Client Server News articles from September 2006

Client Server News archives from September 2006

Google makes threatening noises in Microsoft's direction.
September 4, 2006... Google on Monday started the second phase of its push into Microsoft's desktop turf. It's wrapped up its Gmail e-mail, Google Talk instant messaging, Google Calendar and WYSIWYG Google Page Creator web page publisher in a free, ad-based, highly...

Mischief makers unite.(Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Apple CEO Steve Jobs are teaming up)
September 4, 2006... Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, two fully paid-up charter members of the He-Man Microsoft Haters Club, Silicon Valley Division, are teaming up. Schmidt has accepted a rare invitation to join Apple's board, where he will...

Intel intros Tulsa, its best shot to retake the high end.
September 4, 2006... Tulsa, the last NetBurst Xeon, now officially designated the Dual-Core Xeon 7100, arrived en masse Tuesday. There are eight of them, suggesting that Intel, which has been sucking AMD's wind at the high end, is expecting to do a bang-up business...

Amazon pre-sells Vista.
September 4, 2006... Well, at least somebody's confident that the consumer version of Vista in all its sundry editions will be out in January even if the smart money thinks it won't surface before next spring. Amazon has started taking orders for the thing on...

Corel chases consumer multimedia market with InterVideo buy.
September 4, 2006... Corel, the one-time Microsoft wannabe and owner of WordPerfect, said Monday that it is acquiring DVD software house InterVideo Inc, a company about two-thirds its size, for $196 million, proposing to pay for it with cash on hand, debt financing...

Microsoft's poor writing skills lengthen its antitrust shackles.
September 4, 2006... Microsoft and the Justice Department went to court the other day seeking to formalize their handshake agreement on a two-year extension of the documentation-troubled interoperability-minded communications protocol-licensing program mandated by...

3PAR simplifies life.
September 4, 2006... 3PAR, which thinks of itself as the "last man standing" after other recent storage start-ups hit the wall taking a fortune in venture money with them, is broadening its market by introducing its first mid-range system. The InServ E200 is a...

eBay and Google cut deal.(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... eBay and Google have signed an exclusive multi-year revenue-sharing deal that will let Google put text ads on eBay's auction sites outside the US. Yahoo already has the exclusive in the US with a PayPal-promotion component. Google has a...

Intergraph taken out.(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Late Thursday Intergraph, or what's left of it, said that it's going to be acquired for $1.3 billion by an investor group led by private equity houses Hellman & Friedman LLC and Texas Pacific Group. The price, which works out to $44 a share, is...

Merom's out.(Intel Corp.)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Intel's Merom next-generation dual-core mobile chip was finally officially recognized as shipping on Monday. Intel now has 64-bit Core 2 Duo chips across-the-board for servers, desktops and notebooks. It said Merom or rather the Centrino Duo...

Transitive names reseller.(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Transitive, the Anglo-American outfit whose QuickTransit technology is behind Apple's Rosetta PowerPC-to-Intel migration software, has named MSI Systems Integrators (MSI) as its first North Ameri-can VAR. MSI will initially handle the...

Massachusetts' aggressive ODF plans hang on a plug-in.(Linux Watch)
September 4, 2006... The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or rather its Information Technology Division (ITD), has come up with a plan for switching over to the Open Document Format (ODF) and leaving Microsoft's proprietary formats behind without deviating from its...

Novell checks books for backdating; posts only preliminary Q3 results.(Linux Watch)
September 4, 2006... Novell was only able to post preliminary fiscal third-quarter results Tuesday because it's hired outside legal counsel to review its past stock option practices for indications of backdating, so the results it put out, it said, don't reflect...

Zend gets D round.(oracle corp)(Zend Technologies)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Zend Technologies, the PHP commercializer that is believed to have snubbed an acquisition offer from Oracle on the theory it could do better, got a $20 million D round from its investors, a list that now includes Greylock Partners. Greylock...

OLPC tagged 2B1.(One Laptop Per Child)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Despite reports to the contrary, it appears that the Linux-based One Laptop Per Child machine is not going to be officially called the Children's Machine (CM1), but is now going to be the 2B1, injecting the non-profit widget--at least for...

