Latest News from Maureen O'Gara

There’s Good News & There’s Bad News: Gartner

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:15:00 EST

Gartner has updated its crystal ball - or gotten a new one - and now says that more PCs will ship this year than it expected because laptops, especially netbooks, are selling; it gives Windows 7 little to no credit. In September Gartner was projecting a 2% decline; now it says the number will be up 2.8% to 298.9 million units. It had to eat its words when it discovered that the third quarter was stronger than it allowed and that Q3's results "alone virtually guaranteed we would see positive growth this year" - suggesting that it missed the turn altogether.

NTT Uses OpSource to Compete with AT&T’s Cloud

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

When Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the world’s biggest telco, took a piece of the $10 million E series funding going into OpSource earlier this year, the pair reportedly didn’t know they would be going into the cloud business together – or that it would be on the same day that AT&T told people to stand by because it was about to launch an Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks a lot like Amazon.

Cisco Throws More Money at Tandberg

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST

Cisco had to up its bid Monday for Tandberg to overcome stockholder resistance to the $3 billion deal the Norwegian video conferencing equipment maker’s board agreed to. The sweetener for what Cisco calls a “very strategic” asset amounts to roughly another $400 million making the share price 170 Norwegian crowns (~$30.46) rather than 153.50. Cisco, which needs to amass 90% of Tandberg’s stock under Norse law to take it over, has extended its offer till December 1. It said Monday that it had 40%.

IBM Offers a Little Blue Insight

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:15:00 EST

In the interest of selling more widgetry to more people, IBM has transformed one of its mainframes into what it calls Blue Insight, a private cloud packed initially with a petabyte of structured and unstructured data that 200,000 of its sales, product development and manufacturing people can access to make a sale.

RightScale To Support Azure

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

RightScale, the cloud manager, plans to support Windows Azure and let customers deploy RightScale-managed applications and take advantage of Azure’s particular properties. It said it would support Azure infrastructure-level services through its new Service Management API like it does Amazon and Rackspace and give Azure users access to other cloud platforms. It didn’t say when.

Intel Invests in Joyent’s Cloud

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Joyent, whose customers include ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, developed its own custom OS and data center virtualization technology, which creates a multi-tenant cloud. It’s supposed to deliver more than 70% utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages according to Gartner.

Salesforce To Let Companies Chatter Away

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Salesforce.com is going the way of Facebook and Twitter with a reportedly secure private social networking application called Chatter that companies are supposed to use internally so their people can “collaborate” in real-time, but potentially the techzoid equivalent of the old-fashioned water cooler. In a statement trying to explain Chatter’s aetiology, CEO Marc Benioff said, “Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees? Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me.”

Google Apps Gets Power Panel, Single Sign-On

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

LTech, a little friend of Google’s, has spun up the first Power Panel for Google Apps to give enterprises moving to the cloud central administrative functionality. It’s also announced Single Sign-On for Google Apps now that Google Apps are pushing deeper into the enterprise. The Power Panel add-on, which LTech already know is gonna be popular, offers features such as Contact Journal, Shared Contact Search, Quick Links and an integration framework for CRM and enterprise data.

Intel & AMD Called in a Mediator

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

AMD wanted to be paid for its antitrust claims. Intel wanted to be paid to let AMD’s joint venture make x86 chips. Months of negotiation had been futile. Intel’s former CFO, now chief administrative officer Andy Bryant, who was recruited in September to fill in for general counsel Bruce Sewell – who disappeared in the middle of things first to go on sabbatical then to become Apple’s general counsel – reportedly persuaded the negotiators to bring in a mediator.

Infobright & Talend Combine on Free Virtual Data Warehouse

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

They say nobody else can hand you everything you need in minutes. There’s nothing comparable. Still they’re expecting only the usual single-digit percentage upgrades to their paid software. Infobright’s self-managing software is supposed to reduce administrative effort by up to 90%, leverages standard servers, and reportedly needs less storage than rival products because of data compression and the elimination of indexes, data partitioning or data duplication.

No Intel License for Globalfoundries

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Turns out Intel apparently didn’t give Globalfoundries, the AMD-Arab joint venture now making all of AMD’s processors, an x86 license when Intel and AMD settled their outstanding litigation last week. Nope. What Intel and Globalfoundaries have is an “agreement” that nobody will explain past Intel saying “it protects our IP” because it’s “confidential.”

