Client Server News articles from May 2009

Client Server News archives from May 2009

Jigsaw Pioneers Data-as-a-Service.
May 4, 2009... If software can be a service then the next step is obviously data-as-a-service - now isn't it. It's only Mr. Spock logical. And the first data-as-a-service company looks to be a little number called Jigsaw, a 100-man San Mateo-based global...

EMC Sues To Stop its Ex-Storage Boss from Going to HP.
May 4, 2009... In a surprise raid, HP Tuesday carried off the president of EMC's Storage Division David Donatelli - the guy responsible for the bulk of its rival's revenues - and made him head of its $19.4 billion-a-year Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS)...

Another $75m Poured into SaaS Start-Up.
May 4, 2009... Workday, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield's latest company, has just gotten another $75 million in funding, a sum that would bring its total to more than $150 million and must make it the most royally financed SaaS venture on the face of the...

To Spite Cisco, IBM Cuddles with Brocade.
May 4, 2009... In case there was any doubt that Cisco going into the server business would tick IBM off. There isn't and it is. To show its displeasure IBM has extended its OEM relationship with Cisco's much smaller competitor Brocade, as widely speculated it...

Windows 7 To Virtualize XP.
May 4, 2009... Windows 7 is going to virtualize XP. Microsoft says there's a secret XP Mode (XPM) for the new rep-redeeming operating system that hasn't been part of any beta code or even disclosed before that's "specifically designed to help small...

IBM Fields Enterprise Cloud Appliance.
May 4, 2009... IBM has a new WebSphere hardware appliance with integrated virtualization software that's supposed to extend Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) into a private cloud. The stuff should be available sometime this quarter. Needless to say,...

Microsoft Cuts $3b Cloud Deal with EDS.
May 4, 2009... Microsoft has cut a cloud deal with EDS - the consultancy now in HP's hands - that it figures could be worth more than a fluffy $3 billion in cloud and professional services to the two of them. It didn't say over what period of time but by...

DMTF To Develop Cloud Computing Standards.
May 4, 2009... The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) is going to run up some open standards for managing clouds. Specifications are supposed to be developed by an Open Cloud Standards Incubator that's meant to hatch private cloud-public cloud...

HP Integrates with Microsoft System Center.
May 4, 2009... HP has blended its Insight Control suite with Microsoft's System Center, a k a ICE-SC, to create what it calls the industry's first integrated management environment, a perch it will occupy until its rivals copy the move. It's supposed to...

Fujitsu Building Giant Cloud.
May 4, 2009... Fujitsu Limited is going into the cloud business expecting to generate $3.1 billion over the next three years. For a monthly fee it expects to rent out virtual resources to clients on an as-needed basis from a giant server farm consisting...

Sun Sales Down 20%.
May 4, 2009... Sun has proven again that it has a distinct flair for losing money, a talent that Oracle is now going to have to wrestle with. The company reported its March quarter - the third quarter in its fiscal cycle and perhaps the last time it posts...

Citrix Income Down 80%.
May 4, 2009... Citrix, now a virtualization wannabe, saw its revenues decline a modest 2% in Q1 to $369 million compared to $377 million last year although product license revenue was down 24%. XenApp revenues, for instance, were off 30%. The company...

Amazon Offers Schools Free Use of Cloud.
May 4, 2009... Amazon is offering universities free use of its cloud for research, advanced courses and possible new projects under a new AWS in Education program. Its eye on eventually replacing conventional academic investments in infrastructure, it's...

SAP Complains It's Like WWII.
May 4, 2009... It's unclear whether it will matter much to Oracle, but Teradata and SAP, two of Oracle's competitors, have cut a deal so SAP's NetWeaver Business Warehouse and Business Objects software can run on Teradata's Active Enterprise Data Warehouse at...

Door to Google's Forbidden Zone Opens Briefly.(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Google didn't care very much for that McKinsey study a couple of weeks ago warning companies off outsourcing their data centers to the cloud. So in rebuttal one of its Google Apps folks blogged the 101 reasons why the cloud - particularly a...

