Client Server News articles from March 2007

Client Server News archives from March 2007

VMware goes on attack against Microsoft.
March 5, 2007... Microsoft's virtualization restrictions have ticked off VMware, which committed its passel of complaints, complete with screen shots, to what it calls a white paper. Others might call it the prelude to a lawsuit. It claims that Microsoft...

Corel takes on Google to compete with Microsoft.
March 5, 2007... Taking a page from Google's anti-Microsoft book, Corel is publicly beta testing a free word processor called Word-Perfect Lightning. At its core it's a cut-down version of Word-Perfect--sorta like what Works once was to Word--that should...

Dell tanks, profits down 33%, sales off 5%.(Financial report)
March 5, 2007... Dell turned chicken and canceled its fiscal Q4 conference call with Wall Street, leaving the punters with only its woebegone press release. So much for steely Texans. Profits plunged 33% to $673 million, or 30 cents a share, down from...

Samba wins draconian pricing round against Microsoft in EU.
March 5, 2007... The European Commission sent Microsoft an apparently surprise Statement of Objections (SO) Thursday morning accusing the company of setting unreasonable royalties for the server protocols that the EC ordered it to make available to its rivals...

Microsoft sued for infringing Office Live trademark.
March 5, 2007... Los Angeles-based Office Live LLC, a professional services outfit that maintains free consumer-oriented online Q & A forums such as realtorsofficelive.com and lawofficelive.com as a lure, has sued Microsoft and 10 Microsoft John Does for...

Symantec loses Veritas chief.
March 5, 2007... Jeremy Burton, the Brit who's been running the ill-fitting Veritas wing of Symantec otherwise known as its security and data management group, has turned in his badge to go to Serena Software as president and CEO. Serena does something...

Windows Reorg.(Microsoft Windows Business Group reorganization)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... Now that Jim Allchin has retired and Windows isn't being run Roman-style by twin consuls any more, the sole remaining prince, Kevin Johnson, has made a few changes. There's a new Windows Business Group marketing organization with ex-North...

PolyServe goes to HP.
March 5, 2007... HP is buying PolyServe, the Oregon-based virtualization storage software folks, on undisclosed terms. As an indication PolyServe has raised $73 million from the VCs during its eight-year lifetime as an independent concern. HP said the...

AMD's first chipset debuts.
March 5, 2007... AMD has its first chipset complements of its 2006 $5.34 billion acquisition of ATI. It's called the AMD 690 series, uses ATI's Radeon X1250 GPU and ATI's new, reportedly true-to-life Avivo graphics technology that can handle high-def. It's...

Solaris vultures cruise skies over impending Linux divide.(Linux Watch)
March 5, 2007... As the Linux community titters towards what looks like a GPL-induced schism between those like Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds who hew to the old, somewhat more permissive GPL 2 and those who rush pell-mell to embrace the controversial new,...

Open source leader abandons red hat fedora.(Linux Watch)
March 5, 2007... Eric Raymond, whose "Cathedral and the Bazaar" became the charter of the open source movement, stomped out of the Fedora freeware coven the other day shouting imprecations at Red Hat over his shoulder after a particular trying session with the...

Dell unmoved by Linux plea.(Linux Watch)
March 5, 2007... Since setting up its online IdeaStorm customer suggestion box on February 16, Dell has been awash in requests for factory-installed Linux machines with open source apps like OpenOffice and Firefox. In response Dell posted back last Friday...

Terascala gets funding.(Linux Watch)
March 5, 2007... Terascala, a Massachusetts start-up still in beta with some scalable Opteronbased storage blades aimed at Linux clusters, has raised a $3 million first round from Ascent Venture Partners. The money is earmarked for sales, marketing and...

Despite Microsoft Novell loses money.(Linux Watch)
March 5, 2007... Novell lost $20 million, or six cents a share, on revenues of $230 million, down roughly 5% year-over-year in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31. Wall Street figured it would do $232 million and return a penny. The numbers are...

Losses moderate at SCO; revenues continue to slide.(Linux Watch)
March 5, 2007... SCO revenues continued to slide in its first quarter ended January 31 down another $1.3 million year-over-year to $6.015 million. Losses, however, weren't as bad as they were a year ago when they hit $4.58 million, or 23 cents a share. ...

HP scores upset in blade market; volume servers no longer a growth engine.
March 5, 2007... In Q4 for the first time in living memory HP took market share away from IBM in blades, a sacred Blue preserve. According IDC's numbers put out Monday, HP pushed IBM off the blade pedestal and into the number two slot at the end of last...

