Client Server News articles from May 2005

Client Server News archives from May 2005

Microsoft to support open source Windows software stack for Infiniband.
May 2, 2005... You feel that? That was the earth shaking. Microsoft is going to support an open source network driver and subnet manager, something it's never done before, at least not that anybody knows of. The widgetry is the stuff of a single software...

Macrovision raises contrarian voice in multi-core software pricing debate.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Macrovision Corporation, who's got a dog in this fight since its software counts licenses, has raised the first politically incorrect voice heard in the sub rosa debate over whether ISVs should charge the same for software that runs on...

Microsoft quarter a whoops.
May 2, 2005... Microsoft posted its fiscal third-quarter numbers Thursday and the heroes of the moment were SQL Server and Exchange Server, both of which showed double-digit revenue growth. Otherwise things weren't quite so rosy. The company earned $2.56...

Mendocino: the next best thing to an SAP-Microsoft merger.
May 2, 2005... Microsoft and SAP couldn't pull off an industry-morphing merger last year to deal with the Oracle-PeopleSoft combine but thanks to those talks they're planning a joint project code name Mendocino that will tie Office to SAP's business planning...

Microsoft starts long Longhorn drive to market.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Microsoft handed out preview versions of Longhorn this week to 2,800 hardware developers at WinHEC to kick off the development of device drivers, it said. During the long delay-ridden drive to get this far, Longhorn has lost its sexiest...

Siebel rescue plan vague.
May 2, 2005... When it posted its unhappy numbers on Wednesday Siebel said that it's going to cut people and costs to repair the serious Q1 shortfall that caused it to fire its CEO a couple of weeks ago. Of course, Wall Street had already dragged that...

Egenera takes on debt to grow.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Egenera would probably like to go public to pay for its continued growth. Goodness knows it's had its S-1 registration filed with the SEC since last summer. However, the stars over Wall Street haven't aligned for high tech lately so Egenera's...

Orion starts shipping its personal supercomputer.(Linux Watch)
May 2, 2005... Orion Multisystems Inc, the cluster-in-a-box start-up begun by a couple of Transmeta refugees, has started shipping its knee-knocking 96-node desk-side Cluster Workstation, the Linux-based widget it calls a personal supercomputer that fits...

Court hears motion to unseal SCO-IBM records.(Linux Watch)
May 2, 2005... On Tuesday afternoon an hour before the Utah court presiding over the great SCO v IBM case heard the G2-Forbes-CNET motion to unseal all the court records in the case, IBM delivered a letter to SCO's lawyers offering to unseal some stuff...

Samba leader moves to Novell.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Jeremy Allison, the Samba leader, has left HP to join Novell, a move he's been toying with since HP sent him to Novell's BrainShare user conference last year. Reluctant to go, Jeremy went anyway and says he was delighted to find a company...

Turbolinux nails big Chinese bank.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Turbolinux says it's got a deal in its pocket that will see the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China's biggest commercial banks holding a fifth of the total assets held in all banking institutions in China and a Fortune 500 company,...

SGI fields baby prism.(Linux Watch)
May 2, 2005... Saying it's answering mounting demand for more visualization capability in the hands of Linux users struggling with big data problems, Silicon Graphics has extended its family of rack-mount Prism boxes with a new deskside model that starts at...

Novell eyes China.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Novell has signed a strategic cooperation memorandum with China Standard Software Company Ltd (CS2C), a Linux firm, to promote local development and adoption of Linux. The pair is supposed to cooperate in providing technology, services and...

Forgent sues Microsoft.
May 2, 2005... Forgent Networks Inc finally got around to suing Microsoft for patent infringement. It happened less than a week after Microsoft went to court to try to get the notorious Forgent patent declared invalid and unenforceable, a move that's gotta be...

Casualty count from the browser war.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Firefox has doubled its market share, according to Janco's April Browser Market Share Study. It says that Firefox has grabbed 10.28% of the browser market in less than three months and based on conversations with a number of industry...

IBM goes to the mattresses.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Trying to put a mattress under its stock freefall, IBM Tuesday raised its quarterly dividend 11% and earmarked another $5 billion to buy back its stock. It had to do something to impress its annual stockholders meeting that it was doing...