NComputing Bores into US Schools.(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... NComputing, the folks with the Windows-based virtual desktop, has become one of three computer solutions that New York City's public school system can buy. New York has 1,400 public schools with more than a million kids enrolled, more than...

Google Gets Floating Data Center Patent.
May 4, 2009... Google has gotten a patent on a seaborne floating data center to be housed on a cargo ship three to seven miles offshore that would be cooled by ocean waters and powered by a Pelamis wave-based electrical generator (little fishies and SpongeBob...

Penguinistas Asked To Invalidate Microsoft Patents.
May 4, 2009... Open Invention Network (OIN), the Linux-protecting patent-collecting consortium put in train by IBM and supported by NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony in the name of mutual deterrence, is whistling up the Penguinista brigade asking them to...

Eucalyptus Goes Commercial.
May 4, 2009... Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud makings - and the widgetry underneath Ubuntu's newfangled cloud - is getting a VC-backed commercial company to run alongside it. Eucalyptus Systems Inc has kicked off with a $5.5 million A round...

Opscode Raises First Round.
May 4, 2009... Opscode, the Seattle-based cloud infrastructure automation wannabe started last year, has raised a $2.5 million A round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which got a board seat. The company said the money is earmarked for hiring ahead of the...

Android Netbook Spotted.(Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies Alpha 680)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Computerworld thinks it's spotted what may be the first Android netbook. It's called the Alpha 680 and was designed by Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies around a 533MHz ARM11 chip like the widget that powers Android phones. ...

New HP Biz Laptops Include Linux.
May 4, 2009... HP has launched a new line of mainstream business laptops aimed at SMBs called ProBooks. It can be had with SUSE Desktop 11 installed, the first time Linux has been available pre-installed on a standard HP business laptop. HP told Reuters...

Likewise Closes C Round.
May 4, 2009... Likewise, the open source outfit whose authentication skills improve the interoperability of Windows and Linux as well as Unix and Mac using Active Directory, has closed a $10 million C round. The check is coming from existing investors...

SCO Appeal Hearing Imminent.
May 4, 2009... SCO is headed for Denver on Wednesday May 6 for its appeals court oral hearing. It's asked the 10th Circuit to overturn the Utah district court's damning summary judgment that Novell owns Unix, rotting out the basis of its case that IBM...

Windows 7 Reportedly Due October 23.(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Acer UK marketing director Bobby Watkins told the Pocket-lint.com blog the other day that Windows 7 would be available on October 23. "There is a 30-day upgrade time so that customers don't wait to buy a new computer, so if you buy during that...

Oracle Sued for Infringement.
May 4, 2009... Dallas-based i2 Technologies is suing Oracle for infringing 11 of supply chain management and other related patents in the Eastern District of Texas. Oppenheimer noticed that five of the patents are the same that it charged SAP infringed,...

IBM Ups Dividend; Makes Acquisition Noises.
May 4, 2009... IBM upped its dividend 10% to 55 cents a share saving the bravura announcement for the day Sun posted another round of nasty losses. Jesse Greene, VP of financial management, told the Wall Street Journal IBM still "has the financial flexibility...

Schmidt & Mundie Named to White House Council.
May 4, 2009... The White House has named Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft strategy chief Craig Mundie to the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Both were Obama supports during the campaign and both are enemies in the marketplace....

Microsoft Answers EC's Latest Antitrust Charges.
May 4, 2009... After two deadline extensions, Microsoft has filed its defense against the European Commission's latest Opera-incited antitrust charges against the company alleging that bundling the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system...

Just Make Out Those Stimulus Checks to I-B-M.
May 4, 2009... To make sure it sticks its bread in all that stimulus gravy that may not start flowing until 2010, IBM Global Financing has earmarked $2 billion for bridge financing of high-tech infrastructure jobs likely to get a piece of the $30 billion...