Egenera Changes CEOs Again

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Egenera, the very first company to build a blade system meant to handle peaks and valleys, has reportedly had another purge. It’s now on its fourth CEO with CTO and EVP of engineering Pete Manca replacing Mike Thompson and product marketer Ken Oestreich in as its latest marketing VP. A Twitter tweet claims the company is shy a bunch of other folks. It did not return a call. Egenera has been trying to morph from a hardware company into an ISV based on PAN, its infrastructure management and orchestration software, which Dell OEMs for its blade-based Datacenter-in-a-Box and its Pan System.

SAP & Microsoft Cut Anti-Oracle Pact

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Striking while Oracle is at sixes and sevens over Sun, SAP and Microsoft, two of its worst enemies, have cut an anti-Oracle accord. Microsoft will recommend SAP’s BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application to its customers as its preferred solution, which should irritate Oracle as well as help SAP tickle its flagging sales.

Dell: "It’s the Net Cost, Stupid"

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Dell, which hasn’t been involved in the litigation except as a witness and source of discovery, has featured large in AMD’s suit against Intel over rebates, the European Commission’s action against Intel and now in the new antitrust suit lodged by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. When asked about the “elephant in the room” during its earnings conference call Thursday, CFO Brian Gladden remarked that “The issues that have been raised in these proceedings miss an important point – that the net cost is what matters.”

Yahoo’s Wasting Away

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

According to the latest figures from comScore, Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was a breath away from claiming 10% of US searches in October, up a half-a-point over September while poor consumptive Yahoo at 18%, a new low, lost eight-tenths of a point. Yahoo used to be a plumper 20%-21%. Google like Microsoft was also up a half point. AOL’s got a shrinking 2.9% and it’s on the block with Microsoft considered the likely buyer.

Things Get Better; Dell Tanks Anyway

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Dell’s fiscal Q3 profits plunged 54% to $337 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenues of $12.9 billion down 15%, but the company says demand is improving and, if looked at sequentially, revenues were up 1%. Wall Street expected it to show up with at least $13.2 in revenues. HP, by contrast, pre-announced its quarter last week flaunting profits that exceeded all expectations and raising its 2010 forecast.

Egypt Applies for First Non-Roman Web Domain

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Now that ICANN has relaxed its rules on domain names in non-Roman characters, Egypt Monday became the first country to request a web address in Arabic script. .Egypt will be .masr but in Arabic script. The move is meant to open the Internet to all the folks largely in emerging markets who speak languages written in a non-Roman script such as Chinese and Korean.

AMD Tops Top500

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

The world’s most powerful supercomputer is Jaguar, the recently upgraded Cray XT5 rig at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, according to the new semi-annual Top500 list. Jaguar’s roughly 250,000 processors went from quad-core Opterons to six-core Istanbul Opterons and now delivers 2.3 petaflops of theoretical peak performance or 1.75 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark, dethroning IBM. Four of the top five machines are now AMD-based. This and Intel’s money too. My, my. It’s Cray’s first time in the top spot. HP’s got 210 of Top500 machines; IBM’s got 186. China’s got number five.

Intel Ups Dividend

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Fresh from agreeing to pay AMD $1.25 billion in hush money, Intel upped its dividend 12.5% to 63 cents a share annualized, beginning with the first quarter next year. The company said it was a sign of its “confidence in business prospects going forward.”

Beta, Beta, Beta

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Microsoft has put out public betas of Office 2010, the SharePoint-dependent Office Professional Plus 2010 with its browser-based, Google Docs-offsetting Office Web Apps for business (this time with editing in Word and OneNote), Visio 2010 and Project 2010, both Office extensions, Exchange Server 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as well as Office Mobile 2010 with its mobile apps Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010.

AIR 2, Flash Player 10.1 in Beta

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Adobe’s AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux have been sent out to beta. Flash Player 10.1, advertised as the first “consistent browser runtime release of the Open Screen Project that will enable uncompromised web browsing of expressive applications, content and high-definition videos across the desktop and devices,” supports x86-based notebooks and should turn up on smartphones and other Internet-connected widgetry next year. It should eat less battery power and deliver better video playback. AIR 2 has enhanced support for mass storage devices and native application processes.