Microsoft names new CFO.(Chief Financial Officer)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Microsoft has hired International Paper CFO Chris Liddell to replace John Connors, who left to become a venture capitalist. He suits up on May 9, after Microsoft posted its third fiscal quarter last night. Before International Paper,...

W3C works on rules.
May 2, 2005... W3C ran a Rule Languages Workshop in Washington, DC, this week to kick-start the development of the next layer in the Semantic Web development stack. It wants to identify the requirements needed for a common rules language, and hence a...

Quest buys Imceda.(Quest Software Inc.)(Imceda Software Inc)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Quest Software Inc is buying and Imceda Software Inc, a privately held company with database administration and development products for SQL Server databases, for roughly $61 million, 20% in shares, the rest in cash. The deal is supposed...

Portland Group previews x64 compilers & tools.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... The Portland Group, a wholly owned STMicroelectronics subsidiary, has got a technology preview of its PGI Workstation suite of Fortran, C and C++ compilers and development tools for Microsoft's new Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition and Windows XP...

Dell to factory install x64.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Dell says it'll factory install the newly available 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition on its dual-Xeon Precision 470 and 670 workstations now, the new Precision 380 in May, and the Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition on its PowerEdge...

MSN uses Altiris to deploy x64 Edition.(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... MSN is using Altiris to automate the rapid deployment and provisioning of hundreds of servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition. Altiris Deployment Solution now supports Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions and XP Professional...

Norway another dunkirk?(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Microsoft is at risk of being investigated by the Norwegian Competition Authority for monopolizing the country's schools, according to local press reports. A local company called Skolelinux (School Linux) that wants to crack the market has...

Sox tax.(BILLY GRAMS)(Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... AMR Research estimates that US companies spent more than $1 billion last year on technology to meet Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. Gartner, however, predicts that 80% of those solutions will be replaced this year as companies improve their...

Longhorn server guesstimate.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been making noises that sound like one might send out wranglers looking for the Longhorn server long about six months after the Longhorn client comes out. Figure mid-'07.

Scottish thrift.(ThinGenius)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... A Scots start-up by the name of ThinGenius has put out its first product, a Citrix load-testing and performance monitor that it's tagged TLoad. It claims the widgetry is cheaper and easier-to-use than products from Mercury Interactive, Segue...

Merrill puts sell hex on Brocade.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Merrill Lynch downgraded Brocade telling people to sell. It expects the company to miss earnings consensus estimates for the April quarter by 20% and post a revenue decline of 10%, depressing an already depressed stock price. The broker isn't...

What would happen if--shock! Horror!!--SCO wins?(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)
May 2, 2005... Garner is telling its clients--as it's told them before--to take steps just in case the unthinkable happens and SCO wins its case against IBM. Its advice is along the lines of "Never assume," the reporter's old adage. Gartner imagines...

Dell to play bank.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Dell is going start using its monster cash flow--worth $5.3 billion last year--to underwrite customer loans directly, according to the Wall Street Journal. Dell has been using the New Jersey-based CIT Group for financing since 1997. The paper...

Oracle's not finished.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... "There are more acquisitions to come.... Critical mass and scale is essential in this business."--Oracle co-president Chuck Phillips at Software 2005. He suggested any new prey, er, acquisitions would plug right into Oracle's stack.

New HR queen at Microsoft.(Appointments)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... Microsoft has named Lisa Brummel, the head of its Home & Retail Division for the last 10 years, corporate VP for human resources, replacing Ken DiPietro, who's had the job for the last two years.

Operation lead dog.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 2, 2005... BusinessWeek says that with demand flattening, margins tightening and Dell looming, HP is taking its gold mine printer division's headcount down 10% or more in an exercise called Operation Lead Dog. It's also going to start cutting products...

Who is Pamela Jones?(SCO v IBM suit)
May 9, 2005... A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit. The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews....

Microsoft IP for rent.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Microsoft, which caught a dose of IBM envy--IBM pulls in over a billion dollars a year in IP royalties--is getting more forward about licensing some of its technology to third parties and monetizing some technology it's developed that it's...

