Client Server News articles from November 2005

Client Server News archives from November 2005

Start-up claims to have a tiger by the tail.(Egenera, Fabric7 Systems Inc., contract)
November 7, 2005... Fabric7 Systems Inc, a budding three-and-a-half-year-old box merchant that's just broken cover, claims to have achieved a fundamental breakthrough in enterprise SMP server design inspired, it appears, by groundwork laid by Egenera or borrowed...

Oracle CFO quits.(Greg Maffei)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... After the market closed Thursday, Oracle admitted that its CFO Greg Maffei, four months on the job, had quit to take "a terrific professional opportunity" elsewhere. And so ended a day that started with Goldman Sachs' top analyst Rick...

Dell falters.
November 7, 2005... You have perhaps heard that the mighty Dell juggernaut has stumbled again after showing a certain unsteadiness in August because of its own cutthroat pricing. The astute are aware that Dell's growth has been slowing for the last 18 months. ...

Windows & office chase google into the ether.(preview of Windows Live and Office Live by Microsoft Network L.L.C.)
November 7, 2005... In the name of dipping its bread in the gurgling gravy boat of Internet advertising before Google and Yahoo mop it all up, Microsoft is going to turn bits and pieces of Windows and Office, the twin pillars of its vast hegemony, into online...

Unisys attemps remake.(restructuring)
November 7, 2005... Facing financial losses, deep job cuts and a government probe, old Unisys figured it was time for a makeover--the works--boob job, tummy tuck, facelift, heck, it's even getting its teeth capped, figuratively speaking of course. It all...

Oasis Committee formed to tweak WS-Security.(web services, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards)
November 7, 2005... A swat of Oasis members including Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, CA, BEA and Novell are planning to extend the WS-Security standard to enable the trusted exchange of multiple SOAP messages and define security policies that govern the formats...

SCO finds at least 217 instances of illegal copying in Linux.(Linux Watch)
November 7, 2005... SCO filed its tantalizing case-to-date against IBM on Friday--reportedly "several thousand pages of material"--but we know little more than we did before because the opus is sealed. Interestingly IBM, which was also under court order to...

Oracle moves to crush open source rivals.(new product Oracle Database XE)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya Oracle was going to deliver up a 32-bit Windows- or Linux-run freebie database. It's released a so-called starter edition called 10g Express a k a Database XE, based on 10g Release 2, targeted at application...

Novell cuts 10%; names Hovsepian President, COO.(Ron Hovsepian)
November 7, 2005... Novell, which BusinessWeek and then CNET predicted was gonna fire 20% of its staff Monday, promoted its sales chief Ron Hovsepian on Tuesday instead and made him president and chief operating officer, suggesting that Novell CEO Jack Messman,...

Enter the portable cluster.(new product from Penguin Computing)
November 7, 2005... Penguin Computing's gonna take a shot at this personal cluster business pioneered by the two Transmeta co-founders who started Orion Multisystems a couple of years ago in the name of reinventing the late great technical workstation. Except...

IBM & Sun join behind OpenDoc.(Sun Microsystems Inc., International Business Machines Corp., partnership)(plan of establishing Open Document Foundation)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... IBM and Sun, two old enemies that seem to have struck a mild form of detente lately, have been trying to rally support for the Open Document format so they can harry Microsoft. Today, November 4, IBM VP, standards and open source Bob Sutor...

Sun's light still dim.(earnings of Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Sun lost $123 million, or four cents a share, on revenues up 3.7% to $2.7 billion in the September quarter, its first fiscal quarter. The revenue increase, which was below analyst ex-pectations, was attributed to its Storage Tech and...

Ashcroft to lobby for Oracle.(appointment of John Ashcroft)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... According to papers filed with the House and Senate Oracle has hired former Attorney General-turned-consultant John Ashcroft and his newfangled Ashcroft Group to lobby for it on the Hill. Lobbying the Justice Department's an ethical no-go area...

SGI delisted.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 7, 2005... The once hot-shot SGI is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange effective Monday November 7 and sent down to the OTC Bulletin Board because its stock price has lingered too long below a buck to meet NYSE requirements.

Doutless, the first million's the hardest.(market share of Apple Computer Inc. iTunes Music Store)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Apple said Monday that it took 'em less than 20 days to sell a million videos for its new video iPod, a statement that tickled its stock. iTunes, Apple's redoubtable online music store, began selling about 2,000 music videos and episodes of...

AMD, IBM cozier.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... The AMD-IBM chip alliance has broadened to 32nm and 22nm territory. AMD says it'll be the first time IBM's Research Division has worked with a technology development partner on stuff that's three-five years away from commercialization. The deal...

