Client Server News articles from October 2003

Client Server News archives from October 2003

Ex-BEA CEO Out for the Next Big Software Hit; Will Lightning Strike Twice?
October 6, 2003... After dipping below the radar for a month, Bill Coleman, the "B" in BEA and once its CEO, has turned up at a start-up named Cassatt Corporation after Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt and her brother. Coleman named it that on the theory that...

Lawyers Finally Target Microsoft's Security Holes.
October 6, 2003... In a move that could open up the floodgates, a suit begging to be made a class action has been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on the grounds that Microsoft's market-dominant software is vulnerable to viruses that could cause "massive,...

IBM Says It Virtualizes the Whole Infrastructure.(can offer end-to-end cross-platform utility computing )(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... IBM says, thanks to technology supplied by three-year-old Inkra Networks, it's got the whole infrastructure virtualized and can now offer end-to-end cross-platform utility computing involving Linux, AIX, Windows and OS/400 at least to companies...

Top Merrill Analyst Writes Pointed Open Letter to Sun.
October 6, 2003... With the news of a gargantuan charge as a backdrop, Steve Milunovich, Merrill Lynch's top tech follower, took Sun to task Thursday in an open letter that he wrote to Sun CEO Scott McNealy and the Sun board. Voicing opinions that have been...

Sun Sinks.(4th fiscal qtr ended Jun 30, 2003)
October 6, 2003... Sun says it's gonna take a monumental $1.051 billion non-cash charge for its fourth quarter ended June 30 that will translate into a revised Q4 net loss of $1.039 billion or 32 cents a share caused by a poor showing in Q1 that precipitated a...

Siebel Goes Software-as-Service Route in Company with IBM.(Siebel CRM OnDemand)
October 6, 2003... With IBM as a partner, Siebel is going into the software-as-service business, something Siebel tried and then terminated a couple of years ago. The pair, who've been expected to do something like this, says they have designed a brand new...

OpenOffice 1.1 in the Can.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... The disruptive forces of OpenOffice.org out to destroy the foundations of the Evil Empire's power are rejoicing because on Wednesday they reached that suite nirvana known as OpenOffice 1.1, which is now finished - a term we use loosely - and...

Microsoft Wants To Pull Up a Chair in Your Living Room.
October 6, 2003... Sending clear signals that it intends to dominate the newfangled digital media home entertainment market just as it has office computing, Microsoft rolled out a new version of its home entertainment operating system the other day called Windows...

Microsoft Changes Tack in Europe.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Microsoft is going to try to fend off the EU's latest antitrust charges against it in an oral hearing set for November, according to unnamed Wall Street Journal sources. Microsoft, which declines to talk about any change in tack, has previously...

Another Standards Conflict Brewing.(Framework for Web Services Implementation (FWSI) Technical Committee)(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Oasis members - a short list that doesn't include either IBM or Microsoft, but does include Sun, suggesting it could be another possible point of fracture between the two camps - say they are going to develop a global web services framework...

Microsoft Settles Another Class Action.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Continuing its mop-up campaign, Microsoft has come to settlement terms in still another one of those antitrust class-action suits that have bedeviled it. It's going to pay roughly $10.5 million to a class of people and businesses that bought...

ECMA Memorializes Telecom Web Services Spec.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... ECMA, the international standards grown famous on the back of Java and Microsoft, says it's published some telecommunications standards including the first complete call control web services specification, ECMA 348. It provides the...

Fujitsu US Reorgs.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Fujitsu has melded Fujitsu PC Corporation, Fujitsu Technology Solutions Corporation and some of the functions of Fujitsu IT Holdings together to create Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The idea is to...

SharePoint Add-on Out.(Microsoft Windows Server 2003 )(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Microsoft has release the SharePoint Service add-on to Windows Server 2003 so now people can set up supposedly secure collaboration sites online. The upcoming Office 2003 is going to include widgetry so it can publish documents to SharePoint...

Egenera Adds New Box.(BladeFrame ES)(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Egenera has added a widget called the BladeFrame ES. The thing packages up six Egenera Processing Blades in a self- contained chassis that mounts in an industry standard 19-inch rack. It's designed for branch offices, call centers, remote...

Computer Shipments, Orders Fall.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Computer shipments fell 10.5% from July to August, according to the Commerce Department. The agency said new orders for computers and related products dropped 2.3% then too. August shipments totaled $7.67 billion while new orders were valued at...