Microsoft buys health search start-up.
March 5, 2007... Microsoft is buying privately owned health search firm Medstory Inc whose technology, using at least some of Microsoft's own, is supposed to be intuitive and help people refine and better target their searches for medical information. The...

Oracle buys Hyperion to surround SAP.
March 5, 2007... Oracle is buying Hyperion Solutions Corporation as part of its "surround SAP strategy," it said first thing Thursday morning, and will use Hyperion's enterprise performance management software to flesh out its business intelligence portfolio....

HP seeks to length its lead in blade server.
March 5, 2007... HP has got IBM on the run in blades, having displaced it as blade leader last quarter on the strength of its c-Class machines and now it's got a follow-up punch--blade network virtualization technologies. It believes it's redefining blade...

IBM smells HPC gold.
March 5, 2007... IBM wants a bigger piece of the HPC market as HPC pushes into business. It's got snap-together pre-architected clusters, based on both Linux and the Windows Compute Cluster Server, for the life sciences, CAE and the financial sector. It's also...

Dispatch from the price wars.
March 5, 2007... There's speculation that Intel might cut prices again on single-core Pentiums and low-end dual-cores before April 22 when it was supposed to. Lehman Brothers thinks that, if true, it's a reaction to AMD's broad-based mid-February cuts and...

SCO loses outside director.
March 5, 2007... SCO's many critics are going to be able to taunt it with the fact that one of SCO's long-standing outside board member, Ed Iacobucci, the ex-IBM guy who started Citrix, will be stepping down in April reportedly because of the "current and...

Intel flexes its manufacturing muscle.
March 5, 2007... Intel is gonna put $1 billion-$1.5 billion into its 90nm chip plant in Rio Rancho, New Mexico to gussy it up so it can make next-generation 45nm processors. That'll give Intel four 45nm plants to scare AMD with. Intel's first commercial 45nm...

MontaVista claims 40m devices.
March 5, 2007... MontaVista claims its software is in 40 million end-user devices.

AOL replaces departing CFO.
March 5, 2007... AOL has named Nisha Kumar CFO to replace Steve Swad who's going into private equity. Kumar has been with Time Warner operations and M & A, Priceline and Morgan Stanley.

Will wonders never cease.
March 5, 2007... Firefox 3.0, due in Q3, is supposed to be able to support web applications off-line.

Real, Symantec hacked by insider trader: SEC.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... The SEC has sued Blue Bottle Ltd and its sole proprietor Matthew Charles Stokes, 30, in New York for insider trading in the stock of a dozen US companies including RealNetworks and Symantec. Seems Blue Bottle hacked into its targets' computers...

LBO rumors on AMD.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... There were leveraged buyout rumors abroad on Wall Street Monday about AMD. It's supposed to be having talks with private equity firms because it's in a pickle between the money it's spending and Intel.

HP invests in start-up.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... HP has tucked some money in a Massachusetts outfit called Chiliad whose web site claims it's got cheap P2P "next-generation software for corporate information management with functionality and accuracy beyond existing search engines, knowledge...

Apple TV blows delivery date.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... Apple blew the February ship date it hung on its newfangled $300 Apple TV widgetry for streaming computer-derived video to a conventional TV set. It's now saying mid-March. It offered no explanation for the delay.

PC gods demand more human sacrifices.(Lenovo Group Ltd. plans to 1000 job cuts)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... Lenovo is supposed to cut 1,000 jobs according to unconfirmed reports, sacrifices to the competition in PCs. Most of the cuts are supposed to come out of the US, where the Chinese firm has about 1,450 workers, but China will be impacted too. It...

Et Tu, California.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... Like Texas and Minnesota, a bill has been introduced in California that, if passed, would send the state down the same OpenDocument path as Massachusetts. The bill would exclude using Word, Excel or PowerPoint. This shoe was bound to drop...

British PM asked to pressure Microsoft to cut prices.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... There's a petition on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's web site asking him to pressure Microsoft to lower the price of Vista. The petition, part of a beta e-government scheme that started in mid-November letting the English e-petition...

Reiser still in jail.(Linux file system writer Hans Reiser case for his wife's murder)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... The piecemeal hearing that's been going on since mid-December to decide whether there's enough evidence to bind Linux file system writer Hans Reiser over for trial on charges that he murdered his wife continues to drag on. It's now supposed to...