SAP Jive.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 4, 2006... Jive Software's Java-based Jive Forums community collaboration software is going to be in NetWeaver under a multi-year OEM pact with SAP. Financial arrangements were not disclosed. Jive will let SAP users locate information, find subject matter...

ClearSpeed poaches Intel Exec; In-Q-Tel another.(appoints Stephen McKinnon)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... ClearSpeed Technology, the double-precision performance-per-watt acceleration house, has poached Intel's director of worldwide solution sales, responsible for Intel's emerging corporate platform strategy, Stephen McKinnon, to be its COO. He's...

Orphans no more.(Microsoft Corp.)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Microsoft is going to start selling support for legacy products. It's has restructured its Custom Support Agreement (CSA) program so customers can extend legacy support while migrating, giving slowpokes some latitude if they're constrained by...

Blackout curtains pulled across Symantec v Microsoft suit.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 4, 2006... It looks like we're going to miss the best parts of the Vista/Long Horn-threatening Symantec-Veritas Volume Manager patent, copyright, trade secrets and breach of contract suit against Microsoft. According to a piece the other day in CNET the...

Verizon to offer Windows Live.(Verizon Communications Inc., Microsoft Corp.)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Starting next year, Verizon is going to offer Windows Live to its broadband customers under an expanded agreement with Microsoft that will provide a co-branded search page, a Live toolbar, e-mail, Live Messenger and OneCare security. The pair...

Linux car pact.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 4, 2006... Concurrent's real-time RedHawk and SUSE Linux as well as its NightStar development tools are gonna be used in modeling and simulating electrical systems in cars, even the powertrains in hybrid electric vehicles. Austrian Research Center's...

Sun vet to run extreme networks.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 4, 2006... Mark Canepa, who used to run Sun's storage operation before departing in May, has been named president and CEO of publicly held Ethernet networking house Extreme Networks, replacing co-founder Gordon Stitt, who becomes chairman.

Lenovo reassembling Dell under its own banner.(appoints Gerry Smith)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Lenovo raided Dell again this week carting off Gerry Smith, the guy in charge of Dell's Singapore Design Center. He is going to be in charge of Lenovo's global supply chain, reporting to Lenovo CEO Bill Amelio, who also left Dell for the...

Microsoft loses board member.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 4, 2006... RAND chairman Ann McLaughlin Korologos will be dropping off the Microsoft board at the company's 2006 shareholder meeting because of other commitments. She's been on the Microsoft board since 2000.

Toshiba to make the Zune.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... As has been noised about, Toshiba is going to be making Microsoft's potentially iPod-rattling Zune player. Toshiba told the FCC in a filing that the gadget is supposed to have a 30GB hard drive, a three-inch TFT LCD screen, an FM tuner,...

Backdating's poster children plead not guilty.(Brocade Communication Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
September 4, 2006... Greg Reyes, the former CEO of Brocade Communications, and Stephanie Jensen, Brocade's ex-HR chief, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to multiple counts of conspiracy to commit securities and mail fraud, falsifying records, and filing false statement...

EC & Microsoft locked in Vista stalemate.
September 18, 2006... Despite the God awful crisis created by Windows' inherent vulnerabilities--and despite the European Commission's utter failure in designing software--remember the ill-fated "didn't-sell-a-lick" Windows N, when it made Microsoft drop the Media...

Microsoft pledges not to press patents.(Linux Watch)
September 18, 2006... Microsoft Tuesday made a so-called Open Specification Promise (OSP) "irrevocably" pledging not to press any patent claims against people using, selling, importing or distributing SOAP and a large swat of the WS-* Web Services specifications...

Google cuts strategic pact with another Microsoft enemy.(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Intuit, the company that successfully resisted getting snapped up by Microsoft years ago, is going to put Google widgetry in its ubiquitous QuickBooks accounting software, the stuff that's so popular with small companies. Financial...

Oh, God, HP ...(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
September 18, 2006... In a series of whipsaw revelations over the last 10 days--on which more ink seems to have been spent than Enron got--it has come to light that HP's non-executive chairman Patricia Dunn, who is supposed to be one of the most powerful women in...

