Client Server News articles from March 2004

Client Server News archives from March 2004

Celestica Wants To Design Your Server.
March 1, 2004... A year ago, Celestica Inc, the $8 billion-a-year Toronto-based contract manufacturer that quietly makes the computers that people with big, important computer brands sell, decided to go into a different but related line of work, one that would...

DOJ Sues To Stop Oracle; Oracle To Fight.
March 1, 2004... The Department of Justice has filed suit to block Oracle's $9.4 billion hostile offer for PeopleSoft because it says it would result in higher prices, less innovation and fewer choices. The DOJ's not alone either. The attorneys general of...

Regulators Raid Microsoft Japan.(Fair Trade Commission)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... The Microsoft dike has sprung another leak. Antitrust officials from the Fair Trade Commission raided the company's offices in Japan the other day looking for information on Windows XP licensing while Microsoft has yet to solve its antitrust...

HP Goes with Opteron Big-Time.(Hewlett-Packard)
March 1, 2004... Displaying the kind of agility that's supposed to mark its Adaptive Enterprise scheme, HP picked its way through a minefield carrying an elephant the other day trying to convince folks that the Itanium chip that was supposed to displace x86 and...

Sun Moves To Manage Microsoft.(Sun)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... The first use Sun is making of its acquisition of Waveset Technologies is to use its agent-less Lighthouse widgetry for an enterprise-wide Identity Manager for Microsoft environments that's supposed to provision Microsoft products, mind...

IBM Japan To Resell ClearCube.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... ClearCube Technology, the Texans with the so-called PC Blade, has persuaded IBM Japan to resell and support its widgetry. It's the second IBM entity to pick up ClearCube. IBM Global Service went for it about 18 months ago. Its stuff is on...

Microsoft Claims To Be Pure as the Driven Snow in RealNetworks Case.
March 1, 2004... Microsoft claims the billion-dollar private antitrust suit that RealNetworks, filed against it right before Christmas casting Real as the next Netscape and charging Microsoft with monopoly maintenance doesn't have a leg to stand on because...

Start-up Claims To Automate Data Interoperability Across Web Services.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... A year-old Massachusetts start-up called Pantero Corporation, singled out to show at Demo 2004 last week, claims its Shared Data Services (SDS) Suite can automate data interoperability across web services, reducing integration costs by 50%. ...

Computers & Slave Labor.(Catholic Agency for Overseas Development)
March 1, 2004... Dell has reportedly cleaned up its act a bit after the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) singled out it, IBM and HP for the brutal way computer manufacturing is done in Mexico, China and Thailand. The London-based human...

IBM Pushes Sun To Open Source Java.(International Business Machines)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... IBM, which has a vested interest in Java - heck, it has more Java programmers than Sun does - has written Sun, which owns Java and has been pretty darned persnickety about its so-called "stewardship" of Java over the years, an open letter...

Sun Service Chief Bolts to Salesforce.com.(Sun)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Patricia Sueltz, the ex-IBMer who's been running Sun's $3.6 billion services unit since Sun gave Java and such to Jonathan Schwartz, has jumped to the chi-chi, IPO-bound CRM hoster Salesforce.com as executive VP and president of marketing,...

IBM Climbs the Server Heap.(International Business Machines)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Gartner's 2003 server numbers are out and IBM rushed to point out that it's number one in revenues, which were up 10% while HP's were flat and Sun was, well, down. IBM said only it and Dell were profitable and everybody else is struggling....

MyDoom Menace Gets Worse.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... The new MyDoom.F variant of the virus that's been bedeviling the SCO Group and Microsoft has a destructive payload that deletes document and picture files like digital entertainment and Office documents and is now trying to make distributed...

Microsoft Supposedly Targets ebXML for Destruction.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Based on unnamed software executives and technologists, the New York Times says Microsoft has been working behind-the-scenes to rot support for ebXML. The specification is an EDI-replacing e-business communications standard developed by...