Quite a write-off.(earnings of Symantec Corp.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... In its first quarter after acquiring Veritas, Symantec wrote off an amazing $284 million in in-process research giving it a loss of $251.3 million, or 21 cents a share, on sales up 71% to $1.06 billion. It's expecting to earn 10 cents on...

IBM, TV maven.(SBC Communications Inc., International Business Machines Corp., partnership)
November 7, 2005... Well, it seems that SBC Communications has concluded the teo-month technical field trial of Project Lightspeed, its prospective way of delivering IP-based TV, video-on-demand and high-speed Internet access and that IBM servers are gonna be used...

Less psychodrama at Moto.(compensation to Mike Zafirovski the ex president of Motorola Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Well, Motorola resolved its non-compete issues with its ex-president Mike Zafirovski this week with a lot less psychodrama than the ongoing Microsoft-Google soap opera. Zafirovski is now CEO of Nortel Networks and Moto is getting paid back...

Microsoft goes shopping.(acquisition of media-streams.com, FolderShare and Teleo S.p.A. by the company)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Microsoft is buying media-streams.com, a privately held Swiss ISV that makes communications applications based on Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. Terms were not disclosed. Media-streams' technology can help connect...

HP intros its first Unix blade.(new product Integrity BL60p from Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... HP Tuesday went down the IBM path and introduced the first Unix blade for its BladeSystem platform, starting at $5,695, with units expected to ship early next year. The new one- or two-way 1.66MHz Itanium-based Integrity BL60p blade supports...

Wyse to collaborate with AMD.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Wyse Technology Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Wyse has got a deal with AMD to deliver thin clients to emerging markets. Apparently Wyse's partner Inveneo is deploying Geode-based Wyse S50 Linux thin clients in Uganda as part of its Solar Power Communication Systems, which are designed to...

StorageTek whizzes up tape.(new product from Storage Technology Corp.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... StorageTek, or rather Sun, brought out the T10000 enterprise tape disk the other day, a thing that's been a couple of years in the making. It offers encryption at the drive level, which is supposed to protect information against unauthorized...

Uh-oh, here comes another Oracle wannabe.(Garnett & Helfrich Capital, Computer Associates International Inc. acquires Ingres)(Company Profile)
November 14, 2005... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya CA was gonna divest Ingres. Okay, okay, so it took 'em five months to admit it--reportedly there was a misunderstanding of the terms and the deal had to be revisited--but as we prophesied, Garnett & Helfrich...

Microsoft to move into grids.(introduces Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Bill Gates is supposed to keynote at Supercom this week and show off Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, basically marking Microsoft's move into grid computing, a bleeding-edge segment currently dominated by Microsoft's mortal foe, Linux. ...

Microsoft seeks to prove it gets the Google challenge: Microsoft opens its bible & ponders the end of the world as it knows it.
November 14, 2005... Microsoft Wednesday leaked an internal Bill Gates e-mail dated October 30 to the press underscoring the fact that the company has to build out the software-as-services model or get swept aside by the coming great "services wave" of...

Geac & Infor to create new ERP entity.(Golden Gate Capital acquires Geac Computer Corporation)
November 14, 2005... Golden Gate Capital, the San Francisco private equity firm, is going to acquire Canada's Geac Computer Corporation for $11.10 a share, roughly a billion dollars cash, a 27% premium over its stock price last Friday. The deal, financed...

Maffei to run Liberty Media.(Greg Maffei)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Greg Maffei is going to run Liberty Media, the plum job he left Oracle for last week. On Wednesday they announced that he was now CEO-elect and will serve an apprenticeship until the second quarter of next year when John Malone steps down...

Oracle VP becomes CEO of Borland.(Tod Nielsen)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Besides losing its CFO to Liberty Media, Oracle Tuesday lost its senior vice president of marketing and global sales support Tod Nielsen, another ex-Microsoft guy, to Borland. Only at Oracle for eight months, Nielsen is going to be...

W3C moves on semantic web.(World Wide Web Consortium)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... W3C director Tim Berners-Lee announced the formation of the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) Working Group in Galway Monday. The mission is to produce a standard means of exchanging rules on the web. Rules are key to the Semantic Web,...

Microsoft: better late than never.(upgrades SQL Server 2005)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... SQL Server 2005, a k a Yukon, Microsoft's first major database upgrade in five years, its Visual Studio 2005 toolbox, a k a Whidbey, and a beta BizTalk Server 2005 are now officially announced and a reproach to anything resembling timely...

HP upgrades its PC Blades solution.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... HP, as expected, updated its year-old PC blade solution, the stuff it calls Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI), on Monday and, as expected, replaced its Transmeta blades with an AMD Athlon 64 widget, a thing called the bc1500 blade PC,...

Db4objects implements native queries.(Microsoft Corp., contract)
November 14, 2005... Db4objects, the open source embedded object database start-up that Veritas founder Mark Leslie chairs, is about to become the first company to implement native queries for Java, C Sharp and Visual Basic.NET to increase developer productivity....