IBM to cut European jobs, revamp global structure.
May 9, 2005... IBM is going to cut 10,000-13,000 jobs, mostly in Europe where it's been weak and mostly out of its precious service organization, to propitiate the gods who ruined its first quarter. IBM has been hinting that it was going to restructure...

Microsoft loses Eolas-related appeal bid.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit refused to reconsider a decision that would give Eolas Technologies the right to claim damages on Microsoft's overseas sales if Microsoft loses its new court-ordered trial in the case. Backed...

Hopes of Siebel-Oracle tie-up crushed.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Oracle and Siebel have apparently had what sound like pretty unenthusiastic, going-nowhere-now takeover discussions recently, according to the Wall Street Journal, which got it from TheDeal.com, which apparently picked up on a lead from one of...

Novell's antitrust suit against Microsoft sent to Maryland.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Novell's antitrust suit against Microsoft claiming Microsoft scuttled WordPerfect, the onetime word processing leader, through its anticompetitive behavior--the suit the two companies didn't settle--has been sent from Novell-friendly Utah where...

Maybe Sun should be slower with the cold water.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Quoting an unidentified hedge fund manager supposedly "close to McNealy"--well, maybe he was before the story hit--BusinessWeek caused a bit of a brouhaha last Friday when it said Sun was considering using its $7.5 billion stash to go private...

HP backs next-gen drives.
May 9, 2005... HP is partnering with hard disk vendors Fujitsu, Hitachi and Seagate to accelerate the adoption of next-generation hard drive technology for servers and storage. The new small form factor (SFF) 2.5-inch 10K RPM hard drive, developed by the...

Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC unit closes early.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Lenovo closed on its historic and ambitious $1.75 billion acquisition of IBM's money-losing PC unit over the weekend and is now ostensibly the third-largest PC company in the world behind Dell and HP. The IBM unit is supposed to be run as...

Start-up seeks to solve the processing burden of XML.(extensible markup language)(new product)
May 9, 2005... On the expectation that XML data will constitute 25% of data center LAN traffic by next year, a Texas start-up called Conformative Systems is building a standards-based XML accelerator that it hopes to get to early access customers by early Q4....

Palamida ruffles Black Duck's feathers.(Palamida, Doug Levin, case )(new product)
May 9, 2005... Black Duck, which sorts out open source code from proprietary code, has got some competition and it doesn't much like it. In fact Black Duck's feathers are so ruffled it's starting to look like a chicken hawk. Black Duck CEO Doug Levin...

Novell bought Commerce One patents to protect open source.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Novell was behind the mystery bid that won that batch of supposedly key web services patents that got knocked down in that court-ordered Commerce One liquidation auction held in December, according to the New York Times. Novell confirmed the...

Samba scores another goal against Microsoft.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Remember when we said that the Samba team had objected to the European Commission that the IP that Microsoft is supposedly trying to protect by being difficult about complying with the EC's antitrust remedies is a lot of bunk and that it isn't...

IBM ousts Dell in priority account.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... IBM persuaded Priority Healthcare Corporation, described as a national specialty pharmacy and distributor, to dump its Dell infrastructure and go with four IBM xSeries 445 servers running Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, an announcement IBM...

Sun refugee becomes a Penguin.(Linux Watch)(Penguin Computing has hired Bill Cook as senior VP of sales and services.)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Penguin Computing has hired Sun refugee Bill Cook as senior VP of sales and services, a new position, to drive its aggressive HPC revenue goals. He used to be senior VP of US sales at Sun Microsystems. He was with Sun for 19 years, a fact...

BitDefender open sources Samba module.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... BitDefender, the Romanian security house, has upgraded its Samba Linux File Servers to version 1.6.2 and open sourced parts of it. The antivirus for Samba is capable of scanning and disinfecting shared files and folders on access and on-demand,...

Novell taps sales chief.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Novell has tapped Ron Hovsepian to be president, worldwide field operations responsible for field marketing and sales, channel sales and marketing, consulting, services and Novell's alliance program. He'll have all the regions reporting to him,...

EMC & HP kiss & settle four-year-old patent suits.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Hewlett-Packard is going to pay EMC $325 million or buy $325 million worth of goods off of EMC over the five years to settle the four years of litigation the pair have indulged in for the last four years. HP can resell or use anything it might...