Microsoft Makes Another Security Push.
March 1, 2004... Microsoft, security's whipping boy and rightly so, rolled out a new bunch of initiatives aimed at creating a more secure Internet environment at the RSA Conference this week. They include: * A Service Pack 2 including a Windows...

Microsoft Picks Biometrics Supplier.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Digital Persona, which has fingerprint-recognition software, has become Microsoft's "preferred supplier" of biometric authentication mojo to go in its future products.

HP Buys German Services Firm.(Triaton)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Hewlett-Packard, which has talked about making small acquisitions, is buying German IT services provider Triaton GmbH as part of a move to extend its services offering in Germany and strengthen its overall market presence in services. ...

Deadline in EC Antitrust Case Fast Approaching.(European Commission)
March 1, 2004... Speculation and reports from unnamed sources mount as the climax of the European Commission's five-year-old antitrust investigation of Microsoft approaches against a backdrop of increasingly urgent settlement talks. In a change that may or...

Microsoft Betas InfoPath Enhancements.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Microsoft is beta testing the enhancements that are going into its InfoPath 2003 XML document creation program. The upgrade is supposed to have increased support for digital signatures, enhanced document recovery, data submission and...

Oasis Issues PKI Call-To-Action.(Public Key Infrastructure)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Oasis wants to break down the barriers to widespread adoption of the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) authentication widgetry used to secure commercial transaction on the Internet and protect the privacy of e-mails and phone calls. So it's come...

Fujitsu Adds Mid-Range Blade Server.
March 1, 2004... Fujitsu has added a mid-range 7U blade server to its line. That gives it two blade servers so far. The new Primergy BX600 can house 10 compact server blades, each with two Xeons (2.8GHz-3.2GHz), 12GB of ECC DDR-SDRAM and two hot-plug...

HP Launches New Consera Software.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
March 1, 2004... Barely a few weeks after announcing the acquisition of Consera, Hewlett-Packard closed the deal and launched new Consera software under the OpenView Service Delivery Designer moniker. HP said the new application would let companies build...

Microsoft Moots Caller ID To Stem Junk E-Mail.
March 1, 2004... Microsoft is pushing the idea of a caller ID system to stem spam. The e-mail dyke has developed such a gaping hole that personal and business inboxes are filled mostly with spam these days. Besides the obvious nuisance, spam has also...

Dell Debuts New SMB Servers.
March 1, 2004... Dell has introduced two new uniprocessors aimed at small and mid- sized businesses, corporate workgroups and remote offices. The new servers are the PowerEdge 700 and 750. Both feature a Pentium 4 worth up to 3GHz or a 2.4GHz Celeron, a...

VMware Upgrades GSX.
March 1, 2004... VMware, the virtualization/server consolidation house that's soon to become an EMC satellite, has revved its GSX Server. The new cut can handle 3.6GB of memory per virtual machine to support larger server applications, teamed network...

Strong PC Growth Seen in 2004.
March 1, 2004... PC shipments will rise 13.9% to 187 million units in 2004, according to Gartner. The researcher predicts that the worldwide PC market will experience double-digit growth in all four quarters this year. For the current quarter, Gartner...

Tarantella Redux.
March 1, 2004... Tarantella, the remains of the old Santa Cruz Operation that sold Unix to the infamous SCO Group and that's been looking like it's on its last legs, is getting a makeover under its new CEO Frank Wilde. He's hired a bunch of new senior...

Liberty Addresses ID Theft.
March 1, 2004... Because of the RSA Security Conference in California this week, the Liberty Alliance is circulating a white paper on how federated identity in general and Liberty's own standard in particular can reduce identity theft. It offers deployment...

HP To Roll Out New Security Services.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
March 1, 2004... Hewlett-Packard is introducing two new services aimed at protecting enterprise networks from viruses and worms. The first, called Virus Throttler, seeks to limit the spread of viruses and worms by reducing the number of connections that...

Intel Launches Tool Suite.(Intel Corp.)
March 1, 2004... Intel has released a new tool suite for PDAs and mobile phones based on its Personal Internet Client Architecture processors. The C++ Software Development Tool Suite, which consists of a compiler and debugging tools, supports application...

