Client Server News articles from November 2008

Client Server News archives from November 2008

Salesforce Pushes To Be an End-to-End Cloud.
November 10, 2008... As a software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com has always been fluffy, but it got even cloudier, so to speak, Monday when it introduced Force.com Sites, an extension of its SaaS platform, offering to let its customers build their...

NetSuite Hurls Stone at German Goliath.(Brief article)
November 10, 2008... NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company, the on-demand one usually seen as a foil for Salesforce.com and its CEO, ex-Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, has started directing its attention to Larry's great hereditary enemy, SAP. It's got a...

Cisco Emits an Edvard Munch-like Scream on Behalf of Industry.(Brief article)
November 10, 2008... Cisco, which is regarded as one of those telltale bellwethers, said Wednesday that orders were down 9% across-the-board in October - the market's first indication of how October went - after a 7% spike in August - and that it looks like...

Cisco To Put $100m into Sales to Small Companies.
November 10, 2008... Cisco said Thursday that it will invest $100 million in selling widgetry to companies with less than 100 people, a $10 billion market. Said products, labeled "Cisco Small Business" or "Cisco Small Business Pro," would be for connectivity,...

DOJ Takes Credit for Shooting Down Yahoogle Deal.
November 10, 2008... The Justice Department made it crystal clear Wednesday morning that if Google hadn't abandoned its controversial ad deal with Yahoo, like it did, the companies would have found themselves hauled in court. It's the first time Google has...

Jerry Yang, The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
November 10, 2008... Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's signal distinction right now is being the only man in the industry to have both Microsoft and Google, both potential partners, walk out on him - and in the space of only six months. That's gotta be some kind of record....

Dell to Staff: 'Take the Day Off'.(Brief article)
November 10, 2008... Dell wants its ~80,000 people to take five days off without pay between now and January 30 to save the company money and avoid more layoffs. Layoff avoidance also means a hiring freeze, terminating some contract workers, cutting back on...

Microsoft Gives Pet Start-ups Free Software.
November 10, 2008... Microsoft has thought up a giveaway scheme called BizSpark designed to ensure that entrepreneurs and early-stage startups don't defect to, oh, say, open source where the tools are free by providing them with thousands of dollars worth of...

Intel Dumps Part of its VMware Stake.
November 10, 2008... Intel has sold off a part of its position in VMware, the vaunted virtualization leader. We're talking a million shares here to start, half of which went to Cisco - which already owns a 1.5% piece of VMware - and the other half went back to...

Fujitsu To Buy Out Siemens.(Brief article)
November 10, 2008... Fujitsu is going to buy out its antsy partner Siemens for 450 million euros (currently a bit over $575 million) and take control of Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV come next April 1 when the joint venture will be integrated into the greater...

IBM Sues One of its Own VPs To Stop Him from Going to Apple.
November 10, 2008... IBM has sued one of its top executives, a guy who knows all its secrets, to stop him from going to work for Apple and sharing those secrets with Steve Jobs. It has asked a New York federal court to enforce the non-compete signed by 26-year...

Ex-IBM Guy To Run iPhone, iPod Development.
November 10, 2008... Mark Papermaster, the ex-IBM heavyweight that IBM is suing to stop him from working at Apple, has been named senior VP of devices hardware engineering running Apple's iPhone and iPod development. He replaces Tony Fadell, pretty much the...

Pitney Bowes Jumps on Microsoft's Cloud-in-the-Making Rival Earth Class Mail Calls It 'Lipstick on a Pig'.
November 10, 2008... Pitney Bowes Management Services Inc (PBMS) - the mail outsourcing subsidiary that the giant postage machine tried to sell earlier this year and reportedly couldn't - says it's going to work with Microsoft to put its dMail digital mail service...

IBM & Sun Take Another Swipe at Microsoft Office.
November 10, 2008... IBM and Sun, like ODF drug dealers trying to poison Microsoft Office, have launched the OpenDocument Format Toolkit Union, a new open source software community project to spread the toxin to business, the main Office constituency and source of...

IBM Spreads Symphony Around.
November 10, 2008... IBM said Wednesday that its free Office-wannabe ODF-supporting Lotus Symphony software is now running on Apple and Ubuntu Linux. Symphony first appeared as a public beta a year ago September and is now available in beta for the increasingly...

Ingres & Red Hat To Launch Stack.
November 10, 2008... Ingres and Red Hat have put together a solution stack consisting of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system, Ingres Database, and JBoss Enterprise Middleware and plan to aim the thing at ISVs in EMEA starting later this month. They say...