Veritas makes pretty strong Q1 showing.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Veritas, which is scheduled to disappear inside Symantec, reported Q1 revenue of $559.3 million, up 7% on the license side and up 29% on the services side. It earned $105 million, 24 cents a share, including $12 million in merger-related...

Dell & Altiris cozier now.(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... In the name of simplicity, Dell is going to start offering patch management software that's integrated with Altiris' for updating server environments. The stuff will be part of Dell's OpenManage 4 systems management software, which has...

Did OSI's ex-lawyer inspire the GPL-pricing fixing suit?(general public license, Open Source Initiative, Daniel Wallace)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... The Open Source Initiative's former general counsel Larry Rosen says on page 132 of his book "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law" that "There is also a problem that may prevent enforcement of the GPL's...

Might Linux become a Tiger cub?(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Industry analyst Amy Wohl, who knows a thing or two about the desktop, wonders whether Apple's Tiger release, a year and a half ahead of Longhorn, which would embarrass Microsoft if it had any shame, will inspire Linux desktop writers to try to...

Tiger points?(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Credit Suisse, which thinks Apple's new momentum has yet to peak, figures that its new week-old Tiger operating system release will do better in the market than its predecessors did. Jaguar did 100,000 units in sales and preorders the first...

Dell increasingly offshore.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Dell says it's going to take its headcount in India up another 2,000 people to 10,000 by the end of the year. They'll be deployed in customer service and software development. It currently employs 53,000 worldwide.

50m and counting.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... The open source Firefox browser downloads passed 50 million last Friday. The new two-week-old Opera 8 is claiming two million downloads, 1.3 million in English, 400,000 in German. Opera 7 tallied 60 million downloads during its lifetime.

Another one down.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Microsoft has settled another one of those class actions claiming that it charged too much for Windows and Office. This one's with Nebraska, whose citizens will be able to claim up to $22.6 million in vouchers.

Wall Street doubts.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Ten days or so before HP posts its quarter and Credit Suisse was saying that "HP faces one of the stiffest sets of secular headwinds in our coverage universe and that the company remains stuck in the middle competitively versus major rivals."...

Sun creates another starlet.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Sun has named Sun veteran Stuart Wells executive VP, strategic development and Sun financing, responsible for high-level business opportunities and directing Sun's recently unveiled Grid utility offerings reporting to Sun president and chief...

Lead dog bites.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... HP said Wednesday that 1,900 people in its fabled printer division had accepted severance packages under an internal reality-adjustment exercise reportedly called Operation Lead Dog. The printer profits on which HP is dependent dropped 3% last...

Show us your scars, Gary.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)(Interview)
May 9, 2005... "I spent 14 years at Oracle. Not many people have spent 14 years at Oracle. [That] is equivalent to the person who spent 50 years at IBM."--Veritas CEO Gary Bloom in a BusinessWeek interview.

So, what prairie dog hole did Longhorn get its foot stuck in?(report)(Brief Article)
May 9, 2005... Ever wonder why Longhorn is so late?... I mean aside from the fact that it's coming from Microsoft. Well, according to one insider, what happened was that Microsoft wrote it in the wrong language, discovered when it started pulling the...

IBM buys its first open source firm: app server wars find new battlefield.
May 16, 2005... IBM has bought its very first open source concern, four-year-old privately held GlueCode, a service outfit in El Segundo, California that sells a version of the Java-based Apache Geronimo application server called Joe. Terms were not disclosed;...

Brazil screws Microsoft.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... State-owned Banco do Brasil, Latin American's largest bank, has announced the creation of a socalled World Open Source Software Organization to push the adoption of open source software in place of Microsoft by other developing countries. ...

Lawson to standardize on IBM middleware.
May 16, 2005... Lawson Software, in a move that's gonna irritate Oracle, is going to standardize its software on IBM middleware, starting with using IBM's WebSphere as the basis of its new business applications platform code named Project Landmark. ...

Sun buys old SCO.
May 16, 2005... Sun, which gave aid and comfort to the infamous new SCO by licensing its IP, has up and bought the old SCO, now called Tarantella and historically unprofitable, for $25 million cash vowing to integrate its Citrix-like thin client technology...

