http://websphere.sys-con.com/ Latest articles from Maureen O'Gara Copyright 2008 WEBSPHERE JOURNAL Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:26:00 GMT WEBSPHERE JOURNAL 10 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/546761.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/546761.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:45:00 GMT Novell says it's going to 'simplify' pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a five-year subscription for the price of a three-year subscription. The discounts apply to workload consolidation from non-System z platforms and renewals of existing SLES subscriptions. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/602622.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/602622.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:30:00 GMT To no one's particular surprise, Oracle has claimed that it suffered hundreds of millions, if not 'at least' a billion dollars worth of damages because of SAP and the IP hacking theft of its TomorrowNow PeopleSoft/JD Edwards customer support subsidiary. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/604460.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/604460.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:30:00 GMT The fireworks over Armonk this 4th of July are going to be a bit brighter and more awesome because - by the flick of a checkbook - IBM has gotten out from under a threat to its precious multibillion-dollar mainframe monopoly. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/584771.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/584771.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:15:00 GMT NetSuite, the Larry Ellison SaaS company, is buying OpenAir, the 56-man shop that is supposed to be the leader in on-demand professional services automation, for $26 million cash, net of the cash on the acquisition's balance sheet. NetSuite says it probably won't be able recognize most of the deferred revenue on OpenAir's balance sheet so the acquisition will add to its losses this year. It is now projecting non-GAAP losses of $2.5 million-$3.5 million (four-six cents) on revenues of $156 million-$159 million. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600706.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600706.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 06:15:00 GMT Oracle's earnings, better than expected, were up 27% to $2 billion or 39 cents a share in its fourth fiscal quarter on revenues up 24% to $7.24 billion and good thing too considering Oracle is this week's roundly watched harbinger of what's happening in the economy at this very, um, nasty intersection. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks Oracle's results said more about Oracle's execution than the macro economy. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600739.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600739.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:45:00 GMT Google is currently the pet of the American consumer. Although many in the industry don't find it particularly likeable, the company's reputation is tops among US consumers, based largely on how it treats employees and a perception of social responsibility, according to a Harris poll, in which Google dislodged Microsoft from the perch. Johnson & Johnson, the Band-Aid king, came in second and Intel third. Microsoft is now number 10. Google was previously number four. Companies with the worst reps include Halliburton, Comcast, Northwest Airlines and Exxon. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/603562.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/603562.htm Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:30:00 GMT Xandros acquired Linspire's Linux assets after Linspire changed its name to Digital Cornerstone. With the acquisition Xandros CEO Andy Typaldos has been telling the press, 'Xandros is already the third-largest Linux company in the world, and ... we may already be the largest private Linux company in the world.' http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600683.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600683.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT On Tuesday TechCrunch and CNet, based on the usual 'sources,' reported that talks between Yahoo and Microsoft were back on, stories that prevented Yahoo's desperate, bewildered, shuttlecock stock from dropping below the 20-dollar barrier and landing in the high teens where it was when Microsoft entered the picture on February 1. It was certainly headed in that direction. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600705.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600705.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:00:00 GMT PlateSpin has trotted out its first major product release since Novell bought the virtualization management operation back in March with the launch of PowerConvert 7.0, its data center disaster recovery mojo. The software has new backup and recovery features and expanded multi-platform support. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/602624.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/602624.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:00:00 GMT Monday was theoretically the day that, over protests and despite its popularity, Windows XP was retired as a way of pushing people to adopt the widely reviled Vista operating system before the very Vista-like 'next-generation' Windows 7 arrives, supposedly at the end of next year or at least by January of 2010. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600709.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600709.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:30:00 GMT A little Chicago ISV called LimitNone is suing Google for nigh on to a billion dollar charging it with misappropriating its trade secrets to beat back Microsoft Office. Seems a year ago March LimitNone shared its mojo for migrating Outlook users and their calendars and contacts to Gmail with Google and according to LimitNone's story the widgetry turned up in Google Apps despite Google's assurances that it had no intention of developing a similar product. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600665.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600665.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:15:00 GMT Android, due in the second half, could reportedly be delayed until Q4 or maybe even next year, according to the tale the Wall Street Journal tells, a situation that opens up a can of worms for Google. Google has to prove that it's more than a one-trick pony and that it can deliver something other than beta software. The paper says Google is so absorbed with getting a T-Mobile Android phone out in Q4 that Sprint Nextel and China Mobile have fallen by the wayside. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600668.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600668.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:15:00 GMT With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595781.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595781.