Microsoft Offers ASP Kit.
March 1, 2004... Microsoft has released a free ASP.NET Resource Kit and migration guides for developers building web applications. The kit includes tools, tutorials and sample applications to enable developers to learn ASP.NET.

ICS Offers QicTable.(Integrated Computer Solutions Inc.)
March 1, 2004... Integrated Computer Solutions Inc (ICS), the UI development tools house in Cambridge, Mass, has put out a thing called QicsTable, a sophisticated grid/table object that Qt developers can use to build apps with a more powerful spreadsheet-like...

LSI Logic Storage Files for IPO.(LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc.)
March 1, 2004... LSI Logic Storage, which is spinning off from LSI Logic, filed with the SEC the other day to IPO and raise up to $250 million. Naturally it said nothing about the price of the shares or how many would be offered. LSI Logic Storage, a...

Dot Hill Acquires Chaparral.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Storage vendor Dot Hill Systems has acquired privately held Chaparral Network Storage to broaden its product line and diversify its customer base. The aggregate acquisition price was $62 million in cash and the assumption of $10.4 million...

Hitachi Debuts 300GB Drive.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has released what it's touting as the world's first 300GB enterprise hard drive. The new Ultrastar 10K300 widget is a 10,000RPM 3.5-inch drive that Hitachi says is well suited to online transaction...

Dell To Launch New SAN Bundle.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Dell plans to introduce a new low-cost SAN bundle as part of its drive to reduce the cost of entry-level SAN configurations. The company declined to disclose details other than to say that the platform would debut later this year. "We...

Legato Upgrades DiskXtender.(Legato Systems Inc.)
March 1, 2004... EMC's new Legato unit has revved its DiskXtender 2000 software. Release 5.5 of the Windows-based hierarchical storage management application is supposed to provide improved integration and support for Tivoli's TSM and StorageTek ACSLS 7.0....

Snap Boosts Capacity of NAS Units.(Snap Appliances Inc.)(Network attached storage)
March 1, 2004... Snap Appliance has enhanced the storage capacity of its NAS products. Snap Server 1100 adds a 250GB configuration to its existing 80GB and 160GB versions while the 2200 now includes a 500GB version besides the current 320GB model. The...

AppIQ Inks Sun Deal.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)
March 1, 2004... Sun has licensed AppIQ's StorageAuthority Suite application to boost its heterogeneous storage management software capabilities. Sun plans to include the AppIQ technology in its StorEdge Enterprise Storage Manager offering. Sun expects...

Cisco Completes Andiamo Deal.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Cisco has completed its acquisition of storage switching concern Andiamo Systems for $750 million in stock. Although Cisco announced a definitive agreement to acquire Andiamo on on August 20, 2002 - yup, 2002 - the purchase price was not...

Real Software Gives Linux Desktop Apps a Nudge.(Real Software Inc.)
March 1, 2004... IDE maker Real Software Inc, which started out in the Mac arena, has upgraded its flagship RealBasic kit to create native Linux apps, either newly made or recompiled from existing Windows and Mac programs. The move to RealBasic 5.5 puts the...

Cray Buys Its Idea of a Low-End Linux-on-Opteron House.(Cray)
March 1, 2004... Cray is buying a two-year-old development-stage HPC start-up called OctigaBay Systems Corporation that says that two racks worth of its widgetry, which is supposed to go to beta this June, will provide enough bandwidth for all of the...

Microsoft's IIS Used To Provision Linux.(Open Systems Management Ltd.)
March 1, 2004... With Microsoft's blessings, a software outfit in the UK called Open Systems Management Ltd (OSM) has extended Microsoft's identity management scheme, Identity Integration Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (MIIS), to Linux and Unix as well as...

Limping Wind River Falls into Linux' Arms.
March 1, 2004... Red Hat's gonna dabble in the embedded market again, this time in company with Wind River Systems, the premier proprietary embedded OS supplier, which is obviously hopping on the Linux express to ensure its future. Wind River previously...