Novell Loses SuSE founder.(Hubert Mantel)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Without explaining exactly why SuSE founder Hubert Mantel resigned from Novell Tuesday, announcing his departure to the SuSE mailing list. He said it was "too late" for him and complained that "This is no longer the company I founded 13...

Linux worm circulating.(Linux Watch)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Linux Web servers have been under attack from a worm that McAfee has dubbed Lupper that's looking for boxes hosting vulnerable PHP/CGI scripts. McAfee says it's a derivative of the Linux/Slapper and BSD/Scalper worms and infected computers...

Zend fields PHP IDE.(new product Zend Studio 5.0 from Zend Technologies Ltd.)(integrated development environment)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Zend Technologies, the PHP house, announced Zend Studio 5 on Tuesday, the enhanced Integrated Development Environment for PHP that it promised. The widgetry has new features for developing, debugging, deploying and managing PHP...

GroupWise to embed Intellisync.(Novell Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Novell is going to embed Intellisync's real-time wireless push e-mail and Personal Information Management (PIM) in GroupWise 7 for access to "any platform, any device" for wireless messaging and collaboration. Novell said an important...

Steeleye ogles virtualization.(SteelEye Technology Inc. plans to develop a computer game)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Steeleye's going to get into the virtualization game next year by cozying up to VMware and Xen, according to its CTO James Bottomley. VMware is a tactical play, he says. Xen is strategic since as open source it's likely to make virtualization...

Dell appears to back off its $80b bogey.(revenue reports of the company)
November 14, 2005... Dell came in Thursday with earnings of 39 cents, off 28%, on revenues of $13.9 billion after a charge of $422 million due to restructuring, product rationalization, facilities closing and a bum capacitor in one of its PC lines and for the first...

AMD gaining.(market share of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... At 67.7% market share, AMD topped Intel in selling chips into retail-bound desktop PCs in the US last month according to the numbers compiled by market researcher Current Analysis, which says the situation is fluid and could change again this...

Microsoft ruling by spring.
November 14, 2005... Bo Vesterdorf, the president of the Court of First Instance that's supposed to hear Microsoft's appeal of its antitrust conviction by the European Commission, is making noises about having a decision "in early spring--hopefully before April."

Microsoft Research builds a prototype OS from scratch.
November 14, 2005... Because of Windows' myriad vulnerabilities --and the fact that it's showing its age--heck, its underpinnings are pre-Internet--Microsoft Research decided to throw out all the old dependencies and try its hand at building a brand new operating...

The SAP angle in Oracle's Innobase move.(partnership)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... So SAP has been paying MySQL a reportedly not insubstantial amount of money to make the MySQL database enterprise-worthy. (Remember that deal two years ago where MySQL got SAP DB and the two were supposed to build a next-generation MySQL based...

AOL watch.(negotiation for the acquisition of America Online Inc.)
November 14, 2005... Quoting two anonymous sources involved in the negotiations, the New York Times Monday described Microsoft as the "front-runner" in the AOL race, something our woman's intuition suspects is true simply because it's important to Microsoft in its...

Gnome it is then.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 14, 2005... To simplify things in its hour of need, Novell is reportedly going to default to Gnome from now on. Apparently OpenSuSE will still support KDE. Gnome is more enterprise.

Intel, Dell & Schlumberger collaborate on box.(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Intel, Dell and Schlumberger are working a new workstation for the oil and gas industry, their contribution to the energy crisis. The widget is supposed to be endowed with superior data throughput, computation performance and 3D graphical...

Samsung to spend $45b on R&D.(Samsung Group)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Samsung, which is already lauded as a chi-chi brand, is planning to spend $45 billion on R&D over the next five year to ensure its technological lead. It also intends to recruit some 30,000 new R&D staff by 2010. The money is supposed to go...

Juniper hires Cisco whistleblower.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 14, 2005... Michael Lynn, the security researcher who lost his job at Internet Security Systems after reporting a flaw in the software behind Cisco's Internet routers, has gone to work for Cisco rival Juniper Networks.

Business objects, SAP extend deal.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 14, 2005... Business Objects has extended its OEM deal with SAP, a holdover from Crystal Decisions that includes integrating Crystal reporting with SAP NetWeaver BI.

Google takes to the skies.(Sergey Brin and Larry Page purchased Boeing 767)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are buying a wide-body Boeing 767 that can carry 180 people and when refurbished is supposed to have a sitting area, two staterooms with adjoining lavatories and a shower, a large sitting and dining...

Christians 1, lions up a tree.(rules on Grokster services)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Grokster, the once-popular IP-flouting file-sharing site, is dead. On Monday it posted a message reading, "The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying...