Client Server News articles from November 2006

Client Server News archives from November 2006

Saints alive, Microsoft teams with Novell on Linux.
November 6, 2006... Did you feel that? That really was the ground moving beneath your feet. Microsoft has gone and done the unthinkable and teamed up with Novell. It will help sell SUSE Linux along with Windows, recommending SUSE to customers with an irrepressible...

It's executive carnage at HP.(four general managers resigned from Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... HP may still be Wall Street's darling, scandal or no, but between Carly and Patti it evidently ain't a great place to work. It's lost four general managers in the last two weeks. Steve Smith, the head of HP's revenue-flat $15.5 billion...

IBM bitten by the thin client bug.(International Business Machines Corp. deploying desktops for thin clients using Linux operating system)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Remember when CEO Sam Palmisano said IBM was going to swap out its Windows desktops for Linux? Well, now it's talking about swapping out desktops for thin clients. There are already 4,000 of them deployed internally and Patricia...

Oracle buys Stellent.
November 6, 2006... The ever-acquisitive Oracle has now bought business content management house Stellent Inc for $440 million or $13.50 a share, a 27% premium. Stellent customers use it to deploy multiple line-of-business applications--such as web sites,...

Ex-CA CEO Sanjay Kumar gets 12 years in jail.(chief executive officer)
November 6, 2006... Former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar was sentenced Thursday morning to 12 years in jail for his role in backdating contracts so the company could meet Wall Street's revenue expectations, a practice that CA called "35-day months" that ballooned into a...

On Halloween, Google says 'Boo!' again to Microsoft.(Google acquired JotSpot)
November 6, 2006... On Halloween Google made another one of those moves that's supposed to scare the bejesus out of Microsoft and get everyone else wondering what it's up to. It bought another baby company, a 27-man two-year-old PaloAlto, California...

IBM puts dashboard across major virtualization platforms.(International Business Machines Corp. developing systems management software "Systems Director")(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... IBM has introduced what it calls the industry's first dashboard for major virtualization platforms, a thing called Systems Director, an extension to IBM Director. Users are supposed to be able to discover, monitor and manage physical and...

Office Live on runway.(online business application suites )(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Office Live is officially due out in the US on November 15 with betas becoming available for France, Germany, the UK and Japan. The Basic ad-supported stuff, which gives small businesses a way to create web sites with 25 company-branded...

Advocacy groups file big brother complaint with the FTC.
November 6, 2006... The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), two public interest advocacy groups, have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the agency to investigate online advertising. They...

Microsoft cozies up to PHP.(partnered with Zend Technologies for developing web development applications )
November 6, 2006... Microsoft has taken up with Zend Technologies, the open source PHP commercialer that wants PHP to be a de facto standard in web development. PHP, remember, is an integral part of the open source LAMP stack, the Windows alternative....

Novell plays musical chairs.(appointed Maarten Koster and promoted Troy Richardson and Susan Heystee )(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Novell has named Maarten Koster president of Novell Asia-Pacific, a post it has had trouble keeping manned, and promoted its Northeast US general sales manager Troy Richardson president of Novell Americas. Richardson's predecessor Susan Heystee...

Pre-Novell, Red Hat wasn't gonna cut prices.(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik says he's not going to cut prices despite Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's move to undercut him. At least that was Red Hat's first response when Matthew went on CNBC last Friday after his stock took a nasty hit. Whether...

Windows embedded CE made shared source.(Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Microsoft has made the kernel of the newly available real-time Windows Embedded CE 6.0 shared source, a hex sign against Linux inroads into the market. The company has been inching towards the move. Previously only about 40% of the thing...

XenSource gets third-round money.(Linux Watch)
November 6, 2006... XenSource must be getting serious. It's gotten $15 million of a $21 million C round from its three original investors plus Radar Partners. The open source virtualization start-up has previously raised $23.5 million from Kleiner Perkins, Seven...

White box merchants to bundle SUSE.(Novell contracts with ETegro Technologies, Maxdata, Transtec and R Cubed)(SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.0)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Novell has signed deals with four white box merchants to bundle SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on their PCs and notebooks. The four include European houses ETegro Technologies, Maxdata and Transtec and US shop R Cubed. Novell says other...

Microsoft extends OSP to Office XML.(Linux Watch)
November 6, 2006... Microsoft has added its Office XML File Formats to its newfangled Open Specification Promise (OSP) not to enforce its patents no matter who uses it and what their business model is. It started the OSP in September with a mess of web...

