wednesday night at the D:...

Canadian start-up uses a puck to rethink the enterprise PC.
June 18, 2007... There's a fabless semiconductor start-up hidden away out of sight in Vancouver, British Columbia that been rethinking the problem of thin clients and the so-called PC Blade for the last three years. And now that it's got the necessary...

Linspire next to pay for patent protection.
June 18, 2007... My goodness, they're starting to fall like nine pins. Linux distributor Linspire has followed Novell and Xandros into a patent protection deal with Microsoft despite the fire-breathing, contract-scorching wrath of the Free Software...

ClearCube changes leaders--again.(Rick Hoffman replaces Bruce Cohen at the ClearCube Technology Inc.)
June 18, 2007... ClearCube has changed CEOs again. This is its third in the last, oh, hmmm, must be six or seven months. We now come to find out that outgoing CEO Bruce Cohen is the short-term consulting-type hard to dynamite out of Boston. He succeeded in...

Dell's retail push begins.
June 18, 2007... Any second now Wal-Mart's more upscale Sam's Clubs will be selling a Dell E1501 Inspiron notebook for $899 and a Dimension desktop for $829 in the states. Dell started selling two E521 Dimension desktop PCs, priced at $698 with a 19-inch...

HP revs its PC blades.
June 18, 2007... HP Monday produced its third-generation PC blade solution, which it calls a Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI). (Well, actually it's its fourth set of blades but who's counting.) This stuff includes two new blade PCs and Remote...

Google claims Microsoft's violating its consent decree.
June 18, 2007... The Justice Department has brushed off a complaint from Google alleging that Microsoft is violating its 2002 consent decree because Vista supposedly discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own. The...

Google called "endemic threat to privacy".
June 18, 2007... Privacy International says Google, the self-proclaimed "do no evil company," has an "entrenched hostility to privacy," a rating shared by no other web site it has been following. The British watchdog put out an interim report over the...

Apple puts its Safari browser on Windows.
June 18, 2007... Apple Monday put its Safari browser on Windows, a browser that isn't even supposed to be the best browser for the Mac. Immediately the move was cast as a reprise of the browser wars and by jingo within 48 hours Apple was reporting more than a...

FTC probing Microsoft & Yahoo ad deals as well as Google's: WSJ.
June 18, 2007... At press time, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft's proposed $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive and Yahoo's $680 million buyout of the rest of Right Media as well as Google $3.1...

Voltaire sells 20 Gbps switch.(Grid Director ISR 2012)(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Voltaire, the Infiniband house, has started offering a 20 Gbps 288-port director-class switch for high-performance grid computing. The Infiniband device, designated the Grid Director ISR 2012, is supposed to require less than 10% of the...

IBM buys Telelogic.
June 18, 2007... IBM is buying Sweden's 1,100-man Telelogic AB for around $749 million cash, representing a 22% premium, although some European punters seem to think that a higher bid might materialize from Microsoft or Sun. IBM wants it for its Rational...

Think Linus will defer to Sun on GPLv3? The answer may hinge on a bottle of wine.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks the last GPLv3 draft is better than earlier drafts, but he still doesn't like it much, preferring the existing GPLv2 that the Linux kernel is currently licensed under. He has problems with the GPL 3's ban...

WSO2 rethinks the ESD.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... WSO2 is the ambitious two-year-old Sri Lanka start-up that's writing a complete open source middleware platform for Web Services on Intel Capital's nickel expecting it to become the standard. It says it's the same as a comprehensive SOA...

Adobe takes Web 2.0 to the desktop.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... Adobe has delivered itself of a public beta of Flex 3, a free open source cross-platform framework for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) except they don't necessarily have to run on the Internet. The Flex 3 drop includes a...

Intuit no longer Windows-pure.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... Intuit says it's taking a step down the Linux path and will put its mid-market QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions on Linux servers in its first ever expansion beyond Windows. It's easing into the water; the client will still need to be a...