Backdating watch.(government agencies case against McAfee's former general counsel Kent Roberts)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... The government has moved against McAfee's former general counsel Kent Roberts, who used to sit on the company's ethics committee, charging him with seven counts of both civil and criminal fraud relating to backdating his options when they were...

Yoo-hoo, PJ, come out, come out wherever you are.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 5, 2007... The inimitable screed writer, Pamela Jones, still hasn't returned to her post at Groklaw, and this week, for the first time anybody can remember, the Groklaw site was down. On Monday it reported trouble with its database server and...

W3C does about-face on HTML.(World Wide Web Consortium)(HyperText Markup Language)
March 12, 2007... The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C), admitting that, well, hmm, it was wrong in trying to XML-ize poor HTML years ago, is going to reverse course and stop trying to force a square peg into a round hole. It's finally figured out that the...

IBM taunts HP over storage losses.
March 12, 2007... IBM claims that HP CEO Mark Hurd's cost cutting has damaged HP's storage operation and explains why IBM passed HP in the external disk market last year while HP's market share drop-ped. IBM says HP inherited most of the business from Compaq...

Ex-Gateway boys to get to know what Deep S* & t really is.(John Todd and Robert Manza )(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Gateway's former CFO John Todd and its ex-controller Robert Manza were both found guilty of manipulating earnings to meet Wall Street's expectations by a federal jury Wednesday. The fraud charges, including lying to auditors, date to 2000....

Intel sloppy with discovery-bound e-mail.
March 12, 2007... From what it told a Delaware federal court Monday, it appears that Intel dumped e-mails that AMD wants as discovery in its antitrust suit against Intel. Seems Intel's system automatically deletes e-mail every 35 days and it didn't change...

Hey, look, somebody's licensed Microsoft's EC-mandated protocols.
March 12, 2007... Remember last week when an even-more-bent-out-of-shape-than-usual European Commission sent Microsoft an apparently surprise Statement of Objections on account of the royalties Microsoft was demanding for those server protocols it's supposed to...

AMD's Q1 sours.
March 12, 2007... Before turning up at a Morgan Stanley confab Monday morning AMD put out a statement confessing that it was unlikely to meet its first-quarter revenue guidance of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion. Considering the way things have been going...

McAfee goes to EMC for new CEO.
March 12, 2007... McAfee, which is up to its eyeballs in self-inflicted backdating woes, still has to restate something in the neighborhood of $100 million-$ 150 million and has the Microsoft menace to contend with, has gotten EMC exec David DeWalt, who was CEO...

Microsoft calls Google 'cavalier' with copyrights.
March 12, 2007... Microsoft associate general counsel Tom Rubin, the head of the company's IP legal team, attacked Google's 'novel' interpretation of the so-called fair use doctrine before a meeting of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Tuesday...

ACE 2 hits public beta.
March 12, 2007... VMware's second-generation ACE 2 Enterprise Edition deployment software moved to public beta Monday ahead of an anticipated release sometime next quarter. The widgetry creates a standard PC environment, consisting of operating system,...

After record judgment, Alcatel loses two in a row.
March 12, 2007... Microsoft, which lost a MP3 patent infringement case to Alcatel-Lucent a few days ago and was ordered to pay a record $1.5 billion in back royalties, has won the second of a series of claims brought by Lucent before it was bought by the French....

Backdating watch.(Research in Motion Ltd.'s Jim Balsillie will be co-CEO and Dennis Kavelman will be COO)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Research in Motion lost its chairman Jim Balsillie Monday when it said it would have to restate $250 million in earnings for the period running from 2004 to the first quarter of 2007 because of backdating, something like 10 times more than it...

Free software out to corral the hardware companies.(Linux Watch)
March 12, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is trying to nudge hardware makers into the fold urging them to support free software drivers, end the "Microsoft Tax," remove proprietary BIOS locks, support a free BIOS and reject DRM. According to a...

Ingres & Wipro cut deal.(Linux Watch)
March 12, 2007... Ingres, which started moving into India late last year, has tied up with Wipro, the Indian outsourcer and integrator, in a strategic alliance that's supposed to see Wipro develop open source solutions like business intelligence, content...

NexXen's got Linux socket accelerator.(Linux Watch)
March 12, 2007... California 10GbE start-up NetXen Inc says it's got the first Linux socket accelerator that requires no modifications to the operating system's kernel, host TCP stack or applications and can offload both user- and kernel-mode applications. ...