Azure Goes Live Next Year

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Except for a few companies that are clearly teacher’s pet, nobody will be going into production on Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud, until January 1. Until then it remains a technology preview, with tens of thousands of developers already using it according to Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie.

IBM Turns the Screws on zPrime

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

IBM System z CTO and resident spook Mark Anzani recently sent an IBM mainframe customer a letter meant to scare it into seeing the boogeyman under its bed and make sure it doesn’t use Neon Enterprise Software’s zPrime technology to reduce its mainframe costs. The customer wants to buy IBM’s Specialty Engines for its mainframes, the so-called zIIP and zAAP processors that IBM created to accelerate and run DB2 and Java on. IBM doesn’t want to fill the order unless the customer promises in writing not to use the chips to run the workloads that the zPrime software can offload to the things. It will save the customer millions of dollars in CP cycles and IBM doesn’t like that.

Galleon Doubled Down on ATI Ahead of AMD Buy

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

According to an SEC filing the Galleon Group, the hedge fund charge with trading on insider information, double downed on ATI in 2006 to the tune of ~$125 million in shares and call options right before AMD bought it and was up 6.6% when AMD’s bid was disclosed. Galleon had a pipeline right to the top of AMD and of course this new revelation has raised more eyebrows. Regulators however have so far only charged misconduct with respect to AMD’s spin off of its plants and its taking on more investment.

Chrome Netbooks a Year Off

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:00:00 EST

Google says it’s working with a bunch of unidentified “top OEMs” to create a Chrome notebook based on a Google hardware reference architecture that will hit market around this time next year in time for the holidays. It expects the widgets to change the basic computing model by transferring everything to the cloud. Google accepts that such a device won’t suit all use-cases but it should suit those, particularly youngsters, who spend most of their time on the web, to a “T.”

Vexed with Cisco HP Goes to Voltaire

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Emily Post would probably say Voltaire owes Cisco a bouquet of flowers – about the size Chicago gangsters send to funerals – for steering the two trophy accounts its way, since Cisco may have sacrificed its 77% market share to go adventuring. Voltaire marketing VP Asaf Somekh suggests that the champagne in Cisco’s bathtub could be drained in three-five years. Voltaire was able to nail both IBM and HP quicker than it thought it could.

The Fabled gPhone Reportedly Lives

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

That’s right the Google-branded phone that Google is supposed to sell direct and indirect, the thing whose existence Google pooh-poohed. The blog claims it’s real but won’t make the holiday rush as reported last month by others.

OK, Now Imagine Distributed Data Grids in the Cloud

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:30:00 EST

Having pushed the boundaries of modern technology, ScaleOut Software, the distributed data grid start-up, can now link distributed data grids at different locations into a single logically coherent grid. Seems a simple thing but it’s been illusive and ScaleOut says it’s the first to manage it. So now with its widgetry developers can migrate data across geographies seamlessly without having to replicate it site-to-site.

Chinese Court Orders Windows Off the Market

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

A court in China, where most software is pirated, has ordered Microsoft to stop selling the Chinese versions of its operating systems because they infringe on fonts owned by a Chinese company called Zhongyi Electronic. Microsoft says it has a license from Zhongyi and will appeal. Zhongyi says the license only applies to Windows 95.

Amazon Backs Zeus

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

Zeus Technology, the application traffic management folk, has ported the weeks-old edition of its web traffic management widgetry to Amazon EC2 with Amazon's help - including how to word Tuesday's announcement - despite the fact that Amazon has its own unashamedly rudimentary load balancing. One might conclude that Amazon knows a good thing when it sees it and is backing it to retain the hearts and minds of its followers. Maybe it'll improve its own widgetry over time but now is now.

AT&T To Go Cloud-to-Cloud with Amazon

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

AT&T said Monday that it will turn on its Amazon-like global Synaptic Compute as a Service later this quarter and target the scalable on-demand computing capacity at companies of all sizes. Since it's at the recruiting poster phase, AT&T has yet to divulge what the EC2-like service will cost. The widgetry is based on Sun's Open Cloud Platform, Sun's APIs and its cloud reference architecture; VMware and its vCloud API; and the AT&T-class security of its own network and management.