Well, now, exactly how much trouble is Dell in?
September 18, 2006... Staid old Dell, which unlike its erstwhile image has turned into a regular trouble magnet, said Monday that it wouldn't be filing its second-quarter 10-Q on time--the one that covers the period when revenues plummeted 51%--because of that...

Tech Data poaches Egenera CEO.(Bob Dutkowsky)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... A very civilized raiding party from Tech Data has poached Bob Dutkowsky, the president and CEO of Egenera, to replace its own retiring chief Steve Raymund, who will remain chairman of the giant $20 billion-a-year distributor. Dutkowsky, on...

Gateway taps CEO.(Ed Coleman appointed as chief executive officer)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Gateway, which when last we looked was entertaining what quickly became a rejected bid from the founder of eMachine and Gateway's second-largest stockholder Lap Shun Hui to basically buy the company, has addressed one Hui's outstanding...

IBM claims it's broken the code on protecting data.
September 18, 2006... IBM claimed Tuesday that it has broken the code, so to speak, on how to protect data. This after 90 million consumers have been notified in the last 18 months that their personal information may have been breached. What IBM calls the...

EC to expand its Intel antitrust probe.(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... The European Commission is going to expand its ongoing investigation of Intel's business practices and look into charges that Intel paid German retail Metro AG millions in incentives to sell only Intel-based machines through its Media Markt...

RHEL 5 with Xen hits beta.(Linux Watch)( Hat Enterprise Linux )(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Red Hat has put out a public beta version of its next-generation operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, the first Red Hat release to include Xen virtualization, which it says will work on x86 and x64 architectures and there's a...

IBM goes GA with Cell Blades.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... IBM Tuesday went GA with those Cell-based BladeCenters it's been doling out in beta samples to early adopters. The novel nine-core Cell chip was developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for game consoles and now IBM is pushing it in the BladeCenter...

Linux Networx raises another $37m.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Linux Networx, the cluster folk, has gotten a $37 million third round to put into product development. Checks are coming from two new investors, Canaccord and Lehman Brothers, as well as existing investors Oak Investment Partners and Tudor...

SpikeSource raises $21m second round.(Linux Watch)
September 18, 2006... SpikeSource, Kim Polese's stack startup, has raised a $21 million Series B round from existing investors Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Fidelity Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Fidelity, Kleiner and Intel were involved in the company's $12 million...

Ex-Novell chairman quits board early.(Jack Messman)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Ousted Novell chairman and CEO Jack Messman, who was supposed to remain on the Novell board until October 31, has stepped down early, according to an 8-K that the company filed with the SEC on Tuesday. The filing offers no explanation why...

Intel takes in its belt a couple more notches.
September 18, 2006... Intel last Friday sold off another one of its communications product lines in an attempt to right size so it can focus on its core business and tilt more effectively with AMD over market share where Intel has been losing its shirt. The...

webMethods buys Infravio.(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... BI house webMethods is buying SOA registry and governance start-up Infravio, Inc. for roughly $38 million cash. The deal should close this month and be accretive to webMethods' earnings in the March quarter. Infravio, which was funded...

Microsoft's Live Search goes, well, live.(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Microsoft officially launched its Windows Live Search engine this week. It will replace MSN Search, try to put up a better fight against Google and Yahoo, who have been eating Microsoft's lunch in web search, and corral some of the ad dollars...

NEC joins OIN.(threaten it, )(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... The Open Invention Network (OIN) formed by IBM and fellow travelers Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony to acquire patents on behalf of the Linux ecosystem and ward off any patent holders who threaten it, has admitted NEC as a dues-paying member,...

Kumar dodges the bullet another month.(BILLY GRAMS)(Sanjay Kumar)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Sanjay Kumar, the former CEO of CA, was supposed to be sentenced Tuesday for his leadership role in the company's multibillion-dollar stock-rigging scandal but his date with destiny has now been moved to October 12. Back in April Kumar pleaded...