Supreme Court to hear Microsoft appeal.(AT&T filed case against Microsoft for patent infringement)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... The US Supreme Court is going to hear Microsoft's appeal of a dispute with AT&T, a fight that all software makers have a dog in. Microsoft was found guilty of infringing an AT&T patent but claims the damages don't extend to products created...

Neoware replaces CEO with ex-president of SAP America.(Neoware Systems Inc. appointed Klaus Besier)(chief executive officer)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Caught in a cycle of declining revenues, Neoware, the thin client house, replaced its CEO Monday with ex-SAP America president Klaus Besier, leaving incumbent Michael Kantowitz as executive chairman. Besier has been president of Neoware since...

Backdating watch.(43 Silicon Valley firms are under investigation for backdating cases)
November 6, 2006... SEC chairman Christopher Cox told an academic conference Monday that he expects new backdating cases to be brought soon. So far, only former executives of Comverse Technology and Brocade Communications have been formally charged. Otherwise,...

eBay a counterfeiter's paradise: Microsoft.(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Microsoft said Monday that it had filed 55 criminal and civil suits in 11 countries against people selling allegedly pirated copies of its software on eBay. Action was taken in the US, Germany, the UK, Holland, France, Belgium, Australia,...

Dell starts selling AMD laptops.(Dell Inspiron 1501)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Without any fanfare, even a press release, Dell started selling AMD-based laptops the other day. The company's Inspiron 1501 notebook can be configured with a range of AMD chips from the low-end Sempron through to the dual-core Turion 64...

Microsoft chases the little guy with freeware.(launched new financial software "Office Accounting Express 2007")(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Microsoft has put out Office Accounting Express 2007, a financial package targeted at early start-ups, eBay sellers and SOHOs that still use calculators and Excel spreadsheets, a market of some 20 million. It's a free download and includes...

Google reworks mobile Gmail.(Java client interface for mobile devices )(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Google is taking another crack at sending Gmail e-mail messages to cell phones and unchaining users from their desktops and their Blackberries. In this particular case Yahoo and Microsoft are ahead of it. A previously clumsy and...

EMC buys Avamar for $165m.
November 6, 2006... EMC has bought privately held Irvine, California-based Avamar Technologies for its enterprise-class data protection software and its patented data de-duplicating technology. It's paying $165 million in cash, expects the acquisition to close in...

HP intros its first dedicated storage blade.(Hewlett-Packard Co., HP BladeSystem)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... HP Tuesday announced its first dedicated storage blade. The company says the Storage-Works SB40c can add a maximum 876GB of direct attached RAID storage to each blade in an HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure. It's using small form factor...

Forgent patent suit settled.
November 6, 2006... Forgent Network, the notorious patent troll that sued PC makers who used the JPEG standard for patent infringement, at one point some 45 firms, said Wednesday that the case had been settled. It didn't disclose the terms but told one paper it...

Yahoo + AOL?(Yahoo plans to acquiring America Online Inc.)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Fortune Magazine, which is owned by Time Warner, says it has it from multiple sources that Yahoo has approached Time Warner about buying AOL, an attempt to reopen negotiations that broke down a year ago and, if successful, increase its traffic....

Google Kvetches to EC.(European Commission for Microsoft antitrust violations)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Google has been complaining to the European Commission about Vista and its search, joining, let's see, McAfee, Symantec and Adobe. Seems Google is keeping a watching brief on any perceived antitrust missteps Microsoft may make. It's unclear...

VC remorse?(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... Oracle's move to undermine the open source model by undercutting Red Hat's support pricing reportedly has VCs who've backed open source companies a bit worried. It will be interesting to watch to see how many new open source firms get funded...

One Laptop Per Child for the rest of us.(Quanta wants to use the platform to make cheap laptops)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Quanta, which is making the MIT One Laptop Per Child box, wants to use the platform to make cheap stripped-down ~$300 laptops for Europe and the US too. The Financial Times quoted an analyst at Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry think...

IBM & Lehman Brothers create Chinese investment fund.(International Business Machines Corp., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... IBM has teamed up with Lehman Brothers. The pair intends to invest $180 million in mid-to relatively matured public and private Chinese companies and fix any problem they might have. They'll target technology, telecom and industrial groups. As...

HP to pocket Mercury momentarily.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... HP's tender offer for Mercury Interactive has fetched the number of shares HP needed to complete the acquisition. It expects to suck Mercury up in the next few days.