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:45:00 GMT Mithras Capital, which owns a relatively small block of 1.7 million shares of Yahoo and would vote for Icahn's replacement slate in a heartbeat, sent an open letter to Microsoft Thursday asking Steve Ballmer to take Microsoft's 'alternate transaction' directly to Yahoo's stockholders. That's the better-than-Google deal that Microsoft claimed - after talks with Yahoo fell apart a second time - was worth better than $33 a share. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600707.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600707.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:45:00 GMT VMware has cut an OEM deal with Inspur, the Chinese company whose name used to be Langchao and said to be the largest native server maker. Inspur will bundle and support VMware's Infrastructure 3 widgetry on its servers. Inspur says there's little virtualization deployment experience in China. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600704.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600704.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:30:00 GMT Red Hat saw earnings rise 6.6% to $17.3 million, or eight cents a share in its first fiscal quarter ended May 31 on revenue up 32% year-over-year and 11% sequentially to $156.6 million. EPS was dead flat year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $130.7 million, up 27% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially. Training and services were up 64% to $25.9 million. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/604461.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/604461.htm Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:30:00 GMT On Monday, nine days ahead of his sentencing on July 9 for the murder of his wife, William DuBois, the lawyer for ace Linux programmer Hans Reiser, filed a brief with the court saying - for the very first time since this case began - that under penalty of perjury that he think Reiser 'may be mentally incompetent as a result of mental disorder or developmental disability' - not simply socially inept or perhaps mildly autistic, as he's suggested before - and that Reiser can't - and these are supposed to be magic words to a court - 'understand the nature of the criminal proceedings or assist counsel in the conduct of the defense in a rational manner.' http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600162.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600162.htm Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT Nokia wants to buy the 52% of the Symbian operating system that it doesn't already own to open source it and set it free. It's a defense against advances into the fragmented mobile space that Nokia and Symbian dominate - particularly - from the looks of case - against Google's nascent open source Android initiative and the freebie Linux-based LiMo Foundation - but then there's also Apple's proprietary iPhone, Microsoft's equally proprietary, royalty-charging Windows Mobile and the ever-present Blackberry and Palm. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/603561.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/603561.htm Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:45:00 GMT Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600666.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600666.htm Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:45:00 GMT Not that long ago Linux barely had two drivers to rub together. Now it claims to support 'more hardware devices than any other operating system in the history of the world' and, figuring it's time to push IHVs to open their code, 150 Linux kernel developers, including Alan Cox, signed a 'Position Statement' decrying the use of any closed source kernel module or drivers in Linux. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/584689.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/584689.htm Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT HP may lose the head of its Personal Systems Group (PSG), Todd Bradley, to Motorola. He's on Moto's list of two candidates to run its cell phone operation, according to the Wall Street Journal. Everybody's still in denial because negotiations are at the sensitive stage, the paper said. However, after the story ran Bradley sent an e-mail to his staff saying he was happy where he was. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600667.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/600667.htm Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:15:00 GMT Microsoft managed to get its VMware-spooking Hyper-V, its hypervisor-based virtualization technology, out the door Thursday, which is something of an accomplishment considering that by Microsoft's clock the thing is weeks early, having not been expected until August sometime. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/599814.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/599814.htm Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:00:00 GMT HP has open sourced the Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) that it got from DEC by way of Compaq. It's sent the 16-year-old Alpha-based source code, representing what it calls 400 R&D years, over to Sourceforge under the GPLv2 license as a reference implementation of an enterprise Linux file system. It says it will provide design documentation, test suites and engineering resources. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/599880.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/599880.htm Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:00:00 GMT Moving in like a weather front, IBM is opening its first - or for that matter anybody's first - cloud computing center in Africa, and a second one China. The African site is in Johannesburg, the Chinese one in Beijing. IBM said the new centers are part of its overall investment in the world's growth markets, to which it committed an additional $1.6 billion earlier this year. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595752.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595752.htm Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:00:00 GMT Sun has released a new real-time, shared-nothing, carrier-grade version of MySQL called MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 certified for use in telecom environments, such as subscriber data management systems (hlr, hss) and service delivery platforms. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595803.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595803.htm Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:15:00 GMT The two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo in Delaware to invalidate its severance plan 'poison pill' have been denied the expedited trial that they asked for ahead of the August 1 stockholders meeting. The plan is supposed to incentivize Google staff to leave if an acquisition were to come off. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595755.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595755.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT Novell was foiled in its attempt this week to persuade the bankruptcy judge in Delaware, who's holding SCO life in his hands, to deny SCO another extension in filing a formal plan of reorganization. If the judge had agreed with Novell - which he didn't - that would have ended what they call in bankruptcy circles the 'exclusivity period' when only the debtor - in this case SCO - can file a reorganization plan. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/597208.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/597208.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:15:00 GMT Salesforce.com, which has already linked its CRM software to Google Apps and integrated AdWords tracking into its platform, is deploying a free new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs so third-party developers can interact with data in Google services. The toolkit is supposed to bring together data and content in Google Apps with the database, logic and workflow capabilities in Salesforce.com?s Force.com development platform. Salesforce claims the move creates a -multi-cloud computing platform? that will accelerate the creation of newfangled web-based applications. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/597210.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/597210.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:15:00 GMT Sprint may drop out to do a 4G phone and China Mobile is having trouble translating Android into Chinese. And handset makers' efforts to customize the widgetry for carriers is taking longer than expected; there seems to be some difficulty integrating carrier-branded service into the thing alongside Google's apps. The Journal also says that Android isn't getting backing from the mobile ISV because the platform isn't stable - Google is constantly revising it - and Apple's iPhone is easier to develop for. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595776.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595776.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:45:00 GMT Telstra, the old Australian phone company before government-owned monopolies became unfashionable and now the country's leading telecom and media house, is going into the Software as a Service (SaaS) business. It's got a platform called T-Suite and intends to use it to supply on-demand business applications to Australian businesses, particularly SMEs. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595779.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595779.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:30:00 GMT So the Shanghai Securities News - sort of the Wall Street Journal of China but basically a government house organ often used for conveying official announcements - reports this week that Microsoft is being investigated for antitrust violations and might get sued when China's new antitrust law comes into effect in August. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595778.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595778.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:00:00 GMT Hewlett-Packard has torn a page out of Sun's book - at least the Sun edition that reads give gear away for free to buy market share - except HP's target is IBM and IBM's precious, profitable mainframe preserve. The notion, called the 'NonStop Freedom' incentive plan, is part of HP's 'Blade Everything' concept. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595754.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595754.htm Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:00:00 GMT Red Hat is open sourcing Project Spacewalk, the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base under the GPLv2 license. RHN Satellite is the stuff behind the Red Hat Network and lets customers manage RHEL updates inside their firewall. It does systems provisioning, updates and monitoring across physical and virtual servers. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595780.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595780.htm Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:15:00 GMT Microsoft says it's going to open a Search Technology Center in Europe in the fiscal year that starts in July. The center is supposed to 'accelerate Microsoft's investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace to the benefit of both the consumer and the advertiser,' it said, 'in line with Microsoft's recent announcement in the US of Live Search cashback.' http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595782.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595782.htm Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:15:00 GMT Microsoft has bought Navic Networks, a move that puts it in the business of placing TV commercials in near real-time, one of the things that Steve Ballmer may have had in mind when he said there were a lot of things you could do with $50 billion besides buying Yahoo. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595801.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595801.htm Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:15:00 GMT Having peered into various crystal balls, Cisco figures global Internet traffic will grow 46% a year between now and 2012, nearly doubling every two years. The projection translates into an annual bandwidth demand of more than a half a zettabyte, the equivalent of at least 125 billion DVDs, largely because of online video and social networking. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595802.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595802.htm Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:15:00 GMT The New York Times tried putting a horse's head in Jerry Yang's bed Saturday, prophesying that his 'days as Yahoo's CEO are numbered.' In a piece entitled 'Oh Jerry, It's No Longer Your Baby,' it excoriated him for 'shafting' Yahoo shareholders by running off Microsoft on purpose and turning Yahoo into a Google 'pawn.' http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595750.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595750.htm Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:15:00 GMT It only took 15 years but Wine, the open source Windows rewrite, so to speak, that lets Linux run Windows applications natively, has reached its first stable release, Wine 1.0. Compatibility isn't perfect, the Wine folk say, and not everything will run (particularly newer apps) but thousands of programs appear to be working just fine. There's a list of tested program that's heavy on games. Both Wine source and binaries will be available. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595753.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595753.htm Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:15:00 GMT After a bit of a breech birth - caused by visitors overloading its web servers - Mozilla released Firefox 3 Tuesday seeking to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours as a way to stir up interest and at the same time stick it to Microsoft. http://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595710.htmhttp://websphere.sys-con.com/read/595710.htm Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:00:00 GMT eXpresso, a year-old venture-backed California start-up, has taken Excel to the clouds with Microsoft's blessings. PowerPoint, Word and PDF files are set to follow by the end of the summer. eXpresso webifies legal Excel users and lets them share, edit, download and print their spreadsheets over the Internet; the number of people collaborating has virtually no bounds.