Novell plans small business edition of Linux.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... Novell said Wednesday that by September it would have an Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition of its Linux server and desktop with GroupWise e-mail and calendaring, OpenOffice, and its own Open Enterprise Server for storage management,...

Hyperic raises second round.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... Hyperic, the three-year-old San Francisco open source systems management start-up, has picked up $6.1 million in second-round funding from Benchmark Capital with Accel Partners kicking in. It got its first $3.8 million from these folks a year...

Novell calls SCO's evidence irrelevant, inadmissible & hearsay.(Linux Watch)
June 18, 2007... Novell has asked the court hearing SCO's slander of title suit against it to strike the testimony of the business people who were responsible for Novell's sale of Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation--all of whom testified they sold Santa Cruz the...

Industry unites to save the World.
June 18, 2007... Intel and Google together with Dell, EDS, the Environmental Protection Agency, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Pacific Gas and Electric, the World Wildlife Fund and a dozen other organizations say they're going to form the Climate Savers Computing...

EMC & Wipro in deal.
June 18, 2007... EMC and Wipro have cut a global strategic information infrastructure alliance that includes joint go-to-market schemes involving storage management, information management, content management and information security in an attempt, they said,...

Penguinistas huddle.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... A reported 150 Penguinistas gathered this week at Google at a three-day first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that ends today and, according to Reuters, after they emerge from their closed-door meetings Thursday and Friday they're...

Linux foundation's top engineer goes to work for Microsoft.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... Microsoft has tapped Tom Hanrahan to run its side of its interoperability efforts with Novell. The appointment comes seven months after Microsoft and Novell signed the now-famous pact that raised FOSS hackles because of the built-in patent...

Hola Mumbai.(BILLY GRAMS)(Tata Consultancy Services recruiting Mexicans)(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Tata Consultancy Services is supposed to hire 5,000 Mexicans over the next five years to service outsourcing clients in the US. The company recently opened what it calls a Global Delivery Center in Guadalajara because Indian labor has gotten...

'Q' closer to market.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... The first release candidate for Microsoft's Windows Home Server, code named "Q," is out and available for download by 100,000 official beta testers. It's a cut-down version of Windows Server 2003 SP2 and can support 10 Vista or XP PCs. It's due...

War debt.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... Although PC units are expected to be up 10% this year, the Semiconductor Industry Association has slashed its 2007 revenue growth forecasts from 10% to 1.8%, citing the sharp decline in the ASPs of processors, DRAM chips and NAND Flash. It's...

Acer blames Vista.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... Acer, complaining the slow consumer adoption of Vista, has trimmed its PC shipment projections back from over 40% growth to only 30%-40%.

CA gets new chairman.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... Finally out from under government scrutiny, CA chairman Lewis Ranieri--who was there through the government's investigation and ran the company through interim CEO Ken Cron--has stepped down to mere director status replaced by a former IBMer...

SCO, Novell square with Nasdaq.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... SCO is out from under the threat of being delisted by Nasdaq--at least for now. Its stock perked up apparently on more buoyant news from its suit against Novell. Mid-week it was on its way to a buck fifty then fell back. Novell is also back in...

Symantec's new $2b buyback.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... Symantec had gotten the go-ahead for another $2 billion stock buyback. In the past two years it bought back $7 billion worth.

Talend in the chips.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... Talend, the open source data integration ISV, is moving to an SaaS model. It also picked up $3.5 million in financing from AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners.

Reiser's murder trial delayed.(BILLY GRAMS)(Hans Reiser, linux developer)(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Linux programmer Hans Reiser's murder trial was supposed to get started Monday but, after a conference between his lawyer and the judge, it's been delayed until September or October after what is forecast to be a month spent empanelling a jury....

Microsoft & GE thought of buying Dow Jones out from under Murdock: WSJ.(BILLY GRAMS)
June 18, 2007... The specter of Rupert Murdock buying Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal provoked Microsoft and GE to toy with but then drop the idea of a matching $5 billion bid according to, well, the Wall Street Journal. GE could have paired Dow Jones...