Massachusetts Goes Open; UN Backs Off.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the one state left trying to tighten the screws on the Microsoft antitrust settlement, has decided to move its computer systems towards open standards like Linux. It says its decision has nothing at all to do...

Microsoft Gets a New Patent.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted Microsoft a patent for a technique in reporting program failures, an action that prompted some observers to complain that a much more sophisticated version of such a thing has been standard on IBM...

Application & Integration Server Software on Recovery Path.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Sales of pivotal application deployment software (ADP) dropped 7% worldwide last year compared to the year before, but is showing signs of recovery based on first-half performance, according to the number crunchers at IDC, who interpreted the...

NSI Wins One, Loses One.
October 6, 2003... NSI's distribution deal with Stratus Technologies for Stratus to peddle NSI's Double-Take data replication software has ended barely a year after the deal was struck while, luckily for NSI, Hewlett- Packard has expanded its OEM deal for the...

EMC Broadens Mid-Tier NAS Portfolio.
October 6, 2003... EMC is taking the battle into the NetApp camp with a bunch of new mid-range NAS systems and a low-end NAS device based on Windows Storage Server 2003 outraging NetApp and causing it to try and dismiss the Move by saying that "EMC's claims make...

Troika Gets a New CEO.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Troika Networks has named Doug Rainbolt CEO, its third CEO in 18 months. Rainbolt was previously VP of McData's Switch Product Groups. He replaces Troika co-founder Bill Terrell, who is now CTO of the Westlake Village, California start-up....

Incipient Gets More Funding.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Storage start-up Incipient Inc has raised an additional $10 million in its Series B round to close the financing at $25 million. The new funding takes the total backing of the Waltham, Massachusetts outfit to $35 million. The funding came...

Decru Debuts NAS Security Appliance Upgrade.
October 6, 2003... Storage security vendor Decru Inc has upgraded its storage security appliance for NAS environments. The DataFort E510 includes new secure access control, secure logging and lifetime key management capabilities. Besides providing a...

Dot Hill Debuts SANnet II Blades.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Storage vendor Dot Hill says it's started shipping its SANnet II Blade storage system, a compact, highly redundant Ultra160 SCSI RAID or JBOD system that provides a half-terabyte of storage in a rack- mountable 1U form factor. The RAID...

Another Linux House Bites the Dust.
October 6, 2003... Six-year-old Trustix AS, the privately held Norwegian company with what it called the first truly server-oriented and secure Linux distribution to come down the pike, has hit the wall. It filed for bankruptcy on Monday after spending the...

Lindows Flaunts Microsoft Ultimatum; Eggs Redmond To Sue.
October 6, 2003... It Again Microsoft's lawyers sent Lindows.com CEO Michael Robertson a letter lambasting the www.MSfreePC.com web site that Lindows set up a couple of weeks ago as "deceptive," saying that it "seriously mischaracterizes" the settlement...

SCO To Pull SGI's Unix License.
October 6, 2003... For the last six weeks SGI has been sitting on what it describes as a terse four-page notice of termination with 60 days grace that it got from the SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride saying that SCO was going to pull SGI's Unix license to Irix on...

SGI Admits Unix Code Got into Linux.
October 6, 2003... Concomitant with the revelation that SCO is about to yank its Unix license, SGI put an open letter to the Linux community up on its web site over the signature of software VP Rich Altmaier (see http://oss.sgi.com/letter_100103.txt). In it SGI...

IBM Amends its Suit against SCO; SCO Lashes Out at GPL in.
October 6, 2003... Response IBM last Friday leaked word to the Wall Street Journal that it had amended its countersuit against the SCO Group and added a charge of copyright infringement to the list of faults it has already found with the controversial...

SnapGear First To Productize 2.6 Kernel.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... SnapGear Inc, the embedded Linux security house, has released what it believes is the first production system using the new still "unreleased" 2.6 kernel. It's part of SnapGear Embedded Linux 3.0, a full embedded Linux distribution with...

SuSE Previews 2.6 Features & AMD64 Support in Retail Code.
October 6, 2003... SuSE has back-ported some of the more stable features that will be found in the upcoming 2.6 Linux kernel, not due to be officially released now until spring, it said, into the otherwise 2.4.21-based SuSE Linux 9.0 retail code that will appear...

IBM Buys Migration Business.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... IBM has bought Sector7's applications porting services business on undisclosed terms, meaning it's picked essentially all of Sector7's assets and intellectual property. The privately held firm, which got started 18 years ago in the UK and...

Acronis Gets Turbolinux Deal.
October 6, 2003... Turbolinux - now there's a name you don't hear much anymore - has cut a deal to bundle the Acronis PartitionExpert software with its Turbolinux 10 Desktop. Terms of the agreement weren't disclosed. The stuff, which has been localized, has both...

Lindows Courts Spanish Speakers.(LindowsEspa[+ or -]ol)(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Lindows is getting ready to support Spanish speakers. It's reportedly near to bringing out LindowsEspa[+ or -]ol. It's taking advanced orders. The stuff will cost 50 bucks.

Please Sell Me a Linux License, Please, Please, Please.
October 6, 2003... We gather that if it comes to litigation the SCO Group might follow the example of that other highly unpopular organization these days, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is suing hundreds of "just-plain-folks" who have...

Wind River To Support Linux.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... RTOS leader Wind River Systems said Thursday it would add Linux support to its tools although the open source operating system competes with its proprietary VxWorks operating system not to mention the fact that back in 2001 Wind River picked up...

Macs over Windows.
October 6, 2003... Rumors passed on by well-connected friends of the family that can't be confirmed and are said to be emanating from the Office of Management and the Budget, the agency that pays the federal government's bills, suggest that they're buying Apples...

Microsoft To Lift its Skirt & Show an Ankle.
October 6, 2003... Microsoft is expecting to host 5,500 Microsoft resellers at its three-day Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans beginning Thursday, October 9, a combination of its Fusion and the Business Solutions Stampede events. Microsoft has to keep...

IceCubes & Millipedes.(from IBM)(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... Apparently IBM has succumbed to the bricks concept that Dell was gonna do something with. IBM's got a modular storage project code named IceCube, due to emerge next year, that reportedly consists of a bunch of intelligent bricks connected...

Another Blaster Busted.
October 6, 2003... Another kid has been arrested in connection with the Blaster mess, according to the US Attorney's Office in Seattle, this one too young to identify. The kid was apparently charged with juvenile delinquency.

Ballmer Labels Hackers Criminals.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... "Hackers are criminals. Hackers are people who are causing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in damage. And they're not showing that they are all that smart and creative and clever." _ Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in an interview with...

Microsoft Fails To Quash Sendo Suit.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... There's been a hearing in the Sendo v Microsoft suit in which the UK-based cell phone start-up claims that Microsoft's Stinger mobile software was incomplete, unreliable and feature-short and screwed up its business and that Microsoft had a...

DOJ May Challenge Oracle Bid for PeopleSoft.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... USA Today quoting nameless lawyers said to be familiar with the situation thinks the Justice Department is revving up to challenge Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft. It says there are two dead giveaways to the agency's thinking. First, it's taking...

SCO Gets Extension in IBM Case.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... The SCO Group has filed for an extension in its famous suit against IBM. It says only two of the four patents IBM is now claiming SCO infringed are registered with the US Patent And Trademark Office and that it asked IBM for documents providing...

Microsoft Reportedly Changes its Trustworthy Tactics.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... According to Symantec's semi-annual Security Threat Report, the number of vulnerabilities found in Windows operating systems in the first six months of the year doubled over last year's first half from 445 to 994. The situation has reportedly...

EU Sues France.(Brief Article)
October 6, 2003... European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti, a guy who's not exactly on Microsoft's Christmas card list, has taken France - yeah, the whole country - to court for not recouping the $525 million that it lent to Groupe Bull. Monti regards such...

Gerstner's Bin Laden Connection.
October 6, 2003... It seems the Carlyle Group, that star-studded VC operation replete with a former British prime minister and a former SEC chairman that ex-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner joined late last year, manages a lot of Bin Laden family money. Swear to God we heard...

Blaster Sends Microsoft Back to the Drawing Board; Microsoft's security problems are now worse than its Linux problems.
October 13, 2003... Microsoft's security problems are now worse than its Linux problems By Raga Rao Microsoft's "Plan B," its newfangled "Securing the Perimeter" scheme designed to make itself "trustworthy" though the way it currently provides patches has...

CA Offers Up Three Living Sacrifices to Government Probe.
October 13, 2003... Computer Associates, whose books and policies are still under government investigation, has tossed three of its top financial people out on their ear after the company's Audit Committee found certain revenues were prematurely recognized in CA's...

Good God, Sun & Microsoft Cut Another Java Deal.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Well, imagine that. Saying that current users and developers need a less hasty transition than what Sun and Microsoft had in mind, Microsoft - under a new "maintenance license" deal with Sun - will extend its support for MSJVM for another year...

Microsoft Drops LookSmart Search.
October 13, 2003... Tragedy has befallen San Francisco-based paid inclusion/pay-for- placement search firm LookSmart Ltd. Microsoft - on which LookSmart depends for the lion's share of its revenues - won't be renewing its MSN distribution and licensing agreement...

Blade Vendors Told To Standardize.(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
October 13, 2003... The blades business ain't gonna soar the way some people think and grow at a compound annual rate of 77% through 2007 when it's supposed to be worth $4 billion unless the industry standardizes, according to the market researchers at Venture...

Eolas Wants IE Enjoined; Microsoft To Make Changes.
October 13, 2003... Skirting Eolas Patent Tiny little Eolas Technologies Inc has asked the Chicago court where it was awarded $521 million in damages in its patent infringement suit against Microsoft for a permanent injunction ordering Microsoft not to...

IBM Steals HP Disaster Recovery Chief.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... IBM has poached the head of HP's disaster recovery unit John Jackson three month after he arrived at HP from Comdisco, where he ran its disaster recovery operation according to Gary McWilliams of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story....

There'll Always Be a Microsoft.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Microsoft will continue to dominate in operating systems through 2007 despite the advances of Linux, according to IDC. As of last year, Microsoft, up 12.4% in Windows revenues, held 93.8% of the client market and 55.1% of the server market....

More Grounds for Fracture Appear.(Web Services Composite Application Framework)(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Sun and some of its friends like Fujitsu, Iona and Oracle - a group noticeably missing Microsoft and IBM - are going to collaborate under the aegis of Oasis on a framework for applications composed of web services used in combination, widgetry...

Content Management Server To Get Makeover.(Microsoft)(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Microsoft plans to put out a version of its Content Management Server 2002 web content management application for medium-sized businesses. Microsoft said the Standard Edition would provide the same capabilities as the Enterprise Edition...

Dell Claims $60b is within Reach.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Dell president Kevin Rollins had a reassuring little tte--tte with Wall Street Wednesday on the company's long-term strategy and competitive position. Rollins had nothing to say about the current quarter, but claimed Dell is "on track" to...

HP Smells Blood in the Water.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... With Sun hemorrhaging, Hewlett-Packard is offering Sun customers up to $25,000 to defect to its Linux platforms. It's offering assessment, porting and migration services for moving applications from Solaris to Linux. According to HP's...

Sun Loses its Cool - Barrons.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Barrons says that "The market is losing patience with McNealy." In a story called "Is Sun in Eclipse?" that follows on the heels of Merrill Lynch's open letter to Scott and the Sun board telling them to get it together after the company said it...

Microsoft Powers Napster Redux.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... The wild and wooly Napster returned in domesticated and legal form this week powered by Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series, where it will be available via the Premium Services tab. Users can search, browse, download and organize music...

PeopleSoft Promises Better-than-Expected Results.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Based on preliminary results, PeopleSoft expects its Q3 results to exceed expectations. It says that license revenues, total revenues and earnings per share would surpass its guidance. It attributed the results to its "powerful combination"...

Xeon DP Hits 3.2GHz.
October 13, 2003... Intel has pushed the dual-processor Xeon DP chip to 3.2GHz with 1MB of cache and a 533MHz systems bus and is charging $851 each in 1,000-unit quantities. Systems started shipping this week. It drops into either Intel's e7501 server chipset or...

Microsoft Business Network Debuts.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Microsoft launched its Microsoft Business Network Tuesday as part of its move to bolster its ERP offerings. The stuff combines on-premise software integrated with Office, Microsoft Business Solutions applications, BizTalk Server and hosted...

Small Business Server Available.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... As widely expected, Microsoft has announced the worldwide availability of its Linux-fighting Small Business Server 2003. Dell and HP are providing it along with thousand of resellers. Microsoft claims the thing can make employees 20% more...

Whatever Happened to the Database?(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... On the heels of Merrill Lynch telling CEO Scott McNealy how to run Sun, Goldman Sachs' ace analyst Rick Sherland says that Oracle "needs to add to its product portfolio and expand faster growing market segments. PeopleSoft," he says, "could...