Elastra Does Tomcat.(Brief article)
November 10, 2008... Elastra, the start-up with the push-button software for configuring, deploying and managing application on Amazon's cloud, can now support Apache Tomcat 5.5, its first web/application server, adding web apps and java servlets to its portfolio....

Sun Serves a Filet of GlassFish, Not the Whole Thing.
November 10, 2008... Well, Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6 isn't ready yet - and won't be until the middle of next year - but Sun's got a thing called GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude that's meant to show off some of EE 6's features. The widgetry's a...

RightScale Supports Open Source Cloud To Tickle Cloud Adoption.
November 10, 2008... RightScale, the cloud manager, is supporting the open source Eucalyptus Public Cloud (EPC) run by the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) for purposes of cloud research and experimentation. RightScale and Eucalyptus want to...

Sun Shareholders Want Say on Executive Pay.
November 10, 2008... It must have been the news that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz got $7.7 million in compensation in the year ending in June that did it. Or maybe it was the chauffeur. These little revelations came out right before the company wrote off an...

If Gas Prices Spike Again Do We Picket Armonk?
November 10, 2008... IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has been named "presiding director" of Exxon's board. That means that - in the name of corporate governance - he will chair the board in the absence of the real chairman, CEO Rex Tillerson, and chair executive sessions of...

Symantec's Preparing Pink Slips.
November 10, 2008... Symantec CEO John Thompson said the company is planning to reduce its "head count budget" by 4.5%, which, depending on how that expression's interpreted, could be about 800 people.

Oracle Sucks Up Tacit Software.
November 10, 2008... Oracle has bellied up to the buffet table again and sucked up the IP assets of Tacit Software for its Beehive enterprise collaboration platform. Tacit's SaaS and on-premise automated profiling technology helps uncover new collaboration...

AMD Cans 3%.
November 10, 2008... AMD has canned 500 people, 3% of its workforce, in an attempt to hit $1.5 billion breakeven. It terminated 1,600 people earlier this year. The new cuts do not impact the manufacturing side of its business that's being spun out into a joint...

Ex-McAfee Exec To Run Rackspace Sales.
November 10, 2008... Rackspace Hosting, one of the wannabe cloud merchants, has named former McAfee EVP, Americas sales Jim Lewandowski to run worldwide sales, replacing Glenn Reinus, who will retire.

Circuit City Closing Shops.
November 10, 2008... Circuit City, the consumer electronics chain that was already having problems before the bottom fell out of the economy, consumer spending died, it lost $162.7 million last quarter, and the company started having its own particular credit...

Sony Recalls More Batteries.
November 10, 2008... Sony's back to recalling batteries. This time 100,000 lithium-ion battery packs, made in 2004-05, that went into HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and Acer laptops. Again for overheating and starting fires. In 2006 it recalled nine million batteries...

Otellini: 'It's Ugly Out There'.
November 10, 2008... Paul Otellini told the Web 2.0 Summit Thursday that this is probably the deepest recession he's ever seen, that it should last two-three quarters in the US and that unemployment will be really nasty and linger past a return to growth.

Obama & High Tech.(Barack Obama )(Brief article)
November 10, 2008... Barack Obama has named Internet doyen-cum-VC Julius Genachowski, who went to law school with the president-elect, to the transition team that's picking members of his administration. It suggests to the Washington Post that high-tech policy...

Engineer Changed with Stealing $1b Worth of Intel Secrets.
November 10, 2008... That Intel engineer, Biswamohan Pani, 33, who was charged over the summer with stealing Intel trade secrets before going to work at AMD allegedly downloaded a billion dollars worth of "top secret" Intel R&D documents according to a new...

In a Major Move VMware Expands into Mobile.
November 17, 2008... VMware, the bruised and bloodied virtualization leader, announced Monday morning that it's going into the mobile business with a high-end real-time cell phone hypervisor called MVP, short for Mobile Virtualization Platform. The move,...

VMware Buys Blue Lane in Hush-Hush Deal.(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... It appears that VMware quietly bought a little California number last month called Blue Lane Technologies, which, according to its web site, is no longer selling its wares on VMware's instructions. Blue Lane's stock-in-trade was securing...

Intel Says Business Stinks.
November 17, 2008... Intel didn't wait for its scheduled mid-quarter update on December 4. It came out after the market closed Wednesday evening and said business stinks. And that was after the market fell another 400 points. Intel took down its fourth-quarter...

Sun & Microsoft Cut Web Search Distribution Deal.
November 17, 2008... Who says the age of miracles is past? Sun, which loathes Microsoft, is going to distribute Microsoft's search toolbar with its Java Runtime Environment. Nope, it's not April fool's. More like Sun and Microsoft slurping out of the Obama...