SugarCRM sets up in Europe.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... SugarCRM has opened an office in Dublin to service the continent, naming company co-founder Clint Oram to run the operation. It says a fourth of its commercial customers and 30% of its open source downloads are in Europe. Sugar intends to hire...

Mellanox reports record quarter.(Linux Watch)(Financial report)
March 12, 2007... A newly public Infiniband house Mellanox Technologies earned $3.8 million, or four cents a share, up 31%, on record revenues of $15.8 million, up 30% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. For the year it did $7.2 million, up from $3.1 million,...

Wind River earnings crash & burn.(Wind River Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Wind River was only able to deliver earnings of $546,000, or a penny a share, in Q4, down from $16.1 million, or 18 cents a share, the year before although revenues were up 8% to $76.1 million and Wall Street was expecting a dime. The...

OpenLogic adds Solaris to its portfolio.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Going beyond Linux and Windows, OpenLogic has added some 60 Solaris 10 open source products to its certified open source library. Interesting timing considering Sun has designs on the Linux space that are only encouraged by what may become...

Red Hat goes Mexican.(Linux Watch)
March 12, 2007... Red Hat is setting up direct operations in Mexico City. It says it's hiring locals. It has already penetrated a couple of big Mexican banks and telecom companies and is expecting HP, IBM, Dell, Intel, SAP, AMD, even Oracle to help it push...

Fate of SCO suit in judge's hands.(Linux Watch)
March 12, 2007... After days in court listening to IBM's final pleas for an assortment of summary judgments that could put an end to SCO's case of Unix abuse against it, the decision as to whether SCO's suit ever gets heard by a jury is pretty much in the hands...

By 2010, stored data will reach the moon.(IDC estimation)(The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2010)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... So EMC got IDC to do some projections and IDC came up with "The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2010," deciding that what came to 161 billion gigabytes worth of stored data at the end of last...

Cray to use baby Opterons.
March 12, 2007... Cray says it's gonna put AMD's new low-power low-end Opteron models 1220 (2.8GHz, 103W) and 1218 HE (2.6GHz, 68W) in future versions of its XT4 supercomputers to reduce TCO. It'll upgrade to AMD's Barcelona quad when it gets here.

Leopard may break cane early.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Rumor has it that Leopard, Apple's next version of the Mac OS, could be out by the end of the month, a month or two ahead of schedule. It should sell a few Apples. People will watch to see if it eats into Microsoft sales. It's the first new rev...

Sherlund leaves Goldman.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Rick Sherlund, the Goldman Sachs guy who's been the Wall Street axe on Microsoft seemingly forever, has left, as he said he would, to go to the sell-side, joining Galleon Group, the $6.5 billion hedge fund. He's gonna run a high-tech portfolio....

Google denies M & A designs.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Reluctant acquisition targets can sleep more peacefully in their beds. It seems it's unlikely they'll be Googlized. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Monday that it's unlikely the company will use the billions...

Piece of SAP may change hands.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... There's been chatter in the German business press about a private equity firm maybe being interested in taking a 10% piece of SAP from one of its founders.

Is Oracle all bluster?(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... There hasn't been a peep out of Oracle about its "Death to Red Hat" move into Linux since it started last October. No major wins announced. Major software packages like IBM and SAP are uncertified on the Red Hat look-a-like Oracle Linux....

Even Intel postpones Vista deployment.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... It looks like any real tickling done by Vista will have to wait until the second half. Wise to the ways of Microsoft by now, even Intel is postponing moving to Vista until after the first Service Pack and then it only intends to do "modest...

Symantec to spend $1b-a-year on acquisitions.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... The head of Symantec's consumer arm Enrique Salem said to expect the company to make a roughly billion-dollar acquisition every 12 to 18 months, particularly in mobile security. In January Symantec agreed to buy Altiris for $830 million.

I'm ok, you ok?(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... There's fretting that the upcoming Vista server, Long Horn, will impact Citrix' Presentation Server, its Windows applications delivery system, in the second half. Credit Suisse says that Citrix management suggests that "steps have been taken by...

Dell needs to ape HP: Wall Street.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Wall Street is starting to beat the drum for Dell to make layoffs, especially since its workforce at the end of Q4 was up 26% year-over-year to 82,200 people, double what it was two years ago. On Tuesday Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein...