CIOs Skeptical of Linux.(UK Tech Summit )(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... CIOs representing such as the London Stock Exchange and British Airways told the UK Tech Summit in London that they're using Linux somewhere in their infrastructures but that the OS isn't for mission-critical applications, mostly out of concern...

Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Rambus Case.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... The Supreme Court has refused to review the Infineon v Rambus decision sending Rambus stock soaring. The Court of Appeals substantiated Rambus' claims that Infineon infringed its patents and that Rambus didn't commit fraud and scam the JEDEC...

Borland Warns, Cuts Jobs.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Borland has had a bad quarter. It said Q3 sales missed its expectations and that it's letting 125 people go. It figures it'll scrape somewhere between $69 million and $71 million out of the period. It had said revenues would be about the same...

Microsoft Upbeat about CRM App.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Microsoft is tooting its horn that its CRM application is seeing significant momentum in the marketplace. Redmond claimed that a thousand customers were using rev 1 of the application already. Launched in January for mid-market...

Moto To Dump Semis.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Motorola is going to divest itself of its roughly $5 billion slow- to-repair semiconductor arm, splitting it off from its huge cell phone and communications businesses. A couple of weeks ago it also decided to dump its CEO, Chris Galvin,...

Sun Cluster Guru Reportedly Defects to Microsoft.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Sun has lost its distinguished engineer and chief technical officer for N1 products Yousef Khalidi, according to The Register, the British zine. Khalidi, who is also credited with being the key force behind Sun Cluster 3.0 and much of Solaris...

Panther Due.(Apple's Mac OS X 10.3)(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Apple's 10.3 rev of its Unix-based 64-bit Mac OS X operating system, otherwise known as Panther, will be generally available starting Friday night, October 24 at 8pm. The stuff includes a completely new Finder for one-click access to one's...

Microsoft Takes a Hit.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... EU regulators have refused to grant Microsoft's request for a two- month extension giving it instead just two weeks. The new deadline is October 17. Microsoft wanted the additional time to rebut charges related to the EU's latest statement of...

Siebel Gets Cozier with IBM & Microsoft.
October 13, 2003... Siebel and IBM have moved on to the second stage of their alliance after getting together on Siebel's newfangled software-as-a-service scheme last week. Among other things, the twosome says that in the name of the nascent on-demand...

Solaris for Opteron.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Sun, which has been cheering the Opteron on from the sidelines for some time, has finally decided to take the plunge with AMD's 64-bit processor. Sun software czar Jonathan Schwartz said Thursday the company plans to put out a version of...

IBM, Infrastructure Simplification & Symphonies.
October 13, 2003... IBM is currently enamored of the idea of pairing mainframes with blade servers so when it trotted out its new model 24- or 32-way T Rex 990 mainframes the other day it proposed giving customers BladeCenter technology at a reduced cost if they...

Emulex To Buy Vixel for $310m.
October 13, 2003... Emulex, the storage networking host bus adapter house, is acquiring embedded storage switch outfit Vixel for $310 million in cash. Emulex is paying $10 for each share of Vixel, a 17% premium over its closing price of $8.54 on Wednesday....

EMC, IBM Promise Interoperability.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... EMC and IBM have finally come together in an agreement to boost interoperability between their respective storage systems, software and server products. The pact is expected to make it easier for customers to have both IBM and EMC widgetry...

Elias Find Refuge at EMC After All.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Howard Elias joined the growing covey of execs that has dropped anchor at EMC after jumping ship at HP. Elias has joined EMC as executive VP of new ventures. In his new role, he will manage emerging business initiatives including the...

Veritas Debuts StorageCentral Upgrade.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Veritas has put out a new version of its StorageCentral storage resource management application Rev 5.2 of StorageCentral supports Windows Storage Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003. The upgrade also comes with enhanced quota and file...

Quantum Expects Lower Revenues.(Brief Article)
October 13, 2003... Quantum Corporation said that it expects its revenues, gross margin and non-GAAP loss per share in the September quarter to come in moderately weaker than expected. Blaming the continued pressure on media cartridge pricing, Quantum said it...

AppIQ Debuts Upgrade, New Branding.(StorageAuthority Suite)
October 13, 2003... Storage management software vendor AppIQ has upgraded its storage resource management application suite and re-branded the product. Dubbed StorageAuthority Suite, the applications are supposed to include all of the features of the old AppIQ...