AMD's Shanghai Chip a Go.
November 17, 2008... The day after Intel slashed its guidance and told the press that "orders just died," AMD, a company laboring under a really bad karma, said it's started selling Shanghai, its first 45nm quad-core Opteron chip, plunk in the middle of an economic...

Shrike Dies the Death of a Thousand Cuts.
November 17, 2008... Some people were harboring the notion that AMD might push up its move to 32nm. Well, it's not. The widgets should ramp in 2001 as expected but AMD is killing off Shrike (a k a Fusion), which has died the death of a thousand cuts, so...

LCD Companies Plead Guilty to Price Fixing.
November 17, 2008... LG, Sharp and Chunghwa have pled guilty to charges of fixing the price of LCD panels in defiance of the Sherman Antitrust Act and have agreed to pay $585 million in fines, the Justice Department said Wednesday. LG will pay $400 million,...

Ex-Oracle Heavyweight Lands SaaS Uppercut to Larry's Jaw.
November 17, 2008... John Wookey, who until a non-compete-suggestive 13 months ago ran Oracle's applications development - you know, its crucial next-generation "stitch-$20-billion-together" Fusion program - has gone to work for Oracle's hereditary enemy SAP. ...

Scared but Still Got Amazon- or Google-Envy? See Cassatt.(Company overview)
November 17, 2008... Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house. Coleman observed that...

HP Backs into the Cloud.
November 17, 2008... HP has said it doesn't want to be in the cloud business itself - merely sell gear to cloud makers - but it's lined up with little Salesforce.com rival NetSuite - owned mostly by Larry Ellison - to offer NetSuite's SaaS CRM and ERP applications...

Ballmer to Yang: 'Chuckle, Chuckle, Stew in Your Own Juice, Buddy'.
November 17, 2008... Jerry Yang's pants are down around his ankles. He's got no Google deal. And he can't tease Microsoft into taking another run at Yahoo. After Yang publicly asked Microsoft to take another shot last Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer...

Clouds Need Big Closets: EMC.
November 17, 2008... EMC unveiled its massively scalable cloud storage Monday, the stuff that it's been working on for a long time now under the code names Hulk and Maui, Hulk for the hardware and Maui for the software, branding the whole megillah Atmos as it moved...

Court Tells Ex-IBM Exec To Stop Working for Apple.
November 17, 2008... Well it appears that non-compete agreements may carry a bit more weight in New York than they do in California - at least to a judge right down the block from IBM headquarters. Steve Jobs' pick to run Apple's iPod and iPhone development...

Sun Claims To Revolutionize Storage.
November 17, 2008... Storage has been like a penitential chain around Sun's neck and it's left unspeakable gouges. Sun's $4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek was one of the reasons the company wrote off $1.4 billion of its business in the September quarter....

Citrix Claims To Cut Enterprise Web Apps Delivery Costs.
November 17, 2008... [cedilla] NetScaler AppExpert Template for Microsoft SharePoint Citrix has upgraded its NetScaler web application delivery appliance with a welter of 350 new features whose biggest trick is configuring each web application automatically and...

Vanishing Consumer Hurts Best Buy.
November 17, 2008... The toxic virus of soft consumer spending has hit Best Buy forcing it to axe its earnings guidance for the year and take it from $3.25-$3.40 a share to somewhere between $2.30 and $2.90. The retailer's eroding outlook will of course...

Circuit City Files for Bankruptcy Protection.
November 17, 2008... Last week Circuit City, the second-biggest electronics retailer in the US, decided to close down 25% of its stores, some 155 shops, by December 31 - in part because suppliers wanted to be paid upfront. When its suppliers heard the news it...

Clouds & Friends Need Honking Big Routers: Cisco.
November 17, 2008... Cisco has got a new "close to the user" edge router that can push 250,000 songs or 200 feature films a second. (Figure 6.4 terabytes a second.) The widget, which starts at $80,000 and reportedly took $200 million to develop, is called the...

Cisco & VMware Team.
November 17, 2008... Cisco and VMware are collaborating on making Cisco MDS storage area networks (SANs), which are already supposed to be virtual machine-optimized, more secure, scalable and easier to manage when attached to VMware environments. Cisco, remember,...

Lotus Goes into the Hardware Business.(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... IBM has found something else to do with Linux. Its Lotus software operation is going into the hardware business - geez, first Oracle, now Lotus. It's concocted a Linux-based server appliance for e-mail, calendaring and its...

Qualcomm Launches Low-Cost PC Alternative.
November 17, 2008... Qualcomm figures it's got a PC alternative for emerging markets and the reference design to go with it. The widgetry is code named Kayak and leverages the widespread availability of 3G wireless broadband to bring Internet connectivity to...

Novell Goes Poaching.
November 17, 2008... Novell is trying to entice users of other people's Linux like Red Hat and CentOS to its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with a new subscription and Expanded Support program. It's dangling a three-year subscription to SLES that provides technical...

AMD Prays Acid Rain Falls on Atom.
November 17, 2008... AMD can't quite muster an Atom smasher but it still wants to harness the fallout. So it's going to proposed Yukon as a netbook alternative to Intel's Atom chip. Well, okay, maybe not exactly a netbook, maybe more of an ultraportable...

Dell's Bench Thins.
November 17, 2008... Dell's CTO Kevin Kettler will be leaving in January to do other things and the company has already parted company with Casey Jones, the VP of marketing it hired from McCann Erickson last year. Jones was the one who convinced Dell to fire its...

Microsoft Offers 0% Financing.
November 17, 2008... Because of the credit crunch, Microsoft is offers 0% financing for 36 months to new credit-approved Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM customers willing to buy $20,000-$1 million worth of software right now. The promotion is available in...

IBM, Contract Manufacturer.
November 17, 2008... IBM Microelectronics has hung out a shingle reading "Ovens for Rent," a move that's supposed to threaten Intel's lead. It's offering to make chi-chi, state-of-the-art - not to mention pricey - 45nm Silicon on Insulator (SOI) parts that are...

Google CEO Nixes Political Appointment.
November 17, 2008... In an interview last Friday with fawning CNBC pundit Jim Cramer, Google CEO and Barack Obama transition economic adviser Eric Schmidt said he wasn't interested in the job of US CTO, a position Obama might make into a cabinet-level post....

HP Claims Inroads into IBM's Mainframe Monopoly.
November 17, 2008... HP said Monday that 250 of IBM's mainframe customers have migrated to HP Integrity systems over the past two years. HP thinks IBM has something like 10,000-12,000 mainframe customers so it has a way to go yet to be really dangerous. It quotes...

Suppose He'll Go Out for Coffee?
November 17, 2008... HP has hired Starbucks CFO Peter Bocian as its chief administrative officer, reporting to CEO Mark Hurd and responsible for HP Financial Services and real estate services. Bocain used to be CFO at NCR. Hurd was CEO of NCR. Bocain replaces Jon...

Red Hat Adds to Board.
November 17, 2008... Red Hat has named Micheline Chau, president and COO of Lucasfilm, and Jeff Clarke - yes, that Jeff Clarke formerly of HP and CA and now CEO of Travelport - to its board. Both came up on the financial side.

Lenovo Takes 78% Earnings Hit.(Lenovo Group Ltd.)(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... Lenovo's profits dropped 78% in the September quarter to $23 million, down from $105 million last year, on the back of $4.3 billion in sales because of slower sales to corporates, a problem rolling out new products and lower margins. Analysts...

There are Bug Trackers and Then There are Bug Trackers.(Brief article)
November 17, 2008... Google has added free voice and video conversations to Gmail and launched a free web service developed with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the flu. It's based on the number of searches made about the flu. Apparently...

Clouds are Our Destiny: Gartner.
November 17, 2008... Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman says the destiny of large corporate data centers is the cloud, private ones that is, modeled after Google and Amazon and use public clouds like an overdraft. He also predicts that a great many small businesses...

Mind Mapping in the Cloud.(Company overview)
November 24, 2008... Apple's not the only one telling people to "Think Different." So is an outfit called Mindjet. It's into mind mapping, which isn't as chilling as it sounds. It's merely a way of brainstorming and diagramming non-linear thinking that...

Cloud Envelops Exchange & SharePoint.
November 24, 2008... Microsoft on Monday pushed multi-tenant SaaS versions of Exchange and SharePoint out of the beta nest. Some 7,000 concerns participated in the beta. Now the stuff's available to all comers. Exchange Online will cost $10 per user a...

Microsoft Says No to Yahoo Acquisition - Again.
November 24, 2008... Microsoft is open to a search deal with Yahoo, "very open" apparently, but CEO Steve Ballmer again nixed the thought of revisiting an acquisition, according to both the AP and Reuters. The AP quotes him as saying, "Let me be clear. We are done...

Amazon Launches CloudFront.
November 24, 2008... Amazon has launched a HTTP content delivery service (CDN) called CloudFront that works with its S3 cloud storage widgetry and EC2. It's now a public beta, having been privately tested the last couple few months. It's the stuff Amazon...

Cute Trick Saves Dell's Bad News from Looking Worse.
November 24, 2008... At the end of one of the worst days in the history of Wall Street, when every metric ultimately reacted like acid eating through a thin plate of copper, Dell posted its third-quarter results, returning a surprise 9% increase in EPS on deflated...

Microsoft To Kill Windows Live OneCare for Morro.
November 24, 2008... In a move that looks tailor-made for an antitrust suit, Microsoft says it's going to give away a consumer security kit that it's building code named Morro. It should be available in the second half of next year - probably more like mid-year....

Intel's New Chip is Here.
November 24, 2008... Intel's most complex x86 desktop chip ever, a tiny part loaded with an incredible 731 million transistors that's been five years in the making, has been released to the most dubious demand environment ever, especially for desktops - dubious...

HP: Economic Contrarian.
November 24, 2008... HP jumped the gun Tuesday and told the worried multitudes a week ahead of when it's supposed to release its latest numbers that it more than just survived the volatile quarter it just ended in October when the bottom fell out of the economy....

Symantec CEO To Step Down.
November 24, 2008... Symantec CEO John Thompson, 59, the ex-IBMer who bit off more than he could chew when Symantec acquired Veritas for $13.5 billion three years ago, is going to retire at the end of the company's fiscal year in March. He will however remain...

EMC's New Cloud Concern is, Well, Very Cloudy.
November 24, 2008... EMC has taken its Mozy and Pi holdings - Pi being the stealth-mode mystery start-up it bought along with ex-Microsoft kingpin Paul Maritz before it fired Diane Greene and put him in charge of VMware - and Mozy being its year-old $76 million...

Microsoft Sues WebXchange over IDE.
November 24, 2008... Microsoft has filed one of its rare lawsuits against online transaction service provider WebXchange because WebXchange sued FedEx, Allstate and Dell, three of Microsoft's big customers, back in March. WebXchange claims FedEx, Allstate and...

HP Says It's Got Cheaper Virtualization.
November 24, 2008... HP says it can cut the pricey-but-neglected costs of networking virtualized environments by 55%. Your average VMware ESX server busily hosting virtual machines requires six network connections, which means network expansion cards, switches...

Antitrust Claim against Apple Fails.
November 24, 2008... Paystar, the unauthorized Florida "cloner" with dreams of breaking Apple's lock on its hardware, has had its horns broken by a California federal court, which threw out its antitrust counterclaim against Apple's EULA. Back in the summer...

ARM To Get Flash.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... Adobe and ARM are gonna put Flash Player 10 and AIR, the stuff of web video and rich Internet apps, on ARM widgets by the second half of next year. They mean phones, set-tops, MIDs, TVs, car mojo and personal media devices, which have so...

CA & VMware To Integrate Management Solutions.(Brief article)
November 24, 2008... CA and VMware are going to jointly develop a management solution and, to start, have signed a deal to make CA Data Center Automation Manager interoperate with VMware Stage Manager. The joint solution is designed so enterprises and cloud...

Transmeta Gets Sold for Next to Nothing.
November 24, 2008... Transmeta, the uppity microprocessor wannabe that pushed Intel to create low-power chips before Intel crushed it, is getting bought by Novafora Inc for $255.6 million in cash, roughly what Transmeta has in the bank thanks largely to an IP...

Mark Cuban Charged with Insider Trading.
November 24, 2008... Dot.com billionaire and owner of the Dallas Maverick basketball team Mark Cuban, 50, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.9 billion during the great bubble and trash-talked his meal ticket earlier this year when it wouldn't sell out to...

IBM Sued by Exec It Barred from Joining Apple.
November 24, 2008... Mark Papermaster, the ex-VP of blade development at IBM and the guy that IBM stopped from going to Apple to run its iPod and IPhone development on the strength of the non-compete he signed, has sued his former master looking for a declaratory...

IBM Buys Transitive.
November 24, 2008... IBM is going to buy Transitive, the British cross-platform virtualization firm that salvaged legacy Macintosh programs and made Apple's move from IBM to Intel chips as graceful as a prima ballerina's pirouette. Transitive is clever at...

Cloud Has Shrinking Effect on StarOffice Price Tag.
November 24, 2008... Last Friday Sun Microsystems, its fortunes about as low as a snake's belly, moved its StarOffice franchise into a new Cloud Computing unit with clear instructions to "grow revenues." StarOffice 9, the latest rev of the Microsoft wannabe,...

MySQL Add-on Could Make Sun Money.
November 24, 2008... Sun, which desperately needs to monetize its software, has put out a new release of MySQL with a gold-level subscriber-only Query Analyzer tool that it's praying users will pay for. The tool monitors query performance and quickly pinpoints...