PUBPAT launches patent watch site.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 18, 2006... The open source-committed Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) has launched a new web site called Software Patent Watch that it says is intended to keep the software community abreast of patent issues in general and any specific patent threats...

Backdating watch.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Both Wind River and Novell said the other day that their 10-Qs would be late as a result of ongoing internal stock-compensation inquiries. Both previously announced ongoing internal reviews that have yet to determine whether they will have to...

Intel's dike may have sprung another leak.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Despite Intel's attempt to stop further erosion of its market share by delivering the estimable Woodcrest, Conroe and Merow chips and despite Intel's inventory overhang, Lehman Brothers reckons that "additional order flow is emerging" for AMD...

"Doerr" closes.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 18, 2006... Kleiner Perkins kingpin John Doerr, who has been on the Sun board since his VC firm backed Sun way back when it was getting started, will be stepping down as a director when his term expires in November. Doerr is associated with the McNealy...

Troop movements.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Brian Valentine, who was disenfranchised as senior VP of Microsoft's Windows development unit a month ago ahead of the Vista rollout, has joined Amazon.com. Meanwhile, his colleague Doug Burgum will also be leaving Microsoft. He has been...

Google can't get 'em all.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 18, 2006... Snubbing Google, Acer, the fourth-largest PC maker, has signed up to bundle Yahoo's search as the default on its machines. The deal, described as strategic, includes a co-branded web browser toolbar. Terms were not disclosed.

Real buys into mobile space.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 18, 2006... RealNetworks is buying WiderThan, a South Korean ringtone, mobile games and music downloading house, for $350 million cash less the $90 million or so that WiderThan has in the bank. Real is using the money it got from Microsoft to settle its...

Wii price set.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Nintendo's new Wii games console (say we) will go on sale in the US on November 19, right before the Christmas rush begins. It's finally priced the thing at $250, undercutting the Xbox 360 and Sony's delay-prone $500-$600 PlayStation 3. The...

Freescale confirms it may go private.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 18, 2006... Freescale Semiconductor, the $6 billion PowerPC-making Motorola spinout that lost Apple's business to Intel, said Monday that it's in talks about going private in a leveraged buyout. There are now reportedly two sets of folks involved and the...

One-time American icon descends into HPgate.
September 25, 2006... HP investors had their blickers ripped off in the wee hours of Wednesday night, Thursday morning when press stories started circulating that HP's sainted CEO Mark Hurd, who had so far managed to keep his skirts out of the mud and mire of what...

AMD to try to establish common server socket.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
September 25, 2006... AMD, in a novel twist that's never been tried before, is going to license its Opteron processor pinouts to third parties hoping that industry heavyweights like Sun and IBM take it up on its offer. Licensees would be able to put their own...

Kazeon to go head-to-head with EMC.
September 25, 2006... Kazeon, the three-year-old unstructured data management start-up backed by $44 million in venture money, is going to be going toe-to-toe with EMC, the 600-pound gorilla. They turned up this week with competing products. EMC calls its...

Oracle & SAP trade barbs after Oracle posts Q1 results.
September 25, 2006... Oracle got to pull SAP's nose and its boss Larry Ellison got to look right about his consolidation strategy when the company posted its latest results Tuesday. In its first fiscal quarter ended August 31, usually never its best time,...

Court to hear SCO's motion to overturn order devastating its case against IBM.(Linux Watch)
September 25, 2006... District Court Judge Dale Kimball, who could have blown it off if he wanted, is going to hear SCO's motion to restore a large part of its multibillion-dollar case against IBM on October 24. At the beginning of the summer Magistrate Judge...

European software patents boxing match: round 2.(Linux Watch)
September 25, 2006... Europe's anti-software patent brigade thinks that the pro-patent contingent, whose software patents bill was overwhelming voted down in the European Parliament at the eleventh hour last year, is trying to make an end run around its defeat and...

Red Hat creates JBoss stack.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Red Hat has integrated JBoss, which it acquired 90 days ago, into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and put the resulting Red Hat Application Stack (RHAS) up for sale as a new subscription possibility. The new stack comes with the JBoss...

