Client Server News articles from May 2007

Client Server News archives from May 2007

3Leaf aims to make scale-out scale up.
May 7, 2007... Now here's a curiosity. Intel is backing a start-up that depends on AMD technology to do what's it's doing. No, really, swear to God. In fact, Intel led the stealth outfit's $20 million B round last September, bringing total investment to $32.5...

Linux-Microsoft brawl turns into gang bang.
May 7, 2007... Oracle, IBM, NEC, Hitachi, HP, Dell, NTT Data and others are joining in a consortium to sell Linux servers and systems in Japan, according to a Japanese press report. The Nikki Shimbun says it would be the first time major IT firms...

SaaS becomes 'software plus services' in Microsoft's mouth.
May 7, 2007... Bill Gates' replacement Ray Ozzie on whose shoulders the company's future rests, the guy who has to dig Microsoft out of the Internet hole it finds itself it and at all costs salvage the client, started this week to try to redefine SaaS,...

Santa Rosa ready to roll.
May 7, 2007... Ahead of Intel's long-awaited Santa Rosa Centrino launch in New York on Wednesday, AMD came out with a new faster 65nm Turion dual-core that it claims will get the same five-hour battery life as Santa Rosa, which includes a new feistier...

Microsoft buys French cell phone ad house.
May 7, 2007... Well, it ain't DoubleClick or Yahoo, but Microsoft is buying a French mobile phone advertising company called ScreenTonic. You can tell it ain't DoubleClick because the price for the venture-backed outfit wasn't disclosed. Anyway it's early...

Rackable dumps Barton for Barrenechea.(Mark Barrenechea replaced Tom Barton )
May 7, 2007... Something happened at Rackable between last Thursday when Rackable president Todd Ford was ousted and CEO Tom Barton took over his job and Monday morning when Barton himself was tossed out on his ear and replaced as president and CEO by...

Egenera vBlades out.(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... Egenera has gone to market with its promised vBlade software, the extension to its PAN Manager that provides a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both physical servers and virtual machines. This...

Supremes rule for Microsoft; change patent rules.
May 7, 2007... US software houses can rest easier in their beds. The Supreme Court ruled seven-to-one in favor of Microsoft and said it didn't owe AT & T royalties on software sold overseas that infringed AT & T patents. AT & T had claimed in its patent...

Judge tells Microsoft to get out its checkbook.
May 7, 2007... The judge hearing the Alcatel v Microsoft MP3/Windows Media Player patent case that resulted in an award of $1.53 billion to Alcatel told Microsoft the other day to get out its pen and write the French company a check. Microsoft however...

Dell to pre-install Ubuntu on consumer PCs.(Linux Watch)
May 7, 2007... On Tuesday, ironically enough May Day--at least somebody in Round Rock hasn't lost their sense of humor--Dell announced that it would be pre-installing Ubuntu 7.04, a k a Feisty Fawn, from South Africa's up-and-coming Linux distributor...

OpenLogic introduces inventory tool.(Linux Watch)
May 7, 2007... In June OpenLogic will be introducing a free software tool called OpenLogic Discovery to help enterprises inventory the open source software that's installed on their Windows, Linux and Solaris systems. OpenLogic says the inventory would...

R.I.P. progeny Linux.(Linux Watch)
May 7, 2007... The wake's over and now they're burying the corpse. Progeny Linux Systems ceased operations on Monday. Its founder, Debian creator Ian Murdock, now at Sun as chief operating systems officer, got a day job with the Free Standards Group months...

Zmanda brings in new CEO.(Linux Watch)
May 7, 2007... Zmanda, the open source backup and recovery operation, has brought in a ex-Red Hat guy, Peter Childers, as CEO replacing founding CEO Chander Kant who will serve as CTO. Most recently Childers was VP of online strategy and operations at...

DevZuz offers Global 2000 open source management.(Linux Watch)
May 7, 2007... Fresh from selling LogicBlaze to Iona a few weeks ago, almost two years to the day after he sold Gluecode to IBM, serial entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, who cut his teeth at Intel Capital, is back with another start-up, one that he's folding...

SCO ups its Unix prices.
May 7, 2007... SCO has raised the price of its Unix operation system including patches and upgrades 20% across-the-board, a move that was reportedly well tested with its remaining network and customer base. Hearing that might give the judge overseeing the...

