ePostal News articles from May 2009

ePostal News archives from May 2009

TNT Partners with BancTec on Scanpost.
May 4, 2009... TNT Post, Holland's national postal operator, has tied up with Dallas-based BancTec to strength its Scanpost service and meet what it calls "increasing demand" for incoming mail to be digitized. BancTec is to supply its hardware, software...

China Restricts Foreign Firms.
May 4, 2009... China's masters Friday passed a law forbidding foreign companies such as FedEx, UPS, TNT and DHL from delivering any domestic letters and document inside the countries. The express companies have been fighting this legislation for years. ...

UPU Names RFID Supplier.(Universal Postal Union uses radio frequency equipment from AIDA Centre)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) has picked AIDA Centre, a company based in Spain, to supply radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and equipment for its Global Monitoring System (GMS). Terms were not disclosed. The new system will...

Swiss Post Monopoly To Shrink Again.(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... The Swiss Post is going to lose another piece of what remains of its letter monopoly on July 1 when the government intends to release mail weighing 50-100 grams to competition. It is one of the reasons the Swiss Post has taken up with Earth...

EC Puts Condition on Posten-Post Danmark Merger.(standards for business to business in parcel delivery services )(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... The European Commission's antitrust regulators said Wednesday that Posten of Sweden and Post Danmark can merge provided they "divest assets and customer contracts covering their entire overlap in the domestic standard business to business (B2B)...

Court Clears Royal Mail's VAT Exemption.
May 4, 2009... To TNT's chagrin, the European Court of Justice, the European Union's highest court, decided last Thursday that Britain's Royal Mail universal postal services were legally exempt from value-added tax. The court made a distinction between...

Wages Next Battleground.
May 4, 2009... Both DHL and the recently profitable Royal Mail want to freeze wages. TNT, on the other hand, wants to cut wages 15% to avoid laying off 11,000 people over the next three years but its proposal was rejected by its unions. There is also...

UPS Predicts No Relief.
May 4, 2009... UPS suffered a brownout in Q1 when profits fell a whopping 56% to $401 million compared to $906 million this time last year on revenues down 13.7% to $10.9 billion, or 40 cents a share. It's only the second time in 10 years that Big Brown,...

Stamps.com Revenues Drop.
May 4, 2009... Revenues at Stamps.com, the online postage house, dropped 5% to $20 million in the first quarter, earning it $1.2 million, or seven cents a share. The company blamed the increasingly poor results on its PhotoStamps vanity line, down 43%...

SkyPostal To Co-Market PuntoMio Online.(TAM Brazil and SkyPostal Networks in marketing agreements)
May 4, 2009... SkyPostal Networks, which claims to be the largest private postal network in Latin America, has entered into a co-marketing agreement for its PuntoMio online US shopping facilitator service with TAM Fidelidade, the frequent flyer program of TAM...

Entrust Adds SMS Soft Tokens, Digital Certificates.
May 4, 2009... Entrust has introduced the latest release of its IdentityGuard, which adds support for SMS soft tokens and digital certificates. The strong authentication solution has also been enhanced with improved administration and reporting,...

So Oracle's Gonna Screw with IBM Huh...
May 4, 2009... Ah, the great chessboard of life. So figure Oracle's possession of Sun and its attendant resources like, oh, MySQL and Java is a potential threat to IBM. So what does IBM turn around and do? Well, it plays a card it's been holding in its...

VMware's Newfangled Cloud OS Positioned for Takeoff.
May 4, 2009... VMware has announced what it calls the industry's first cloud operating system ahead of delivering the thing sometime before the end of June. Branded vSphere 4, the expected widgetry, which promises a 100% virtualized cloud, is meant to...

EC Evidently Aims To Hang Intel High.
May 4, 2009... The European Commission has reportedly drafted a final antitrust decision on Intel that - predictably - calls for a fine and a ban on Intel's allegedly anticompetitive rebates though what any "ban" - a complex issue - might entail remains to be...

Sun's Largest Stockholder Sells Out Early.
May 4, 2009... How odd. Southeastern Asset Management, which foolishly spent $2.1 billion buying 22% of Sun over the last few years, didn't wait around to collect Oracle's $9.50 a share, money it should have been able to pick up by summer and a price it...

AMD Gets Testosterone Shots, Revs Chip Schedule.
May 4, 2009... Trying to get the best of Intel, which trounced it with the quad-core Nehalem, AMD said during a webcast updating its rollout schedule that its so-called Opteron Magny-Cours chip, a 45nm piece of silicon with eight to 12 cores and due in 1Q10,...