Stallman trashes OSDL patent project.(Linux Watch)
September 25, 2006... Richard Stallman, the demigod who invented the notion of free software and a software patent abolitionist of the first water, has lit out after a new Open Source Development Labs' project, undertaken with the Patent and Trademark Office, to...

Neelie denies EC has it in for Microsoft.(europeam commission)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... In a letter to the Financial Times, the head of the European Commission's antitrust unit Neelie Kroes denied "pursuing a vendetta against Microsoft" and also denied that the "Commission may seek to prevent Microsoft from improving the...

Now Toshiba recalls Sony batteries.
September 25, 2006... The Sony battery recall that hit Dell and Apple has now spread to Toshiba, which is recalling 340,000 Sony-made batteries used in its laptops. After the Dell and Apple recalls of 5.9 million laptop batteries, Sony swore that was it, but this...

Freescale bought out for $17.6b.
September 25, 2006... Freescale Semiconductors, which used to make PowerPC chips for Apple, has gone down for a hefty $17.6 billion, making it the largest LBO ever in technology. It will be taken private by a private equity consortium led by the Blackstone Group. A...

EMC wades deeper into security.(EMC Corp. (Hopkinton, Massachusetts))
September 25, 2006... On Monday, the day it closed its $2.1 billion seemingly out-of-character acquisition of RSA Security, storage hardware maven EMC announced that it had also bought Network Intelligence, another security software house, for roughly $175 million...

Dell & Symantec Ally.(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Dell Wednesday tied up with Symantec touting an Exchange-based end-to-end hardware, software and service package called Secure Exchange that is supposed to put a harness on "out-of-control" e-mail at midsized companies. There's nothing...

HP not new to rummaging through phone records.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Years ago, when Itanium--or what became Itanium--was still a threat and HP was working closely with Intel on the chip, this paper contacted a guy working deep inside the HP side of the project to find out more about the then-mysterious...

Apple & AMD?(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... AMD CEO Hector Ruiz has been making noises about running off at least some of the business Intel is getting from Apple, its substitute purist now that Dell has admitted AMD into its once Intel-only product line. Ruiz was at a dinner in San...

Dell may come up short again.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... ThinkEquity suspects that Dell may turn up short again this quarter and pre-announce in mid-October. It bases its suspicions on tittle-tattle about rapidly declining PC units and profitability that it's heard from Dell's supply chain in Asia....

The undeserving rich.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... It's unclear what either of them has done to deserve it but both Sun chairman Scott McNealy and the company's new president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz have gotten substantial raises. Swartz's fiscal 2006 compensation plan is now worth--take a...

Backdating watch.(Novell Inc.)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Novell has gotten a delisting notice from the Nasdaq and a notice of default from Wells Fargo on $600 million worth of debentures all because it hasn't filed its 10-K covering the July quarter and hasn't any idea when it will because it's in...

Intel enlists the aid of the gods of Madison Avenue.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Intel Monday kicked off a branding campaign dubbed "Multiple" on behalf of its Core 2 Duo desktop and mobile chips, its biggest marketing blitz, it said, since the Centrino launch on which it spent a reported $300 million. Print ads are...

Dell threatened with delisting.(BILLY GRAMS)
September 25, 2006... My how the mighty have fallen. The Nasdaq is now threatening to delist Dell because it hasn't filed its second-quarter 10-Q and it hasn't been able to file its 10-Q because of the three investigations of its books that're going on by the SEC,...

Google flaunts Belgian court.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... A Belgian court has ordered Google to stop reprinting stories from the Belgian press without paying for it on pain of being fined $1.27 million a day. Google is erasing the copy from its database but now it refuses to post the text of the...

'If only the Pope would run interference for me': Dunn.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Patricia Dunn )(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... "All I will say about the maelstrom is that I look forward eagerly, in the near future, to setting the record straight and going back to leading my life as discreetly as possible. And in the meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt if the pope continued to...

Intel to show off quad-core at IDF.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
September 25, 2006... Intel is supposed to show off Kentfield, its first quad-core chip, at its Intel Developer Forum this week. For a while there we heard they were gonna dub the thing the Quadro. The latest is they've not. Since Intel moved the Kentfield ramp...