BEA quarter comes up short.
May 7, 2007... EA warned investors Tuesday that it's been having a hard time of it, especially in the US, and that several big deals slipped and it was reorganizing its sales operation so its first fiscal quarter, ended April 30, will only see revenues...

Yahoo buys all of Right Media.
May 7, 2007... Yahoo is buying the 80% of the industry's largest online display ad exchange Right Media that it doesn't already own to compete against the Google-DoubleClick combine, which gives Google a foothold in graphical advertising where Yahoo has been...

That thud you heard was graphics chips.
May 7, 2007... Q1 shipments of graphics chips dropped 5.5% sequentially but increased 5.3% year-over-year to reach 78.8 million units. Jon Peddie, who puts these numbers together every quarter, said, "Normally Q1 will be flat or drop a little; this year...

Google brands iGoogle.
May 7, 2007... Google has dubbed gadget-bedecked personalized versions of its home page "iGoogle" and provided a new coding-free Gadget Maker customization tool with seven templates for adding stuff like personal photos, YouTube favorites and users' own...

Dell contemplates apostasy.
May 7, 2007... In a leaked e-mail sent to employees worldwide on April 25 that surfaced last Friday its author Michael Dell admitted that Dell's vaunted business model wasn't working and that the company needs another approach to the market. "The direct...

ClearSpeed adds second accelerator.
May 7, 2007... ClearSpeed Technology, the Anglo-American HPC acceleration maven, has just introduced its second iteration add-in card, a smaller Advance e620 that piggybacks on a machine's PCI Express interconnect, keeping the widgetry abreast of the latest...

HP & Dell play to Hispanic audience.
May 7, 2007... HP has started targeting Spanish-speaking consumers in the US with Spanish versions of Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium on a $329-to-start Pavilion a6005y desktop. The PC has a Spanish keyboard and Spanish versions of Norton, Office and...

Rumors have Microsoft chasing 24/7 Real Media.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Citing unnamed sources the New York Post, a money-losing Rupert Murdoch publication--the same Murdoch now trying to buy the Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal for $5 billion--reported Tuesday that Microsoft may bid somewhere around a billion...

HP shifts marketing chief to printers.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... HP's chief marketing officer Cathy Lyons is being "repotted," as Peter Drucker would say, returning to the company's printer unit "to take on responsibility for strategic change management," whatever that means, reporting to printer boss...

Qantas abandons Linux for AIX.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Qantas is abandoning the Linux it's been using under its finance systems for AIX to "address some stability issues," according to a story in ZDNet Australia quoting a speech given by the airline's general manager for finance improvement and...

Washington creates pirates rogues gallery.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... The Bush administration has put China and Russia on a "priority watch list" for playing fast and loose with copyrights and pirating movies, music and software. Also on the list are Argentina, Chine, Egypt, India, Israel, Lebanon, Thailand,...

Oracle worries SAP will destroy evidence.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Oracle told a US federal court Monday it was worried SAP might have destroyed documents relative to the suit it filed against the German company accusing it of wholesale theft of Oracle IP. It wants the court to order SAP to preserve evidence....

Acer reportedly not chasing US acquisition.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Acer chairman JT Wang says that that anticipated acquisition he just happened to mention a few weeks ago will be small, cheap and not American. A deal is expected in three to five months.

Oracle forms new applications SBU.(Global Business Unit)(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... Oracle has formed a new Global Business Unit focused on applications for financial services headed by i-flex solutions chairman Rajesh Hukku. i-flex is Oracle's majority investment in India but the SBU will be headquartered in New York. It's...

EC pauses, waiting for results of Microsoft appeal.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... The European Commission's regulator have decided to wait for a decision from the Court of First Instance on Microsoft's appeal before memorializing new guidelines on dealing with firms suspected of abusing market dominance, Reuters reported....

WS-Federation put on road to standardization.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... OASIS has formed a committee under Microsoft to push WS-Federation 1.1 through to royalty-free standardization. The effort includes BEA, BMC, CA, HP, IBM, Iona, Novell, Red Hat, Tibco, Verisign, webMethods and others.

Mystery interconnects get first funding.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Lightspeed Venture Partner and New Enterprise Associates have pumped $11 million in Series A money into a Aprius Inc, a 10-month-old Sunnyvale, California start-up with hush-hush high-speed computer interconnects. The funding's for product...

The Massachusetts halo effect.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Texas, California, Minnesota and Oregon are considering bills that could push them down the Massachusetts path and into the arms of the anti-Microsoft Open Document Format (ODF).