Microsoft Co-Founder Has Cancer Again

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, 56, one of the richest men in the world, is suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to his sister Jody Allen, the CEO of Vulcan Inc, his private asset management company. Allen left Microsoft in 1983 to undergo radiation treatment and bone marrow transplant for Hodgkin's disease and, although successful, he never returned to Microsoft.

Madoff Programmers Busted

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:15:00 EST

Two Madoff computer programmers who authorities say made the whole decades-long $65 billion Ponzi scheme possible were arrested Friday and brought up on criminal charges of conspiracy, falsifying the books and records of a broker-dealer and falsifying the books and records of an investment advisor. The SEC, which never tumbled to the ripoff before Madoff up and confessed last December, added civil charges.

MySQL + Novell??

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

MySQL co-developer Monty Widenius, said to have the business sense of a child by MySQL’s old management, and his hired help Florian Mueller, who made a killing on his MySQL stock when Sun lost its mind and bid a billion dollars for the Scandinavian company, paying 20 times revenues, are now insisting that Oracle should be made to divest MySQL so it can take over a fading Sun.

Rackspace Cloud Biz Doubles

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Budding cloud merchant Rackspace Hosting came in with better-than-expected net revenue of $162.4 million for the September quarter, up 17.4% year-over-year and up 6.8% sequentially. Earnings were up 45.3% year-over-year to $7.6 million or six cents a share and up 8.8% quarter-over-quarter. Managed hosting revenue increased to $147.1 million, up 6% sequentially. Cloud revenue increased to $15.3 million, up 17% from the previous quarter. The company said its cloud business now represents ~10% of its total net revenues, up from 5% this time last year.

MontaVista Sells Out Cheap

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

In a move reminiscent of Intel and Wind River, Cavium Networks, maker of specialty ARM and Mips processors, is buying MontaVista Software, the embedded Linux shop, for $50 million and it’s only paying $16 million in cash. The rest is stock. MontaVista, however, took in at least $93 million since it started 10 years ago from folks like Siemens, US Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures, NEC, IBM, Sony, WR Hambrecht, Samsung, Infineon, China Development Industrial Bank, Intel, Panasonic, Toshiba, Yamaha and RRE Ventures. A lot of those guys were MontaVista customers along with major accounts like Cisco, Dell, HP, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent and NTT DoCoMo.

Zend Teams with Varien

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Zend has gotten Varien, apparently a hot e-commerce platform, to ship the free Community Edition of Zend Server, the PHP web application server with the free Community Edition of its open source Magento e-commerce software. Varien, in turn, will contribute a number of native e-commerce features such as payment gateways and shipping calculation modules to the open source PHP framework, Zend Framework, which is an integrated part of Zend Server.

Microsoft Buys Eclipse Widgetry

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Microsoft, which has been out wooing Eclipse developers lately, is buying the Teamprise-related assets of SourceGear LLC, which lets developers using the Eclipse IDE or operating on multiple operating systems, such as Unix, Linux and Mac OS X, to build applications with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. Terms were not disclosed.

Sun Revs Sun Ray

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Sun Microsystems, whose future is dicey at best right now thanks to the European Commission, revved its virtual desktop Sun Ray software Tuesday. Oracle, Sun’s would-be acquirer, by the way, was an early access customer and is evaluating the software for potential use as part of its own IT infrastructure.

ScaleMP’s Talking BIG Clouds

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

ScaleMP, which builds SMP machines for HPC by aggregating multiple x86 blades into a single virtual x86 system, has become one of the cloud people. It’s adding some widgetry called vSMP Foundation for Cloud, currently in beta, to its vSMP Foundation line. It enables the dynamic, on-the-fly aggregation of x86 servers into big SMP virtual systems – sort of like what 3Leaf is doing – but ScaleMP uses virtualization for the server aggregation and the software is cloud-specific, meant for provisioning and re-provisioning large virtual-machine resources – large memory capacity and high memory bandwidth, say – mostly in private clouds.

Novell Makes Aboutface in SCO Case

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Back when the SCO litigation was under Utah district court judge Dale Kimball, whose decision that Novell owns Unix was overturned by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Novell thought it was simply ducky that SCO’s case against Novell should go ahead of SCO’s case against IBM, which is how we wound up with the summary judgment that got trashed. If memory serves right, it was Novell’s idea that it go first and block and tackle for IBM.