Sun's GlassFish & Friends To Swim in Amazon's EC2 Tank.
May 4, 2009... Sun has put its open source GlassFish portfolio and identity management OpenSSO and OpenDS software on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Sun said it was the first step in its strategy to offer its portfolio of open source software on a...

HP Takes On Cisco.(Hewlett-Packard Co.'s networking equipment)
May 4, 2009... Well now the fat is in the fire. A ticked-off HP is coming out against Cisco with both guns blazing. It claims it's been working for years on the kind of all-in-one compute-storage-network-fabric-power-and-cooling convergence that Cisco...

Sun Supports Google Apps Premier Edition Users.
May 4, 2009... Sun has made a new open source OpenSSO Express release available to provide scalable federated single sign-on for organizations using Google's Apps Premier Edition as their collaboration and messaging service. It will let employees use...

Microsoft Revenues Down 6%, Profits Down 32%.
May 4, 2009... Microsoft's in some amount of pain that it blames on the recession and deteriorating spending and says it doesn't expect things to get better this quarter, maybe longer, maybe into the next calendar year, a forecast it's made before. Its...

VMware Predicts Rough Going Ahead.(Financial report)
May 4, 2009... VMware said that it earned $69.9 million, 18 cents a share in Q1, up 64% on revenues up 7% to $470 million in the March quarter. On a non-GAAP basis before charges, the virtualization leader earned 25 cents a share, up 14%. Its non-GAAP...

Bottom? Bottom? What Bottom Where?: AMD.
May 4, 2009... AMD CEO Dirk Meyer says he doesn't know how anybody could call a bottom - like Intel CEO Paul Ottellini just did - given the continued lack of visibility and uncertainty in the marketplace. Although Intel is expecting Q2, usually down from...

Recession Costs IBM.
May 4, 2009... After letting Sun go to Oracle, an outcome seen as a problem for IBM, Big Blue said its first quarter came up short on revenues. The total was $21.7 billion, down 11% against a consensus of $22.5 billion with earnings of $2.3 billion, off...

Kickfire MySQL Data Warehouse Appliance Launches.
May 4, 2009... Kickfire, the MySQL data warehousing start-up that invented its own SQL chip, is starting to roll out its newfangled plug-and-play appliances to the mass market - the first low-end data warehouse play ever- and obviously it's targeting the...

MySQL Steps on Larry's Toes.(Oracle Corp.'s computer servers)(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... It a heck of a time but Sun has started circulating a preview of MySQL 5.4, a new powerful and scalable version of the open source database that's supposed to enable InnoDB, MySQL's primary storage engine - which Oracle already owns - to scale...

Sun & Oracle Dumbfound Microsoft, IBM.
May 4, 2009... In Moscow when the Oracle-Sun news broke, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told Reuters that he was "very surprised" and that having just heard about it needed to think about it. Evidently they didn't warn him ahead of time. Having thought about it...

Oracle Iron.
May 4, 2009... Skepticism is rampant about Oracle keeping the hardware side of Sun despite Oracle's claims that it will. Charles Fitzgerald, the former general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, for instance, remembers on his blog that eWeek a...

Larry, Open Source and the Anti-Christ.(Oracle Corp. licensed to develop software )(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Oracle CEO Larry Ellison privately regards open source software as the Anti-Christ. (Mirroring Scott McNealy's feelings, come to think of it.) And since Sun hasn't had much luck monetizing open source - a mortal sin in Larry's pentitental - it...

Who's Next?
May 4, 2009... SAP, VMware, Red Hat and EMC have been added to that of NetApp that armchair speculators are thrown out as possible acquisition targets for IBM now that it's lost Sun.

Obama Names First US CTO.(Aneesh Chopra appointed as Virginia's Secretary of Technology )(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Barack Obama has tapped Virginia's Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra - not Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos or Steve Ballmer - to be the first chief technology officer of the United States. Jeffrey Zients, a consultant, will be the...

OLPC Dumps AMD.
May 4, 2009... With AMD no longer developing the x86 Geode chip inside the One Laptop Per Child XO widget, OLPC is going to VIA's low-power C7-M x86 chip for what it's calling an XO 1.5 upgrade due in November. The device itself will look the same but inside...

Yahoo & Microsoft Reportedly Still Talking.
May 4, 2009... The watch towers trained on the Yahoo-Microsoft no-it's-not-an-acquisition talks claim negotiations have stepped up but are still a ways away from any resolution. They involved Yahoo migr Qi Lu, the former Yahoo top gun now running Microsoft's...