BakBone Joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Lab)
March 1, 2004... Membership in the Open Source Development Lab, which wants to be the heartbeat of the Linux movement, is getting more diverse. Its latest recruit is BakBone Software, which means to participate in the consortium's Data Center Working Group and...

HP Services To Peddle PolyServe Clustering Software.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... HP Services is going to resell PolyServe's Matrix Server shared data clustering software to commercial accounts. Customers can call either company for support. The two will cooperate on training sales and reseller channels. The PolyServe...

Lindows Hitches Ride on Motherboards.(Lindows.com Inc.)(Albatron Technology Company Ltd.)
March 1, 2004... Lindows.com says it's got a publicly traded Taiwanese board maker called Albatron bundling LindowsOS 4.5 on some of its motherboards, claiming the scheme will save OEMs time and millions of dollars and "circumvents Microsoft's iron lock in OEMs...

SCO Using Web Site for Linux Tax.(The SCO Group Inc.)(Linux)
March 1, 2004... The SCO Group has taken to peddling its Linux license off its web site, which means it's finally gotten its EULA written down. The company is offering paid-up licenses ranging from $699 to $4,999 depending on the number of CPUs and has...

Dell Sets Up Cluster Center with Scali.(Dell Inc.)
March 1, 2004... Dell and Scali have opened an EMEA HPC validation center in Scali's facilities in Oslo, Norway called the Cluster Expert Center (CEC) so customers can do pre-sales design, validation and testing in a controlled environment. Dell has an...

Novell Earns a Bit.
March 1, 2004... Earning $10 million, or three cents a share, on revenues of $267 million in the January quarter, Novell claims its Linux strategy is already having a positive impact on its business. Revenues rose 3% year-over-year but declined 7%...

Linux Jinxed It.(Microsoft Corp.)(MainSoft Corp.)
March 1, 2004... Microsoft and Mainsoft are saying diddly about the great source code fiasco of the week before last when some of Microsoft's source was plucked from a Mainsoft computer and put out into the wild to be pawed over by gawkers. Reports, however,...

Microsoft's in the Market for a New Search Guru.
March 1, 2004... The former CTO of Overture Service Paul Ryan, the guy Microsoft hired a few months ago after Yahoo took over Overture to build its paid-search technology to take up against Google and Yahoo, bolted a couple of weeks ago, according to CNET....

Itanium's Left with More Than Just Crumbs.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Despite Opteron and Yamhill, the 64-bit extensions twins, chip groupie Nathan Brookwood says Intel can still make money on Itanium, even though it's not gonna be a mainstream processor and even though it cost a fortune to bring it to market....

Color Roman Desktops Linux.
March 1, 2004... The city of Rome is going to start replacing Windows with desktop Linux in May, according to La Repubblica.

What To Do with All That Money.(Microsoft Corp.)
March 1, 2004... Microsoft CFO John Connors told a Goldman Sachs conference the other day that the company would have something to say about what it's going to do with its mountain of cash by its annual analysts meeting in July. The treasure now stands at nigh...

PeopleSoft Changes its Compensation Plan.
March 1, 2004... Calpers, the powerful California Public Employees' Retirement System, has pretty much had its way with PeopleSoft. It wanted the company to make 75% of its equity compensation performance-based but settled for 50%. The cash compensation of...

IRS Audits Intel.(Internal Revenue Service)
March 1, 2004... The Internal Revenue Service is auditing Intel's 2001 and 2002 tax returns. The IRS previously examined the company's 1999 and 2000 returns and proposed adjustments to its tax benefit for export sales. Intel said it doesn't expect the current...

American Ingenuity and Know-How Running Out of Steam.
March 1, 2004... The confirmed anti-patent set will be gratified to learn that international patent filings by Americans were down 12% last year from what they had been the year before, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and only...

Hyperion Goes Red Hat.(Hyperion Software Corp.)
March 1, 2004... Hyperion claims to have the first end-to-end business intelligence solution for Red Hat.