MSN makes move on China.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... MSN, Microsoft's online services division, has formed a joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd (SAIL) to launch MSN China. SAIL is an 11-year-old professional investment company funded by the state-owned Assets Supervision and...

i2 to integrate Microsoft widgetry.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... i2 Technologies and Microsoft have cut the proverbial strategic alliance that will see i2 supply chain solutions better integrated with Microsoft technologies. i2 will be developing its SCM solutions on the Microsoft platform. The deal...

W3C opens new mobile front.(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... W3C has kicked off a Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), a new effort to improve the web experience for mobile devices and recognize them as first-class citizens, the equals of the desktop. Founding sponsors include France Telecom, HP, MobileAware,...

IBM sends SCO its fabled discovery.(Linux Watch)
May 16, 2005... Last week, on deadline day, IBM outside counsel Todd Shaughnessy filed an affidavit with the federal court in Utah that's hearing the SCO v IBM case swearing that IBM had delivered to SCO all the discovery that it was supposed to under the...

SCO v IBM unsealing starts.(Linux Watch)
May 16, 2005... Some previously sealed documents in the SCO v IBM have started dribbling out in response to the joint Forbes-CNET-G2 motion to unseal them. Although presiding judge Dale Kimball rejected the review mechanism that the press offered the...

Ex-SuSE chief quits Novell.(Richard Siebt)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Richard Siebt, the ex-IBMer who was running SuSE when the company was sold to Novell, has resigned from his post as president of Novell EMEA, the job he's had since Novell took SuSE over. Novell was anxious to underscore the fact that Siebt...

Black Duck joins OSSI.(Linux Watch)(Black Duck Software Inc)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Black Duck Software Inc, the license compliance outfit that sorts open source code in proprietary software, has become a corporate member of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), the four-year-old US trade group championing open source use...

Novell buys Linux protection.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Novell has acquired Immunix Inc, a Linux host-based application security solutions provider whose enterprise-level AppArmor is supposed to protect Linux environments against malicious attacks and viruses. The product, which will now be...

OpenXRI.org to create XRI reference implementation.(extensible resource identifier, Apache Foundation)
May 16, 2005... There is now an OpenXRI.org, modeled after the Apache Foundation and dedicated to providing a stable, freely distributable, open source resolution server that can be integrated into enterprise, ISP or software vender architectures. NeuStar...

Wine hires lawyers.(Open Source Development Labs, donations)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... That newfangled Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) that Free Software Foundation general counsel Eben Moglin is putting together on a $4 million "secret" grant from the Open Software Development Labs--nobody knows which OSDL members wrote the...

Haansoft, Korean ISV, joins OSDL.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Haansoft, the Korean company known for its native word processor as well as its run-ins with Microsoft, has joined the Open Source Development Labs. Haansoft, China's Red Flag Software and Japan's Miracle Linux, the Oracle joint venture,...

$100m? What $100m?? Another $100m???(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Earlier this week Red Hat's stock got tickled on the news--complements of an SEC filing--that Michael Dell had put $99.5 million into the company. Red Hat wouldn't say word one about it. It just ran for cover. Except that, if you read the...

McNealy & Ballmer to show a bit of leg.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer have scheduled a conference call for today to discuss the progress they've made in the fabled Sun/Microsoft alliance since Microsoft paid Sun $1.95 billion last year to drop its antitrust...

Egenera temporarily gives up on Wall Street.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Indicating its disgust for conditions on the stock market, Egenera, the blade pioneer, pulled its S-1 IPO registration, which has been getting dusty anyway.

Lenovo talks tough.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Lenovo's new CEO, IBM legacy Stephen Ward, thinks the world's new third biggest PC maker can double its profits in three years and defy near-universal doubt that it can turn the loss-making PC business it bought from IBM around. Ward also...

Sun to double Indian staff.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... Sun says it's going to double the staff at its Indian engineering center to 2,000 over the next two to three years and expand its engineering centers in Russia, China, the Czech Republic at the expense of hiring in the United States. The...

OpenVMS diehards.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief Article)
May 16, 2005... HP claims 10 million OpenVMS users on upwards of 300,000 systems worldwide and also claims 90% of them are going stick with the stuff by buying more AlphaServers or bringing in HP Itanium-based Integrity servers, all of which are supposed to...