Microsoft licenses first Chinese.(Comtech Group Inc. and Hunan Talkweb Information System Company Ltd. for digital media-style prototype technologies )(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Microsoft has its first Chinese licensees. Under the aegis of Microsoft IP Ventures, two software companies, Comtech Group Inc and Hunan Talkweb Information System Company Ltd, are licensing three digital media-style prototype technologies...

Merrill cuts Intel.(Merrill Lynch and Company Inc.)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Merrill Lynch has gone sour on Intel, reducing its 2007 earnings estimates from $1.30 to $1.18 and downgrading it from "buy" to "neutral." Analyst Joe Osha cites weakening demand and persistent excess capacity. He continues to believe that the...

How big the chip market.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... Lehman Brothers thinks AMD will sell about 16.9 million chips this quarter (25% of the market), Intel about 52.1 million (75% of the market). It thinks AMD will increase its market share from 23% in calendar '06 to 25% in calendar '07 selling...

Oracle impact.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... Gartner says that upwards of 80% of new Linux database sales are attributable to Oracle.

Explosion at PayPal.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... There was what authorities said was a deliberately contrived explosion at PayPal Halloween night that shattered windows. Police found no device. No one was hurt. The campus was closed.

SRAM makers under investigation.(static random access memory)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... The EC's antitrust police raided German SRAM memory makers, including Samsung Germany, suspected of running a price-fixing cartel. On this side of the pond the Justice Department is investigating Sony, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Micron and Cypress...

SQL Server chief out.(Paul Flessner resigned from Microsoft)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Paul Flessner, the head of Microsoft's Data Storage and Platform Division that does the highly successful SQL Server, will hand over his day-to-day responsibilities to Ted Kummert come the first of the year. Kummert is currently corporate VP...

Helmi joins Eclipse.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... Helmi Technologies has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-in Provider. Helmi supplies an AJAX-based browser-independent open source RIA platform.

IBM to open SOA centers overseas.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... IBM will open two new SOA development centers in China and India, each employing 500 people. China is supposed to focus on banks and government, India on healthcare and insurance.

Apple gets two-month reprieve.(BILLY GRAMS)
November 6, 2006... The Nasdaq says it won't delist Apple if it files its missing 10-Q covering the July quarter and figures out whatever restatements it has to make because of its backdating issues by December 29. Apple says if it can't meet the deadline, it'll...

Indian City loses its brand.(Bangalore)(Brief article)
November 6, 2006... Bangalore, India's thriving and increasingly famous tech hub, isn't Bangalore any more. Nope, the name has gone the way of Bombay, Madras and the Raj along with other anglicanizations. Now it's called Bengalooru, which we're told derives from...

Vista is finished ... done ... ready ... finally.(Microsoft Windows Vista)
November 13, 2006... The long march to Windows Vista is over. Wednesday morning Microsoft released the operating system to manufacturing. An hour later it got on the horn to tell the press that business would have the thing "on or before" November 30, the last...

Egenera vBlade to manage virtual machines.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Egenera, one of the first of the virtualization contingent, is deepening its virtualization support with a thing called vBlade, a software add-on to its BladeFrame system. It will let customers manage both physical blades and virtual...

Office 2007 sent to manufacturing.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Office 2007 is in the can as they used to say in Hollywood. Microsoft confirmed Monday that the software had been released to manufacturing (RTM) after a second beta involving more than 3.5 million people. Starting December 1 Microsoft...

PeopleSoft founder warms up for grudge match with Oracle.
November 13, 2006... PeopleSoft founder David Duffield is back for more with that start-up he's been honing the last 18 months for a grudge match with Oracle, which bought PeopleSoft out from under him. The start-up is called Workday Inc and has the beginnings...

Dell delivers first Intel quad Xeons & first AMD business desktop.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Dell may have abandoned its Intel purity but it's apparently still got dibs on Intel's first quad-core Xeon chip or simply took the liberty of getting out first--the chips haven't been formally introduced yet. That won't happen until Tuesday....

Microsoft, IBM, HP, CA, Red Hat & GE finance patent reform attempt.
November 13, 2006... Microsoft, IBM, HP, CA, Red Hat and GE, some of which have significant patent portfolios, are financing the Community Patent Review project, the collaborative effort between the US Patent and Trademark Office and New York Law School's Institute...

VMware moves into testing.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... There is now such a thing as VMware Lab Manager, which is supposed to make it possible for enterprise developers to use software development and test lab assets more efficiently, accelerate the development cycle and increase software quality....