And That Cloud Costs What?(Brief article)
May 4, 2009... Two-year-old Apptio says it's got a Cloud Migration Cost Analysis for Amazon Web Services so companies can figure out the cloud's cost savings and ROI. It's supposed to track the ongoing costs of cloud-based and internal IT services and compare...

Royal Mail's Prospective Buyers Turn Antsy & Demanding.
May 18, 2009... The British government has refused to back off its plan to sell off a minority piece of the Royal Mail to another postal operator despite the widening revolt of its own party in the House of Commons - serious enough, some reports claim, to...

Earth Class Mail Makes Postal Mail More Like E-Mail.
May 18, 2009... Earth Class Mail, the company that lets folks get their postal mail online, has rebuilt the interface in front of its system to mimic the user-friendly features of popular e-mail clients and has now started a widespread beta test of the new...

Poste Italiane Victim of Cyber-Heist.(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... For 10 days this year security researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara cracked and spied on the Torpig botnet, one of the more sophisticated of those dastardly Trojans the bad guys use to turn otherwise innocent and...

USPS Down Another $1.9b.
May 18, 2009... The US Postal Service lost $1.9 billion in the March quarter. That puts losses so far at $2.3 billion and it's only half-way through its fiscal year. The agency is now forecasting a loss of over $6 billion for the year, more than double last...

Jersey Post Launch Internet-Leveling Ship2me Service.(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... Jersey Post is promising its constituency a new home delivery service this summer that overcomes the fact that many online and retail suppliers won't deliver to the Channel Islands. With the new Ship2me service, residents and businesses on...

Report Suggests Austria Post in Play.(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... The chairman of Austria Post's biggest shareholder UIAG, approached Deutsche Post about buying a 25% stake in the post, according to a piece in the Austrian news magazine profil. UIAG, the company that administers the government's...

UPU Conference on E-Commerce Next Week.(Conference news)
May 18, 2009... The Universal Postal Union (UPU) will be holding a conference on e-commerce in Hong Kong from May 21-23. Hosted by Hongkong Post, the event will bring together industry professionals from UPU member countries. Delegates from operators,...

Pitney Bowes Launches Inview Mailstream Management Suite.
May 18, 2009... Pitney Bowes is introducing Inview Mailstream Management Suite, which is supposed to help customers gain greater visibility into their mailing operations and manage costs from one central location. The suite of postal and information...

HP Forced To Bench Poached EMC Exec.
May 18, 2009... EMC has clipped the wings of the erstwhile president of its storage division David Donatelli, who suddenly resigned last Monday and tried to flit to rival HP to run its storage, servers and networking. EMC sued to enforce his one-year...

Micro Focus Buys Borland.
May 18, 2009... Another of the old guard has collapsed. Borland has finally given up the ghost. After a 26-year run that saw it adopt multiple personalities in going from influential to non-entity, the tools house that once challenged Microsoft and Lotus...

IBM, Hubspan Team on Cloud-Based Integration Platform.
May 18, 2009... IBM is going to start selling a thing called WebSpan, a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration platform, created by pushing its WebSphere integration software together with Hubspan's on-demand integration platform and forming a...

Windows 7 RC & XPM Beta Out.(Microsoft Corp.)(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... Microsoft has posted both the public release of the Windows 7 Release Candidate and the beta XP Mode (XPM) add-on, the virtualized rendition of XP that Microsoft made so users of the new operating system can run XP apps, well, so at least the...

A Match Flickers in the Tunnel: Cisco.(Cisco Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... Cisco came in Wednesday with revenues for the April quarter off almost 17% at $8.16 billion, a shade better than the $8.07 billion expected, but it said that sales at some of its customers are stabilizing - or at least not continuing to...

Microsoft Fires Second Round of Softies.
May 18, 2009... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail Tuesday morning saying that the company was about axe more of the 5,000 people that it said in January it would lay off by the middle of next year. When Microsoft announced its first...

Citrix Leverages Amazon's Cloud.
May 18, 2009... Citrix has pushed out a cloud solution called Citrix C3 Lab so its followers can use Amazon's EC2 and S3 as part of their standard technology infrastructure and prototype cloud projects. Citrix says C3 Lab is the first of several ways it...

Google Apps Now Syncs with Active Directory.
May 18, 2009... Google Apps can now sync with Microsoft's Active Directory or any LDAP user directory like Lotus Domino or the open source OpenLDAP complements of Google's 2007 Postini security acquisition. The widgetry is called Google Apps Directory Sync...