Abilene's Speed Quadruples.
March 1, 2004... The speed of Abilene, the Internet2 network, has been quadrupled to 10 billion bits a second, an upgrade that's been in progress since 2001. Some 206 institutions use the fiberoptic-based network through 11 connection points in the US. The...

AT&T Wants $90m from Microsoft for Patent Infringement.
March 1, 2004... Microsoft has been attracting patent infringement suits the way a pretty girl attracts compliments. One filed by AT&T has gone to trial in New York. AT&T says Microsoft owes it $90 million in royalties for using a technology that's now part of...

Ex-Cobalt CEO Surfaces.(Azul Systems)
March 1, 2004... Stephen DeWitt, the guy who conned Sun into buying Cobalt Networks for $2 billion in stock, has been tracked down to a new stealth-mode start-up in Mountain View called Azul Systems. The Register claims the super-secret operation, which only...

XP Reloaded.(Microsoft Corp.)
March 1, 2004... Reportedly Microsoft may put out an edition of XP before the fabled Longhorn that's been dubbed XP Reloaded. It's because Longhorn may only get here in 2006, not 2005 and Microsoft doesn't want to give Linux any quarter. The interim edition is...

SGI says it's got the next big thing in hand.(Silicon Graphics Inc.)
March 8, 2004... SGI says it's inventing the Next Big Thing. SGI has invented the Next Big Thing before like its SMP and NUMA work. Anyway, it's not enough that the next-generation supercomputer be bigger and faster, according to Greg Estes, the head of...

Dell to step down as CEO.(Michael Dell of Dell Inc.)(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... Michael Dell, like Michael Eisner, is going to need new business cards. Come the Dell stockholders' meeting on July 16, he's going to turn his CEO title over to Dell president and COO Kevin Rollins. Rollins will thereafter be president and CEO...

CA says it didn't pay SCO no stinking Linux tax.(Linux Watch)
March 8, 2004... The Linux faithful have been hammering Computer Associates as a heretic since the British publication Computer Weekly quoting the SCO Group's CFO Bob Bench identified CA Thursday as one of SCO's rare Linux licensees. CA senior VP of...

Intel fails NDA paternity test.(Itanium microprocessor)
March 8, 2004... All these years it's been pretty much taken as gospel that Intel begot the Itanium and that HP, Itanium's so-called "co-developer," was an outlander that elbowed its way into Intel's happy family picture afterwards. Not true, says industry...

Intel launches the last of the Gallatins.(Xeon microprocessors)
March 8, 2004... Intel set off a few firecrackers to announce the arrival of the next bunch of Xeon MPs aka Gallatin upgrades, staging the release on Wall Street at Thomson Financial, the First Call people and converts from IBM who are in the throes of one of...

IBM to spend a billion dollars on ISVs to take on Microsoft.(independent software vendor)(International Business Machines Corp.)
March 8, 2004... IBM said it will pump a billion dollars into its business partner program this year to get ISVs to commit to its middleware and hardware. The billion-dollar pledge highlights a realigned partner initiative that's supposed to bolster IBM's...

Microsoft cuts Windows price in Malaysia.(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... Microsoft is going to provide cut-rate software to a government-backed push in Malaysia to increase computer penetration from 15% to, oh, 35% in the next two years. A Malay version of XP Home Edition and Works Suite 2004 is going to be...

M'soft makes inroads into HD-DD widgetry.(Microsoft VC-9 video codec used for high definition digital video discs)(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... The DVD Forum's steering committee, which includes Disney, Sony, Panasonic and Warner, has provisionally decided to make Microsoft's VC-9, H.264 and MPEG-2 technologies mandatory in HD-DVD blue-laser playback devices, a big push for Microsoft's...

Oracle's focus on PeopleSoft Wanders.
March 8, 2004... With the Justice Department moving to block Oracle's nine-month-old hostile bid for PeopleSoft, there's now speculation that Oracle, which has apparently been seriously bitten by the acquisition bug, may take a run at BEA. Oracle CEO Larry...