Papermaster Back in the Game.
May 4, 2009... Remember Mark Papermaster, the IBM chip guy that Apple hired to run its iPhone/iPod development until IBM's lawyers sued, waving around Papermaster's non-compete? Well, one settlement and six months on the bench later he's officially working at...

Kumo Countdown.
May 4, 2009... Microsoft is supposedly in countdown to release Kumo, its next-generation search engine, which looks like it may be at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle in early June.

Akamai Who?
May 4, 2009... Akamai, the content delivery company, is trying to reposition itself as a cloud service provider, and pretty much always has been.

HP Building $100m Data Center.
May 4, 2009... HP is supposed to put a $100 million data center on its campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Active Endpoints Gets $5m in Funding.(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Active Endpoints, the inventor of visual orchestration systems, has raised $5 million in an extension of its Series B funding. North Bridge Venture Partners, one of the company's original investors, participated in the round was. The money is...

Atom Hits the Server Circuit.
May 4, 2009... HP must have lost Intel's instructions saying that Atom was for netbooks because HP has stuck the little chip in a server, the $400 MediaSmart Server LX195 positioned as a storage hub with 1GB of memory and a 640GB hard disk. Guess home storage...

Spring Blossoms Perhaps.
May 4, 2009... After a none-too-pretty March quarter all around, the Wall Street Journal says that Europe's chip makers, Infineon and STMicroelectronics, and Taiwans's three main PC makers, Acer, Quanta and Compal, see signs of a bottom

Talend To Compete Against a Cipher.
May 25, 2009... Talend, the open source company with the data integration software, is moving up-market with a new enterprise-grade Integration Suite MPx that won't be open sourced. The massively parallelized widgetry will pit Talend against the...

Intel Chip Reportedly Delayed on Account of IBM/Oracle/Sun.
May 25, 2009... Tukwila, the next Itanium chip - which once upon a time was supposed to be out in, oh, let's see, 2006/2007, and was just delayed this past February until some time around the middle of this year - has been delayed yet again, this time until...

Netbooks: Take Two.
May 25, 2009... Intel has been talking up its next Atom processor, code named Pineview, and due out in Q4. Intel says it's shrunk the number of chips it takes to make an Atom netbook or nettop from three to two. Throw in the Tiger Point I/O hub and -...

NetApp To Buy Data Domain for $1.5b.(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... The consolidation fairy has visited Silicon Valley again. NetApp said Wednesday that it's buying its deduplication storage rival Data Domain for $1.5 billion. In the same breath it said its earnings were off ~16%. It's paying $25 a share...

VMware's Cloud Widgetry Arrives.
May 25, 2009... VMware Thursday pushed out vSphere 4, its so-called Cloud OS, nominally a month before it was due to arrive. It's supposed to create a 100% virtualized cloud, reinforcing the company's virtualization leadership. As previously announced...

You Suppose Microsoft's Spider Will Have Any Sting?
May 25, 2009... Code named Kumo, Japanese, we've been led to believe, for both spider and cloud - whoa, that's so utterly prescient - Microsoft has been testing the thing internally since early March. It's supposed find more relevant results apparently by...

HP & Microsoft To Spend $180m Blocking & Tackling Cisco.
May 25, 2009... HP and Microsoft say they're prepared, as part of their 20-year-old Frontline Partnership, to spend $180 million over the next four years delivering an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution to push back on Cisco. The...

AT&T & EMC Pair on Cloud Storage.
May 25, 2009... AT&T has gone into the cloud storage business in competition with services such as Amazon's S3. It said Monday that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with EMC to jointly develop and market an EMC-based enterprise-grade AT&T...

HP To Can Another 6,400 People.
May 25, 2009... HP, being a leviathan, which makes it hard to grow in the worst recession since 1929, came in with revenues down 3% to $27.4 billion in its second quarter or, if you look at it another way, up 3% in local currency because of the gyrations in...