Tandberg Holds Cisco Up for More Money

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Cisco’s having trouble herding Tandberg’s shareholder into its pen. Despite the deal it cut with management, it’s only gotten 9.37% of the shareholders to accept its $3 billion cash offer for the videoconferencing equipment maker. They figure it’s worth more than Cisco’s 38% premium; Cisco doesn’t. The offer was set to expire Monday. Cisco has extended it till November 18. It says if it doesn’t have the necessary 90% by then it “will evaluate whether or not to withdraw the offer.” Cisco CEO John Chambers last week expressed confidence the deal would get done.

Oracle Upgrades its Open Source Database

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Berkeley DB Java Edition is a transactional storage engine for key-value pairs written entirely in Java that can be deployed as an embedded or so-called edge database, so developers can build applications that don’t need any manual administration. It now includes new replication features for high availability and scalability and performance improvements for highly concurrent applications.

Vordel to Manage Multiple Clouds

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Tucked away right now in a private beta is a versatile Cloud Service Broker that sounds like it could be a very handy thing to have around once it’s delivered sometime in the first quarter. Gartner predicted such things would turn up to negotiate relationships between providers of cloud services and service consumers and manage access to the services, providing greater security and creating completely new services. How prescient of Gartner.

Abu Dhabi Means To Become a Chip Contender

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

Waleed Al Muhairi, the COO of Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi government-owned investor in AMD as well as the chairman of Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), AMD’s Abu Dhabi government-owned partner in Globalfoundaries, its fab spin-out, said at a conference in Dubai Sunday that a chip plant would be up and spitting out parts in Abu Dhabi in four years. It would be the country’s first fab. The idea is for it to employ 30,000-40,000 people by 2030 – after it builds up an infrastructure and education helped along by MIT. According to Reuters, Muhairi said $10 billion has already been committed to the business through Globalfoundaries, which is in the process of acquiring Singapore-based contract manufacturer Chartered Semiconductor and its 150 customers for $1.8 billion. The object of the game is to cut both Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), contract manufacturing’s leader, and Intel down to size. Muhairi figures Globalfoundaries can take out all the other fabs besides TSMC. Not to get political or anything but some of Intel’s best design work is done in Israeli and it makes 45nm parts there too.

HP’s Flush

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

HP pre-announced its preliminary fiscal fourth quarter results Wednesday when it disclosed it was buying 3Com to stick it to Cisco. In the process it raised its fiscal 2010 outlook. It figures it’ll show revenues of $30.8 billion, down 8% for the October quarter or down 5% when adjusted for the effects of currency and up 12% sequentially. Net earnings should work out to 99 cents a share, up from 84 cents year-over-year. Preliminary non-GAAP EPS were for $1.14, versus $1.03 last year.

Cisco Takes on Microsoft Exchange

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Cisco’s behaving a little like the Lord High Executioner in the Mikado. It’s got a little list and apparently figures nobody on it will be missed if it sent them to an early grave starting with Microsoft Exchange. See, as of Monday Cisco is in the hosted e-mail business up against Microsoft Exchange Online, Google Gmail, IBM iNotes, heck, even Zoho Mail, but especially Microsoft, because it claims it can save users the price of Exchange Server and still leave them with the same experience.

Daddy, Where Did Windows 7 Come From?

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

This from the Windows Blog: “An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed. If you’re interested in learning more about the design of Windows 7, I suggest reading this AP story with Julie Larson-Green as well as these WSJ (membership required) and Fast Company articles. And here is one of many blog posts on the E7 blog discussing the design process of Windows 7.”

Bright To Peddle SUSE

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

Bright Computing, a specialist in Linux-based cluster management software and services for high-performance computing (HPC), has started offering its Bright Cluster Manager software bundled with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Bright and Novell are going to co-market the stuff to their channels and perhaps collaborate on software development for HPC. Eight of the top 10 supercomputers run on SUSE.

Intel to Industry: Nothing’s Changed

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Despite agreeing to pay AMD $1.25 billion in hush money, which sounds like an admission of guilt, Intel claims it’s done nothing wrong and never did – and such a position is memorialized in the 20-page deal it signed with AMD Wednesday. Intel CEO Paul Otellini claims it would have been improvident for Intel to risk losing the complex, nuanced AMD antitrust case that was supposed to go trial in March.