Latest News from Maureen O'Gara

Qualtrics Raises $70 Million

Wed, 16 May 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Called “the biggest software company you haven’t heard of yet” by one of its shiny new backers, 10-year-old Qualtrics has gotten $70 million from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital in the VCs’ largest joint investment ever. It’s also the company’s first outside investment. Reportedly profitable since it started, it’s supposed to use the money to expand its SaaS products beyond market research and accelerate its global growth, expecting to hire another 250 employees to add to the existing 200 in the next year. Qualtrics is used for online data collection and analysis claiming to make it “easy for anyone in a company to conduct PhD-level research.” It figures outsourced research and data collection is too expensive – it’s shooting at data generated from customers, sales reps, channel partners and employees – and competitive tools are either too basic or too complicated.

Java Jury Deliberating Google’s Patent Infringement

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Oracle’s Java patent infringement case against Google and Android went to the jury Tuesday afternoon. The jury, which delivered only a partial verdict on copyright infringement last week, deciding that Google infringed but unable to say whether that infringement made “fair use” of the IP, is now down to 11 jurors. One juror reportedly called in from the San Francisco Bay Bridge with car trouble, unlikely to make court at all. The judge excused her from ever coming back, ZDnet said, and pushed on. Only two patents are at issue. In its closing statement Oracle accused Google of being reckless and willful and told the jury that words like fair use, open source and clean room had no meaning in this phase of the trial, only the fact that Google’s Dalvik virtual machine works just like Oracle’s Sun-inherited Java virtual machine and that Google lacked a license. Google continued to maintain that it designed Android from scratch – though that’s not a defense in patent infringement cases – and different from the claims of the two patents. Over the weekend the judge told Oracle the damages phase of the trial couldn’t wait for a retrial of the fair use issue. Oracle, in turn, said it wouldn’t accept a bench verdict on damages and is insisting on asking for disgorgement of infringer’s profits on a few lines of copyright infringement although the judge has tried to disabuse Oracle’s lawyers of the notion that that theory is going to translate into a finding worth billions or even hundreds of million of dollars. It’s unclear when the judge will decide if APIs are copyrightable or not – but currently it won’t be in time for part three of the trial on damages – and until he does there’s no possible liability. According to Law.com Oracle lawyer David Boies tried to strike a deal with Judge Alsup. “He said Alsup should put off the damages phase of the trial until after the judge resolves the burning legal questions, chiefly whether the 37 API packages are copyrightable. And should Alsup rule against Oracle then Boies said he would agree to forgo a jury award on infringer’s profits and would let Alsup award any statutory damages on those two lines of infringed code. But should Oracle prevail in the legal finding that the API packages are copyrightable material then Oracle wants a shot at the more lucrative damages in a jury trial….Alsup seemed to indicate Boies’ idea might be doable if Google agreed. He asked for more briefing.”

Facebook Ups Its IPO Price

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

You knew this was gonna happen, right? Facebook has repriced its IPO upwards from $28-$35 a share to $34-$38 a share giving it a valuation of $92 billion-$104 billion, a neighborhood more to its liking than the original $77 billion-$96 billion. The actual price won’t be set until Thursday night. Bloomberg claimed the company’s IPO roadshow was producing less institutional demand for the stock than expected because of less-than-rosy revenue forecasts last week – though the increase in the price would seem to belie that statement – and the AP and CNBC did a survey that found half the people polled thought the original asking price was too high – more among active investors.

GM to Pull Facebook Advertising: WSJ

Wed, 16 May 2012 06:45:00 EDT

Here we are less than three days before Facebook’s historic $100 billion IPO and General Motors or “people familiar with the matter” let slip to the Wall Street Journal that GM’s going to stop advertising on the social networking site because the paid ads are ineffective. The big American carmaker still reportedly intends to do marketing through Facebook but that’s not going to put any money in Facebook’s pocketbook. The paper says GM started having doubts earlier this year and met with Facebook managers, leaving the meetings “unconvinced advertising on the web site made sense.” GM reportedly spends about $10 million advertising on Facebook and another $30 million on its Facebook promotional content and managing its Facebook pages.

Facebook Co-Founder Gives Up US Citizenship

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:30:00 EDT

Brazilian-born Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, 30, traded in his American citizenship last September to take up residence in Singapore, a move that will cut his taxes when Facebook IPOs on Friday. He is estimated to own about 4% or 5% of Facebook. The company was valued at $77 billion–$96 billion ahead of the IPO although, according to Bloomberg, its roadshow is producing less institutional demand for the stock than expected since Facebook said last week that advertising revenues weren’t keeping pace with user growth and may not reach its rosier forecasts. It’s supposed to go out at $28–$35 a share and sell 337.4 million shares, 180 million put up by Facebook itself. The rest of the shares are coming from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and selling shareholders like Accel Partners, Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies.