Sun To Open Java Store.
May 25, 2009... Before Sun's current management leaves the building, it's going to open an iPhone-like Java Store where Sun-vetted third-party apps can be sold or traded. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, unmuzzled and back blogging again now that the company's...

Life with the EC.
May 25, 2009... Intel chairman Craig Barrett has retired having bequeathed his place on the board to Jane Shaw, the company's first chairman never to have been an Intel employee and the retired chairman and CEO of Aerogen, a specialty pharmaceutical company....

Pegasystems Joins the Cloud Camp.
May 25, 2009... Pegasystems, the BPM major, joined the cloud crew Tuesday with the announcement of a SmartPaaS Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developing and deploying dynamic business applications on EC2. The widgetry packages Pegasystems' patented Build...

Dell To Build Servers Out of Laptop Chips.
May 25, 2009... Dell, which was so fixated on Intel it couldn't get off the dime and embrace AMD until AMD lost its edge, is going to use VIA chips in a system code named Fortuna - presumably after the Roman goddess of luck. It's putting 12 complete VIA-based...

EC2 Getting New Features.(Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud )(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... Amazon Web Services (AMS) started a public beta of some new features for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Monday: namely CloudWatch, a web service for monitoring AWS cloud resources; Auto Scaling for automatically growing and shrinking EC2...

Lenovo's Q4 Results Stink.(Financial report)
May 25, 2009... Lenovo is finding life outside its old Chinese cocoon sorta like Mao's Long March. Fiscal Q4 revenues for the company that bought IBM's PC unit fell a worse-than-expected 25.8% to $2.8 billion and earnings a horrific 49% to $285 million....

3Tera To Bait Cloud Adopters with AppStore.
May 25, 2009... 3Tera is going to set up an AppStore next quarter, a marketplace for cloud components where enterprise users, software vendors and data center folk can exchange production-ready, scalable and highly available cloud components on a pay-per-use...

Gmail Now Translates.(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... Google Translate now works in Gmail. In 41 languages; 98% of web users reportedly speak one of them. Google Translate is better than Babelfish, but machine translation still has a ways to go, as Google admits. "Message Transation" is...

Dell Pushes Netbook for Kids.
May 25, 2009... Dell has had an upscale One Laptop Per Child moment. It definitely thinks every kid should have one. So it's fielding a rubberized 10-inch netbook based on a 1.6GHz Atom and directed at the K-12 set called the Latitude 2100. It comes...

FSF Finally Wrestles Cisco into Compliance.
May 25, 2009... Cisco has finally bowed to the demands of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and resolved that suit for copyright infringement that FSF filed in December over Cisco playing fast and loose with its GPL- and LGPL-protected code. Cisco will...

Big Blue's in the Black Box Game.
May 25, 2009... IBM has started peddling a turnkey SMB appliance integrated with Intuit's QuickBooks software called the Smart Cube. It starts at $7,745 and includes e-mail, calendaring and Big Blue support. There's also access to remote services such as...

Microsoft & Linux Foundation Send Joint Letter of Protest.
May 25, 2009... Oh, my sainted aunt! Microsoft and the Linux Foundation, the epicenter of the movement that wants to destroy Microsoft, have sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute (ALI) protesting its draft Principles of the Law of Software...

Canonical Lassos S3 for Live Mesh Knock-Off.
May 25, 2009... Canonical, the Ubuntu creator looking to make a deflationary buck and apparently thinking of Microsoft's Live Mesh, is going into the cloud storage business using Amazon's S3. It's got some internally developed, Dropbox-reminiscent...

Black Duck & Microsoft Cut Deal.
May 25, 2009... Microsoft is going feed projects from its CodePlex open source project hosting site automatically into Black Duck's open source KnowledgeBase repository. Black Duck's software keeps track of the use of open source components in...