Intel reins in forecast.
March 8, 2004... Intel pulled in its revenue estimates for this quarter saying demand for its chips was at the low end of normal seasonal patterns. The microprocessor giant narrowed its forecast from $7.9 billion-$8.5 billion to $8 billion-$8.2 billion,...

HP makes second services buy.(Hewlett-Packard Co. acquires FH Computer Services Ltd.)(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... HP has acquired UK-based hardware and software auditor FH Computer Services Ltd, a long-time partner and big Microsoft reseller that has licensing and inventory management software, on undisclosed terms to add to its services necklace. Last...

Siebel SMB CRM bows.(Siebel CRM Professional Edition from Siebel Systems Inc.)(customer relationship management software)(small and medium business)(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... Siebel CRM Professional Edition, the next evolution of the Siebel MidMarket Edition, has gotten off the ground and is obviously targeted at the SME market particularly financial services, communications and life sciences. It's supposed to...

Umm, about that $100m Microsoft funneled to SCO.(The SCO Group Inc.)
March 8, 2004... A juicy piece of compromising e-mail written by a SCO consultant to SCOsource VP Chris Sontag and SCO CFO Bob Bench last October suggesting that Microsoft had quietly funneled $86 million to SCO and that it was good for at least $106 million...

SCO sues DaimlerChrysler & AutoZone.(Linux Watch)
March 8, 2004... The story that broke Wednesday. After weeks of threats and repeated delays, the SCO Group has finally sued two Fortune 500 end-user companies, Daimler-Chrysler and AutoZone. SCO is suing the carmaker, which is already one of its Unix...

IBM CEO ordered to turn over Linux secrets to SCO.(International Business Machines Corp.'s Irving Wladawsky-Berger was accused for disclosure of information to The SCO Group Inc.)
March 8, 2004... The story that broke late Wednesday. The magistrate judge doing the legal housekeeping in the run-up to the $5 billion SCO v. IBM trial next year gave the SCO Group what it wanted Wednesday and ordered IBM to cough up the discovery that SCO...

Court tells SCO its amended IBM suit is on.(Linux Watch)
March 8, 2004... The SCO Group's recently amended suit against IBM, where it dropped its original trade secret misappropriations charge for copyright infringement and boosted its damage claims from $3 billion to $5 billion, is going to play as far as the court...

Red Hat brings Wall Street IT director on board.(Orcale Corp. hires Joanne Rohde)(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... In a move reminiscent of Oracle hiring a top Morgan Stanley researcher who quickly became its co-president, Red Hat has hired UBS Investment Bank's managing director of IT and chief procurement officer Joanne Rohde as executive VP of worldwide...

Texas Hoster pays SCO Linux tax.(Linux Watch)
March 8, 2004... On Monday Houston-based EV1Servers.net, a four-year-old dedicated server hosting operation that says it manages 20,000--going on 30,000--web servers, became the first company that the SCO Group has actually officially named as buying a Linux...

Linux Zealots threaten to do mi2g damage.(Linux Watch)
March 8, 2004... London-based mi2g Intelligence says it analyzed 17,450 successful overt digital attacks in February and the most attacked server-side operating system was Linux (11,780) at 67%, followed by Windows (3,843) at 22%. Trailing significantly behind...

PeopleSoft declares for Red Hat.(EnterpriseOne 8.10 )(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... PeopleSoft, who's buddies with IBM on this, is going to put its EnterpriseOne 8.10 software on Red Hat because of customer demand, according to the head of its tools and technology unit Jesper Andersen. The kit, which should be ported sometime...

Oracle claims record for 10g-on-Linux.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
March 8, 2004... Oracle is claiming a record 3TB warehousing benchmark for its 10g database on Linux. It says running on an eight-node HP ProLiant DL740 cluster, each with four 3GHz Xeons on Red Hat Enterprise 3 and Oracle RAC, it hit 22,387.9 QphH@-3000GB at a...