Judge Finds Google Copied More Java Code than Jury Said

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

District Court Judge William Alsup, who refused last week to decide whether Google had fairly used the Java IP a jury said Android infringed, had no trouble Friday deciding that the jury made a mistake in finding Google only copied nine lines of Java’s rangeCheck code as well as infringing the sequence, structure and organization of 37 Java APIs. In a judgment as a matter of law the good judge said Google directly copied eight other Java files and that it wasn’t a petty little thing. FOSS Patents had said when it came out that the jury’s verdict was odd since “there are code files in there that are much larger than the rangeCheck function, and infringement was so clear that it shouldn’t even have been put before a jury.” The judge effectively said the blog was right.

Thompson Told Yahoo Board He Has Cancer: WSJ

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

Departed Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, 54, told the board before he resigned over the weekend that he was just diagnosed with thyroid cancer and was starting treatment, the Wall Street Journal said overnight. It isn’t clear exactly where this piece is supposed to fit in the puzzle but if it’s a sympathy bid it may not have worked. All Things Digital says Yahoo is claiming he’s gone for “cause” over ethics violations because of his phony computer science degree – which appeared in Yahoo’s regulatory filings – and won’t be getting much in the way of severance. Heidrick & Struggles apparently didn’t vet his resume when it placed him at eBay years ago but kept a copy of the resume he submitted back then and was able to shoot down his claim that the great headhunting firm had introduced the fabrication. It appears that was Thompson’s last possible defense.

How Red Hat Plans to Conquer the Enterprise PaaS Space

Mon, 14 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Red Hat claims that the enterprise isn’t using these newfangled platforms-as-a-service to develop software very much because they don’t meet its needs. The enterprise is worried about compliance, enterprise architecture standards, IT governance, security, application lifecycle management, application development methodologies, organizational and process restrictions, data and compute locality and privacy restrictions. Itches other people’s PaaSs don’t scratch according to Red Hat. Ah, but analysts like 451 Research say the enterprise PaaS market could be worth $3 billion by 2015, a mere three years away, and surpass the SaaS market. And then there’s Red Hat’s great enemy VMware with its new Cloud Foundry open source PaaS. So to meet the opposition and give the enterprise what it wants Red Hat has been evolving its OpenShift PaaS, which it put out for as a developer preview a year ago.

PTO Finds Key RPost Patent 100% Valid

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

A US Patent and Trademark Office re-examination has found a basic RPost proof-of-delivery patent valid. In a sweeping decision all 89 of its claims have been left standing against challenges of prior art. Patent holders dream of such things. It is understood to be a so-called “final final” decision covering items such as time-stamp authentication. No one except the PTO knows who made the claims of prior art but that unknown challenger reportedly dumped scads of documentation on the PTO for it to wade through and failed. It’s bad news for the slate of companies RPost is suing in federal courts in California, Texas and Virginia for infringing US Patent No 6,182,219 including Swiss Post, Canada Post, Adobe, Docusign, Zix, RightSignature and Farmers Insurance among others.

Dell’s Got the First 22nm Microservers

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:15:00 EDT

Dell has turned up with the very first cloud-directed microservers using Xeon processors built on Intel’s teeny-weeny 22nm process with sexy TriGate transistors. It will be amusing to see if AMD sends its recent SeaMicro microserver acquisition, which used to be tight with Intel, out to buy the same chips on the open market while it retools for some AMD dingus. AMD did say SeaMicro would continue its Xeon line. Intel is also warding off promised server competition from ARM. ARM server start-up Calxeda is supposed to be about a month away from beta testing its boxes.

Windows RT Raises Antitrust Specter & It Isn’t Even Out Yet

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

This sound familiar? Mozilla is complaining that Microsoft is impeding its Firefox web browser from getting on the devices being designed to carry the unseen next-generation Windows for ARM chip, now officially called Windows RT. RT, which has a Metro environment for tablets and phones, as well as a classic Windows interface, won’t support legacy apps like the x86 version of Windows 8 and programs that run on it will only be available Apple-like from Microsoft’s store. Developers who support RT will only be able to use the Windows runtime stack and standard APIs. Microsoft claims that’s for reasons of security, performance and battery life. It’s supposedly typical of ARM. But it means third-party browsers, which need more than the standard APIs, won’t be supported in the classic desktop mode.