Canonical Manages Ubuntu on EC2.(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... Landscape 1.3, the upgraded semi-proprietary Ubuntu systems management and monitoring service just released by Canonical, Ubuntu's commercializer, lets users start, stop and manage Ubuntu Server instances on Amazon EC2. The widgetry,...

IBM Survey Claims Linux Desktops Easier to Deploy Than Expected.
May 25, 2009... IBM is waving around a study that it commissioned from Freeform Dynamics showing - surprise, surprise - that Linux desktops go down better if the right group of users is targeted for deployment such as those who have moderate and predictable...

IBM: Antitrust Target.
May 25, 2009... Since the European Commission nailed Intel's ass to the wall last week and the Obama administration adopted the EC's antitrust principles, Google, which narrowly escaped a suit during the Bush administration, has been widely proposed as the...

Apple's Not-a-Netbook Predicted.(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... Having looked into his crystal ball Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicts that Apple will field a $500-$700 seven- to 10-inch touchscreen tablet based on a proprietary chip cooked up by its semiconductor acquisition PA Semi and running a...

Big Losers.
May 25, 2009... Time Magazine had 24/7 Wall St run up a list of the 10 biggest tech failures of the last 10 years and it came up with Vista, Gateway, the HD DVD, Vonage, YouTube, SiriusXM, the Microsoft Zune, Palm, Iridium and Segway. YouTube's on the black...

Acer Reportedly Cuts Netbook Orders.(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... Acer has netbook channel inventory turning moldy in Europe, according to DigiTimes, and is cutting netbook build orders with its ODMs in Taiwan to focus on higher-margin CULV-based notebooks. Meanwhile, CMP's Channelweb.com claims Acer is...

Fujitsu Reportedly Thinking Acquisitions.
May 25, 2009... With nowhere for it to go at home, Fujitsu, Japan's number one server vendor and number two PC supplier, is thinking about making software acquisitions to compete better internationally against IBM and HP. Richard Christou, the head of...

Intel To Unwrap Eight-Core Nehalem.
May 25, 2009... Intel is supposed to take more of the wraps off the eight-core RISC-stomping Nehalem-EX, a k a Beckton chip, on May 26. It won't ship until late this year or early next but when it does it'll replace the six-core Dunnington as the company's...

Wal-Mart Wants To Replace Circuit City.
May 25, 2009... Wal-Mart wants to pick up the traffic that would have gone to the now-liquidated Circuit City so it's expanding the electronics section in its 3,500 US stores lest the Apple iPod, Acer netbook, Dell touch screen Studio One 19 computer and Pre...

Greylock Takes Horace Greeley's Advice: Goes West.(Greylock Partners)(Brief article)
May 25, 2009... Greylock Partners, the VC operation that was started in Massachusetts in 1965, is moving its headquarters to Silicon Valley, according to the New York Times, because that's where they keep the start-ups. Anyway that's where 75% of its portfolio...

Rackspace Email Upgraded.
May 25, 2009... Rackspace has upgraded its e-mail hosting service and to pry loose Microsoft's grip has cut its pricing. Rackspace Email 7.0 is supposed to be 90% cheaper than Exchange. The complexity of switching, control and availability issues, user...

HP Recalls Batteries.
May 25, 2009... HP has recalled about 70,000 lithium-ion notebook batteries as a fire precaution. A couple exploded. The widgets affected were sold between August 2007 and March 2008 and include the HP Pavilion (models dv2000, dv2500, dv2700, dv6000, dv6500,...

Alleged Infringement To Cost Microsoft $200m.
May 25, 2009... A Texas jury has told Microsoft to pay the apparently aptly named i4i $200 million because the custom XML tagging in Word 2003 and - although forewarned - in Word 2007 infringe a 1998 document formatting patent held by the Toronto outfit....

Five-Dimensional DVDs.
May 25, 2009... Researchers at the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have demonstrated how nanotechnology can create "five-dimensional" DVDs with a storage capacity 2,000 times greater than those currently available...