HP teams with VMware on desktops.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Having passed Dell in PCs, HP is now suggesting that companies don't overprovision and trotted out a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that consolidates physical desktop PCs onto a single server that's centrally hosted and managed in the...

Zeus & the Virtual Traffic Cop.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... UK-based Zeus Technology has unwrapped a new version of its flagship traffic management technology that operates as a virtual appliance in virtualized data centers. It's called, pointedly enough, the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual...

Transitive's Sparc-to-Itanium Widgetry moves out of beta.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Transitive's Intel-backed QuickTransit software for moving software that runs on Solaris-on-Sparc and to Linux-on-Itanium--supposedly without a hitch--pretty much along the lines of what it did for Apple--has moved out of beta and is now...

Gateway servers go AMD.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Gateway's server line, up to now strictly Intel, has admitted AMD to its ranks. It's got dual-core 1U, 2U and 3U rack-mounted models to start, promising more to come. The first boxes, which can field upgrade to quad cores next year--one of...

HP & SAP team on research.
November 13, 2006... HP Labs and SAP Research are going to put their heads together and work on technologies to exploit synergies between HP's Adaptive Infrastructure management technologies and SAP's Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (Enterprise SOA). ...

Adobe's new CFO doesn't stick.(Randy Furr)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Adobe has lost its CFO Randy Furr, the ex-president and COO of Sanmina-SCI, less than six months into the job. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen will pick up the reins while the company looks for a replacement. Adobe says Furr's resignation is "unrelated...

Oracle buys SPL.
November 13, 2006... Oracle is doing two acquisitions a week now. Last Friday, after having said it was buying ECM maven Stellent, Oracle announced it had acquired SPL WorldGroup from private equity funds manager GFI Energy Ventures LLC. Terms of the deal were...

Lenovo quarter disappoints.
November 13, 2006... Lenovo, third behind HP and Dell in PCs with Acer pushing up its rear, is finding it hard to become an international player. Its Q2 earnings were off 16% year-over-year at $38 million on revenues up 1.3% to $3.7 billion. It blamed slow...

Microsoft to pay Novell $348m less the $40m Novell pays Redmond.(Linux Watch)
November 13, 2006... Novell Tuesday night skimmed a beaker or two off the ocean of ambiguity that everybody's been swimming in since the Microsoft-Novell axis was announced five days before. It outlined the financial terms of its pact with the devil in an SEC...

Red Hat slips indemnification clause into its defenses.(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... In response to the new Microsoft, Novell, Oracle front it's facing, Red Hat quietly slipped an indemnification clause into its defenses. After the Microsoft-Novell rapprochement last Thursday, Red Hat posted a FAQ adding indemnification to...

SFLC dumps on Microsoft's patent pledge.(Linux Watch)
November 13, 2006... The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), the open source advocate that got its funding from OSDL's sponsors, has a letter to the FOSS community on its site dissing Microsoft's pledge not to sue individual non-aligned non-commercial open source...

XenEnterprise close.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... XenSource says that XenEnterprise, its virtualization platform for both Windows and Linux, will be released next month for Windows Server 2003, XP and Linux. Support for Windows 2000 will come along in Q1. Pricing will start at $488...

Adobe gives aid and comfort to Firefox.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Adobe, which has got a bone or two to pick with Microsoft, has teamed up with the open source Mozilla Foundation in what can only be described as a browser platform play. Adobe is giving Mozilla and its Firefox browser the source code for...

EC to create open source repository.(Linux Watch)(European Commission)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... The European Commission has tapped a consortium led by Unisys Belgium to set up and run an Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) to promote the use of open source in the public sector. The Repository is supposed to extend the EC's...

Panasas no longer 'lunatic fringe' play.(Len Rosenthal)
November 13, 2006... Newly arrived Panasas chief marketing officer Len Rosenthal, fresh from PathScale, which he co-founded and sold to QLogic, says Panasas' days of playing to the "lunatic fringe" are waning. Its value proposition makes it mission-critical,...

Penguin thinks it's found the golden goose.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Penguin has developed a simple low-cost compute node that it believes will be a volume player in the HPC cluster space if customer demand is any judge. Penguin, which will debut the widget at Supercomputing, also thinks it has a six-month...

OSDL seeks technical writer.(Linux Watch)
November 13, 2006... OSDL is going to dip into that Fellowship Fund it set up in March and bestow a one-year grant on someone to write Linux kernel documentation. OSDL got the money from Google and HP. It's looking for more pledges.