Solaris boots on Rock.(Sun Microsystems Inc. sparc processor)(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... Sun is preening about Solaris booting on its next-generation high-end, heavily multithreaded, high-throughput, 16-core 65nm Sparc chip Rock ahead of schedule and within six weeks of Sun getting its first Rock prototypes back from TI. First...

HP cuts its first nano deal.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 7, 2007... Ten years into investing in nanotechnology and HP has signed its first license. Terms were not disclosed. A California outfit called Nanolithosolutions Inc is going to use HP's patented nanoimprint lithography (NIL), a method of stamping out...

Red Hat plays the desktop card.
May 14, 2007... Red Hat made some guttural, almost inarticulate, awfully confusing noises Wednesday from its user-cum-analyst meeting in San Diego when it tried to say that it's finally going to play the desktop card. Red Hat has always been rather, oh,...

IBM sticks Novell in the corner.
May 14, 2007... OK, let's sit up and try to follow these moves. So Novell--which got into Linux on IBM's nickel and then stuck its head into what may turn out to be a SCO noose for the Big Boy--has wandered off the reservation and is now hugging Microsoft,...

Sun seeks to cure Java bloat.
May 14, 2007... Remember how complicated and obtuse Java has gotten? Well, there's a thing called JavaFX Script coming, previewed by Sun at JavaOne this week and described as a "radically simple" scripting language for creating rich content and...

Amazon pays off IBM to settle big patent suit.
May 14, 2007... Remember last October when IBM sued Amazon claiming the great dot.com had knowingly built its business model on the back of IBM's patents? Well, the pair patched up their difference the other day outside the courtroom after Amazon paid IBM some...

Dell becomes Microsoft-Novell's third wheel.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... Dell Sunday night went and stuck its head in the lion's mouth by cutting a deal to buy SUSE server licenses off of Microsoft and redistribute them, making it a third leg in the controversial Microsoft-Novell alliance that moved the keepers of...

Lemme get this straight. Red Hat is going to secure Windows.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... Under a joint program with Intel, Red Hat is going to deliver a Red Hat-branded software platform that supports desktop PCs imbued with Intel's vPro processor technology. It's supposed to bring hardware-assisted virtualization to the...

Novell loses desktop architect.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... Novell has lost the chief architect of its Linux desktop effort Robert Love to Google and its Open Source Program Office. Many would like to ascribe it to the Microsoft-Novell relationship but Love denied it on Slashdot. It's simply the thrill...

All of Java that can be open sourced is.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... Java is now open source as far as Sun is concerned. At JavaOne Tuesday, it released a fully buildable JDK for Java SE to the OpenJDK community under the current GPL 2, remarking that it was delivering on its promise in under a year and...

MySQL goes outside for Four9s high availability.(inks deal with ISV Linbit)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... MySQL has tied up with Austrian ISV Linbit, which supplies high-availability Linux widgetry called DRBD. MySQL is going to support the Four9s LAMP technology directly. It's meant to narrow the gap between MySQL and proprietary databases....

Red Hat Exchange is born.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... The promised Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has come into existence. That's where Red Hat is going to sell third-party software, open source stuff build around Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss, sort of like what Linspire does, in combination with...

Intel & Ubuntu collaborate on Silverthorn.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... Ubuntu, Dell's pick for some of its PCs and laptops, is going to try its hand in the mobile and embedded market next and is talking about riding on small handheld Internet-enabled tablets powered by energy-efficient Intel chips, the tiny...

Sun supports OpenID, seeks friends.(Linux Watch)
May 14, 2007... Sun has opened a new initiative in support of OpenID, the decentralized, web-friendly single sign-on mechanism used across different web sites. OpenID is currently limited to facilitating low-risk transactions like blog comments. Sun wants...

Spring creator picks up $10m.(Interface21 got finance from Benchmark Capital)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... Interface21, the open source Java Spring start-up, has fetched $10 million in Series A financing from Benchmark Capital. The money is earmarked for product development, sales and marketing, and fleshing out its support infrastructure. ...

E-mail gaffe makes HP raise its numbers.
May 14, 2007... HP raised its fiscal Q2 guidance Tuesday. When it reports its numbers on Wednesday, it expects its revenues to be between $25.5 billion and $25.55 billion, up a billion over its last call. It said it should earn 64 cents-65 cents a share, not...

VMware Workstation 6 hits market.
May 14, 2007... VMware's sixth-generation desktop virtualization software VMware Workstation 6 made it to general availability Wednesday. This is the stuff that supports Vista and cross-platform paravirtualization as well as such niceties as multiple...

Hotmail emerges from the plastic surgeon's.
May 14, 2007... The next-generation Hotmail, now styled Windows Live Hotmail, is available to anyone who wants the free rebuilt e-mail. Microsoft says 280 million people worldwide use the old service. Now they can have Outlook-like folders for saving e-mail...

Santa Rosa arrives.
May 14, 2007... Santa Rosa, Intel's pace-sustaining contribution to the laptop push, is here at last, pulling in its wake 230 design-wins, by Intel's count, 50 more than the last Centrino outing. Some will be out faster than others and not everybody will...

Microsoft & Yahoo reported talking about Google counterweight.
May 14, 2007... According to the press Microsoft and Yahoo are supposed to be trying to figure out a configuration that would let them fight Google together. The notion of Yahoo's acquisition by Microsoft for, oh, $50 billion advanced by the New York Post...

Third-largest PC maker loses money again.
May 14, 2007... Gateway's position continues to erode. In the first quarter it lost $8.6 million, two cents a share, on revenue of $1.009 billion, down from $1.078 billion a year ago and down from $1.021 billion in Q4. It managed to earn $11.5 million, or...

IBM launches Big Green project.
May 14, 2007... IBM is supposed to spend $1 billion a year to double the energy efficiency of its internal data centers by 2010 without increasing power consumption and make a business of helping major customers save a Watt. It calls the initiative Big...

Reporters want to take HP to court.
May 14, 2007... The three CNET reporters who were pretexted by HP, Dawn Kawamoto, Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit, intend to sue HP for invasion of privacy and ask for punitive damages, their lawyer said Monday. Three BusinessWeek reporters, Peter...

EMC seeks to create R & D network.
May 14, 2007... Borrowing here and there from the open source movement, EMC is setting up an Innovation Network consisting of its own global R & D resources, university researchers and key customers to explore new technologies and stuff like the Semantic Web,...

SAP buys OutlookSoft.
May 14, 2007... SAP is going to buy privately held eight-year-old OutlookSoft Corporation, maker of what SAP calls Web 2.0-style integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software built on a SOA and aimed at CFOs. The widgetry...

Transitive prices upcoming Solaris widgetry.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... Transitive showed up at JavaOne this week with its Sun-sanctioned Solaris/Sparc-to-Solaris/x86 you-don't-have-modify-nothing QuickTransit widgetry in toe, saying that a beta would be available in July and a production release in September. ...

Ericsson to build multimedia App Server with sun.
May 14, 2007... Ericsson has signed up to co-develop and then license an open source Java-based multimedia application server from Sun and contribute parts of it to the open source GlassFish project. It's also supposed to license the Java System...

Microsoft buys into job site.
May 14, 2007... Microsoft has bought a reported 4% of CareerBuilder for an undisclosed amount of money. CareerBuilder, owned by three newspaper publishers, is said to be the largest US online job site, averaging 1.5 million job postings and 21 million...

SAP tells Oracle to start training for a knockdown dragout.
May 14, 2007... Oracle better be ready for a "massive fight" over that lawsuit it filed against SAP and its TomorrowNow support subsidiary for allegedly equally "massive theft" according to what the German's been telling its stockholders. SAP contends that...

Sun releases Java real-time 2.
May 14, 2007... Sun has released Java Real-Time System 2.0, which pairs the Java extension with Solaris 10 for creating deterministic systems. RTS helps developers set process priorities according to their importance, something not typically supported by...

Asia a dynamo for HP.
May 14, 2007... HP Asia is selling PCs at a growth rate of about 36% a year on average, twice the market rate according to what a senior executive told Reuters. The territory includes China, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The company...

SAP invests in Conformia.
May 14, 2007... SAP's $125 million NetWeaver Fund has made a minority investment in Conformia Software Inc, a California product and process lifecycle management house for regulated process manufacturers like the alcohol industry and the life sciences....

Viridian comes up short.
May 14, 2007... VMware and Xen will be delighted. Microsoft is putting its Viridian Longhorn virtualization widgetry through the same slimming exercise that Vista went through to get it out the door. It's not going to have the 64-processor support that pushed...

Ballmer suggestive.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... CEO Steve Ballmer told the Software 2007 conference on Wednesday that Microsoft is "open to large acquisitions," raising eyebrows considering those conflicting days-old reports about Microsoft taking another swing at Yahoo to ward off Google....

AMD lets the first 430 go.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Remember we said AMD was making guttural noises that sounded like it wanted to say it might lay people off? Well, the Austin Business Journal tumbled to the fact that the company was laying off 80 people down their neck of the woods and then...

Acer wants company in court.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... High-flying Acer doesn't want to face the wrath of HP alone and has sued three of its ODM suppliers, Hon Hai, Quanta and Wistron, in Texas to get them to share any pain HP's two patent infringement suits might inflict. Both HP suits seek to get...

Solaris wants to look like Linux.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Sun is going to try to make Solaris look like, behave and install like Linux to get developers over their adoption rejection. The project is code named Indiana and opens the door to issues of backward compatibility and code sharing.

GPL & Apache make eyes at one another.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... The Free Software Foundation is talking about bringing its GPLv3 rewrite into compatibility with the more liberal, business-friendly Apache License before it's engraved in stone this summer. Just what that means remains to be seen.

Does Greta van Susteren know about this?(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Evidently Nina Reiser had exquisitely bad taste in men. Her estranged husband stands accused of her murder, his trial was to have started this past Monday, but not before prosecutors were reportedly forced to tell the court that an ex-lover...

Leopard beta due next month.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Apple's saying it'll have a "feature-complete" beta of its iPhone-delayed Leopard operating system available the middle of next month at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Now the question is what sexy new features are we talking about.

Katmai to redeem some of the old lost vision.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Katmai, Microsoft's next version of SQL Server, now part of its BI vision, is supposed to manage any kind of unstructured data--like images and geographic information--not just the typical relational stuff, and so use something called...

Lenovo is trying to bury the pirate flag.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Lenovo could buy around $1.3 billion worth of Windows, Office and other software from Microsoft this fiscal year as part of China's effort to dampen rampant piracy by pre-installing software at the factory. Lenovo cut a similar deal last year.

WS-Transaction 1.1 standardized.(from Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards)(Web Services Transaction)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... Web Services Transaction (WS-Transaction) 1.1 has been made an OASIS standard. It provides a framework for coordination protocols that support applications that require consistent agreement on the outcome of distributed transactions. The...

Intel funds Ceedo.(BILLY GRAMS)
May 14, 2007... Intel has put an undisclosed amount of money in two-year-old Israeli-based Ceedo Technologies Ltd whose virtualization widgetry runs Windows apps from a portable external physical or network drive without being installed on the host PC. The...

Microsoft opens Pandora's box.
May 21, 2007... Microsoft has let loose the Furies. It would love the three terrible winged goddesses in charge of avenging wrongs to bring open source to book but it seems inevitable that Microsoft will get entangled in their serpentine hair. It's a...

Your honor, $1.5b doesn't cover the bill.
May 21, 2007... Alcatel-Lucent wants more from Microsoft than the $1.5 billion it was awarded by a jury three months ago for infringing Alcatel's two MP3 patents, the ones Microsoft thought it had licensed from the Fraunhofer Institute. Alcatel has told...

New York sues Dell for bait & switch tactics.
May 21, 2007... Consumer complaints have spurred New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to sue Dell, charging Dell and its finance arm of fraud, false advertising and using deceptive terms and interest rates to boost sales. Cuomo wants such...

HP looks like it whupped Dell big time.
May 21, 2007... Somebody somewhere ought to give HP's ousted CEO Carly Fiorina some credit. In the hands of her successor Mark Hurd HP Wednesday returned $2.1 billion, or 65 cents a share, up 27% year-over-year, on revenues of $25.5 billion, up 13%, in...

AMD breaks out a quad desktop chip.
May 21, 2007... In the wake of Intel's Santa Rosa notebook release last week, AMD trotted out a four-core desktop version of the widely anticipated Barcelona server quad on which its future rests. It said it hopes the desktop chip will be shipping in systems...

Oracle spends another $495m in its arms race with SAP.
May 21, 2007... While SAP fills in the missing beads on its necklace with what looks like penny-ante purchases, Oracle, the great consolidator, has gone and bought Agile Software, laying out another $495 million in cash in its race to catch up with SAP, a...

Broadcom promotes its 10 gigE NIC.
May 21, 2007... Broadcom is all atwitter about what it says is the industry's "first true single-chip, dual-port 10 gigabit Ethernet converged network interface controller (C-NIC)." It figures the device, sampling now and due to be in production by the...