Skytap Introduces Budgetary Discipline to the Cloud.(SkyTag Software Inc.)(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... Skytap Monday put a drag on runaway cloud spending when it initiated cost controls and policy enforcement. Users of its hybrid cloud-based virtual lab platform - or rather the guys who pay for all those resources that developers are...

Citrix Upgrades XenServer & Essentials.
May 18, 2009... Since making XenServer free earlier this year, Citrix has been reserving sexier virtualization functionality to a paid add-on called Citrix Essentials. Now it's upgraded that widgetry, which works with both XenServer and Microsoft's...

Citrix Starts Delivering Receiver.
May 18, 2009... Citrix - which has been promising this stuff for a while - has announced the general availability of Citrix Receiver, a free lightweight plug-in-like software client that it says makes accessing virtual desktops and applications as easy as...

Google & All of Android Land Sued.
May 18, 2009... Google and 46 of its Android followers plus their consortium have been sued for stealing the Android name. The suit, which claims "it is clear that Google stole first and asked questions later" - was brought last Tuesday by a little-known...

Satyam Missing $100m in US Investment Money.(Satyam Computer Services Ltd.)(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... It appears that $100 million that Satyam raised by selling its stock - a k a American depositary shares (ADS) - on the New York Stock Exchange never made it into the company's bank account and India's Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO)...

IBM Buys Exeros Assets.
May 18, 2009... IBM said Tuesday that it's bought the assets of Exeros, a data discovery ISV whose software automatically uncovers hidden relationships between databases, on undisclosed terms. It's for IBM's business analytics optimization consulting practice...

NetSuite Comes Up Short on Guidance.(NetSuite Inc.)(Financial report)(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... NetSuite, Larry Ellison's SaaS ERP company and competitor of Saleforce.com, earned two cents a share excluding items - a rare profit - on $41.6 million in revenues in Q1. With charges it lost $3.7 million, or six cents a share, up from $2...

SpringSource Acquires Hyperic.
May 18, 2009... SpringSource, the company behind the ever-popular but free Spring Framework, the Apache-licensed Java framework used by half of the Fortune 2000, said Monday that it's acquired most of the assets of Hyperic, the company with the equally popular...

Novell To Build Product for Moblin Netbooks.
May 18, 2009... Intel and Novell said Thursday that they're going to work together on getting OEMs and ODMs to adopt Moblin, which is kinda odd since the Intel-created open source Ubuntu/Fedora-based Linux operating system built specifically for Atom-based...

IGEL Launches a Virtual Thin Client Evaluation Tool.
May 18, 2009... Bowing to recession-induced exigencies, IGEL Technology, the third-largest thin client vendor by revenue last year according to IDC, has introduced a virtualized version of its new Linux-based Universal Desktop firmware to give people a no-cost...

Oracle Reportedly Developing SaaS Products.
May 18, 2009... Oracle is reportedly developing a line of seven new SaaS products to meet the online competition. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, remember, has scoffed at SaaS as unprofitable although he owns a goodly piece of NetSuite. According to the Wall Street...

BSquare Squeals on Dell's Android Netbook.
May 18, 2009... With the slip of a mistimed press release Wednesday, embedded house BSquare disclosed that it's porting Adobe's Flash Lite 3.17 to Dell Android netbooks. Really? Dell Android netbooks (plural)? Then - poof!!! - the errant press release was...

Microsoft, Yahoo & Open Source.
May 18, 2009... The watchtowers trained on the latest round of Microsoft-Yahoo talks on a search and advertising partnership report that they have finally become "meaningful" in the words of one source and could produce an actual contract in a few weeks. ...

FTC Probing Apple-Google Interlocking Directorate.(Federal Trade Commission)(Brief article)
May 18, 2009... Sniffing the presence of that exotic - but not exactly uncommon - fauna known in antitrust law as an interlocking directorate, the Federal Trade Commission has opened a "confidential" inquiry into the composition of the boards of Apple and...

EC Sets Date for Hearing But Microsoft May Be a No-Show.
May 18, 2009... A hearing date of June 3-5 has been set for Microsoft to offer oral arguments against the European Commission's browser accusations that bundling IE with Windows is a prima facie antitrust violation. Paidcontent.org, however, says Microsoft may...

Dell & Acer?
May 18, 2009... Sanford Bernstein ace analyst Toni Sacconaghi suggests that Dell buy Acer, the Taiwan PC company nipping at its heels and threatening its place as number two in market share in the US. The pair was tied in Q1 according to Gartner. He thinks the...