SEC chief lassoed into anti-Microsoft debate.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz got an answer back from SEC Commissioner Christopher Cox about his proposal that the SEC accept corporate blogs to make the material disclosures historically made in 8-Ks, press releases and conference calls. And...

Scali gets new money, new CEO.(appoints Jack Kay)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Scali, the Linux clusterer, has gotten another $3.5 million in funding and a new CEO. Bjorn Skare has been replaced by Jack Kay, the president and CEO of BIOS house Phoenix Technologies during the 90s when its market share spiraled from...

Red Hat cuddles with VMware.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Red Hat, which is about to put Xen in its operating system, expanded its alliance with VMware Wednesday, promising interoperability and certification. They're supposed to collaborate on virtual machine disk formats, paravirtualization and...

Appro's life among the gods.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Appro has delivered the first of four Infiniband-connected Linux supercomputing clusters to Lawrence Livermore National Labs. The thing is called Rhea, after the Greek version of the Great Mother Goddess, and consists of 576 four-way...

Sun closer to Ubuntu.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... In the throes of a budding relationship with Canonical Ltd, Sun says Glassfish, the open source Java Enterprise Edition 5 application server, will be available on Ubuntu, the species of Linux Canonical is commercializing. Glassfish is currently...

IBM wants to own the cluster space.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... IBM, currently number three in clusters behind HP and Dell, is determined to be number one by the end of 2008, according to Wendy McGee, program director of its Cluster Solutions Brand & Business Unit. Bearing down on its mark, IBM has...

Mono 1.2 out.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Mono1.2 is out and Novell says it's a lot closer to compatibility with .NET Framework 2.0. Now feature complete, it adds support for the Windows Forms API, the GUI part of the framework, and makes it easier to translate the port .NET...

Why Microsoft-Novell?(licencing agreement between Microsoft Corp., Novell Inc.)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Rumor--underscore rumor--has it that Microsoft did the Novell deal because Novell threatened it with IP, which might explain why Microsoft is paying Novell $108 million under their "patent agreement." As a side benefit, Microsoft gets to...

Oracle Linux dissed.(BillyGrams)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... "This is a prototype that was cobbled together by a handful of people and tossed out there to support Larry's latest visionary thing. It does not have the stability behind it that customers can use in production."--Hapoalim Securities USA...

Sun to open source Java under GPL: report.(BillyGrams)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Sun is going to open source Java--at least its mobile (ME) and standard editions (SE) to start--under the GPL perhaps next week, according to CRN. And then move Java Enterprise Edition and the GlassFish reference implementation out from the...

AMD cuts Opteron prices.(BillyGrams)
November 13, 2006... My, my. AMD cut Opteron prices, so far pretty insulated, as much as 47% last week. The average was between 25% and 30%. Presumably this is a short-term response to Intel's Woodcrest, despite the general assumption that AMD will continue to take...

HP entrusts its software future to Mercury.(Mercury Interactive Corp.)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... HP closed on its big Mercury Interactive acquisition Tuesday and will be creating a new HP Software operation meant to make HP a leader in business technology optimization (BTO). Scuttlebutt claims Mercury personnel are getting all the plum...

Big doings at Dell: BusinessWeek.(BillyGrams)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... BusinessWeek says that Michael Dell is doing some headhunting, looking first for a new services boss and then some new blood willing to come on board to fill other strategic trouble spots in the company, contemplating what the book was told...

Quad watch.(Intel Corp. introduces quad-core Xeons )(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Intel is supposed to formally introduce its quad-core Xeons on Tuesday, November 14, almost a week after Dell said it stood ready to deliver servers and workstations based on them. Intel is expected to trot out four versions, three for servers,...

Wither open text?(Oracle corp buys Stellent Inc.)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Oracle's buying Stellent for $440 million cash last week means that "one of the major potential buyers of Open Text is leaving the stage, and becoming a competitor," according to Credit Suisse. The broker figures that other potential buyers,...

Microsoft axe falls.(BillyGrams)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund, the Microsoft axe, is looking for a new job on the buy side. He's expected to move in the next year. As a fallback, he could always start his own fund, he told the Wall Street Journal. Sherlund's been...

Microsoft rummages in Ma Bell's old trunk for a new outfit.(BillyGrams)(Brief article)
November 13, 2006... In Tokyo for a Microsoft conference, CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft would be seriously going into the VoIP market the beginning of the year--not just dabbling with it like it has been--and incorporating the widgetry into all its operating...