Microsoft appears to be regrouping.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... The head of Microsoft's tail-dragging losing-share-to-Google Live Search operation, Christopher Payne, one of the guys who got Microsoft into search in the first place, is reported to be leaving to start his own company. Microsoft has cut its...

Alcatel-Lucent joins WS-I.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Having just nailed Microsoft for an unprecedented $1.5 billion for MP3 royalties--if the jury verdict stands--Alcatel-Lucent has now joined WS-I, the Web Service Interoperability organization that Microsoft and IBM set up to promote Web...

Adobe Creative Suite 3 scheduled.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Adobe says it will announce Creative Suite 3 on Tuesday March 27 in New York and explain what all is in it. It's supposed to be the largest release in the company's 25-year history. When exactly the thing ships is unclear.

Patents worth $1.3b last year.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 12, 2007... Patent verdicts totaled $1.3 billion last year, according to research done by the National Law Journal and its VerdictSearch affiliate. It seemed a lot until Alcatel got more than that in one fell swoop against Microsoft the week before last.

Google & the SEC don't see eye to eye.(Securities and Exchange Commission)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... The good people at Reuters slogged through Google's annual report--out last Thursday--and it appears Google and SEC don't see eye to eye on income taxes and have been writing letters to each other for at least the last year. Google's also...

Red Hat starts moving out RHEL 5.
March 19, 2007... Red Hat Wednesday pushed out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), the first major update of its operating system in a couple of years, a rev on which much hangs considering the threatening noises coming from the direction of Oracle, Sun,...

Microsoft buys Tellme's 'Dial Tone 2.0'.(Company overview)
March 19, 2007... Microsoft is buying privately held Tellme Networks Inc and its voice-enabled J2ME-based business search technology for what the press thinks may be upwards of $800 million, perhaps outbidding Google. Microsoft didn't say what it's paying...

Cisco buys WebEx.
March 19, 2007... The ever acquisitive and now, recently, ever diversifying Cisco is buying WebEx Communications Inc, the 12-year-old subscription web conferencing company, for roughly $3.2 billion in cash. It's paying $57 a share, a 23% premium. Less WebEx'...

Felony charges against Patti Dunn dropped.
March 19, 2007... In a deal struck by California Superior Court Judge Ray Cunningham, the four felony charges pending against former HP chairman Patti Dunn have been dismissed. Dunn, a cancer victim, was supposed to be the force behind HP's boardroom spying...

Google to shield user data.(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... Google, which knows all about everybody's searches and has been storing all that information on its servers much to the consternation of the privacy-sensitive, has decided to come up with a privacy policy and "depersonalize" the data every...

AMD says Otellini, Barrett, Maloney mail missing.
March 19, 2007... Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Intel's head of worldwide sales and marketing Sean Maloney, Intel chairman Craig Barrett and other "worldwide heads of Intel" are among those at the company whose e-mail wasn't saved for discovery by AMD in its...

Companies are storing lots of junk: Kazeon.(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... Well, according to Kazeon, people are bulking up on storage to store trash. Based its new Data Assessment Service--and after working with 37 businesses in five countries in eight vertical markets like finance, manufacturing,...

Hitachi to resell HP PCs.
March 19, 2007... An unprofitable Hitachi Ltd says it's gonna sell HP's business PCs under the Hitachi label in Japan starting in May, replacing its own Flora line of desktops and laptops. The agreement is still being worked out. Hitachi currently sells HP...

Citrix buys Scottish firm.
March 19, 2007... Citrix has bought Edinburgh-based thinGenius Ltd for its load-testing abilities for any application delivery infrastructure that uses Citrix' ICA protocol, especially Citrix Presentation Server and Desktop Server environments. It extends the...

Virtualization watch.
March 19, 2007... The researchers at TheInfoPro (TIP) figure only 10% of the server production environment in Fortune 1000s and mid-sizes firms was virtualized at the end of last year and that, based on answers to their questions, 25% of production applications...

OASIS learns to speak Chinese.(is opening office in China)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... OASIS, the standards consortium, is setting up an office in Beijing. The Changfeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance is hosting it. OASIS is also setting up a Chinese version of its web site. And it has set up an Unstructured...

Dell appears to inch closer to factory-installed Linux PCs.(Linux Watch)
March 19, 2007... What with its new IdeaStorm suggestion box crammed full of requests for factory-installed Linux, the Direct2Dell blog has started taking soundings to put a face on the demand. It says "we're crafting product offerings in response, but we'd...