HP Betas Its OpenStack Public Cloud

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

HP, the public cloud’s Johnnie-come-lately, made its first public cloud services available in public beta Thursday and, to make up for lost time HP is going to charge utility prices to use the beta albeit at half what it’ll cost when it goes GA. The widgetry, which reportedly went to private beta in September, is not the homegrown cloud of HP’s dreams that it was working on a year ago. It frankly didn’t have the technology in-house to build it and was lucky that the open source effort to produce the OpenStack public cloud infrastructure came along. Of course, OpenStack is not supposed to be quite ready primetime yet so HP’s widgetry will stay a beta until it proves it can scale and HP can figure out its SLAs.

Yahoo’s New CEO is Toast: WSJ

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:00:00 EDT

Yahoo’s so-called ResumeGate has reportedly claimed its short-lived CEO Scott Thompson. In the midst of Mother’s Day – when, as she says, everybody’s at brunch – All Things Digital’s ace reporter Kara Swisher, who seems to know everything that goes on at Yahoo, said Sunday – based on what she’s been told by “multiple sources” – that Thompson’s stepping down after a mere four months on the job.

Intel & McAfee on Mission to End Cloud Nail-Biting

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:00:00 EDT

Security concerns are the biggest thing holding back cloud adoption, but Intel says it’ll take it and its pricey $7.68 billion McAfee acquisition at least another five years to bring cloud security up to the best-in-class traditional enterprise security available now. Not very reassuring is it. Intel also says, “A private cloud added to your IT infrastructure is like adding another door to your house – it’s another entry point for bad guys to get in.” Oh, great, just what we need. Despite those sobering thoughts Intel is still expecting more than three billion connected users – that’s a B, dear, as in billion – and 15 billion connected devices to be driving more than 1,500 exabytes of cloud traffic by 2015, and IDC figures that about 20% of all digital data – roughly, say, 1,400 exabytes – a mammoth load – will be stored or processed in the cloud.

Proview’s US Suit Thrown Out

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

A California Superior Court last Friday threw out Proview Electronics’ three-month-old infringement suit against Apple over the iPad trademark. The dismissal only came to light the other day. Proview claimed Apple duped it when Apple bought the iPad trademarks from it in 2009 for $55,000 because it didn’t disclose who its middleman was working for. The trademark was reportedly registered in 10 countries. Proview wanted the 2009 deal set aside and Apple stopped from using the iPad name. Proview Electronics is the Taiwanese subsidiary of Proview International Holdings, and a sister firm of the Chinese Proview that sued Apple in Mainland China claiming to still own the mark. In probably the kindest rendition of the facts the Taiwan company apparently sold Apple the Chinese trademark without authorization. Apple claims it reneged.

Yahoo Pushed to Name New Interim CEO

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Dissident shareholder Daniel Loeb, head of the Third Point hedge fund that uncovered Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s resume lie, sent the Yahoo board another letter Wednesday saying it was “farcical” for them to be spending more time deciding whether to fire him than it had deciding to hire him. He wants Thompson out and recommends that Yahoo CFO Tim Morse or global media head Ross Levinsohn replace him on an interim basis – unless they were privy to Thompson’s little deception – lest Yahoo “flounder under a discredited leader for an undefined period.” Loeb also wants his slate installed on the Yahoo board, one of whom would lead a search for a new CEO. Meanwhile, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Thompson’s former boss, lent Thompson some support but noted that eBay’s filing were always accurate even if its web site and PR material weren’t. He said, “Our legal filings were taken care of by our legal department.” So it would seem then that Yahoo legal department does shoddy work too.

Google Demands New Java API Trial

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:45:00 EDT

Google, as expected, has put in its papers asking the court to declare a mistrial because the jury only decided it infringed 37 Java APIs in building Android and didn’t decide whether that infringement constituted so-called “fair use” of the code. So it wants a whole new trial “as to both infringement and fair use as to Oracle’s claim that Google is liable for infringement of its copyright on the structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 API packages.” Google claims the two issues – infringement and fair use – are “opposite sides of the same coin” and “indivisible.” It’s standing on its Seventh Amendment rights to trial by jury and a unanimous decision on liability, using its “indivisible” contention to oppose a partial retrial in front of a new jury. Oracle has yet to reply to Google’s “indivisible” argument but it wants the judge to decide the fair use question in one of those handy judgments as a matter of law (JMOLs) that both Google and Oracle asked for before.

Judge Refuses To Decide ‘Fair Use’ in Java Trial

Thu, 10 May 2012 06:15:00 EDT

Judge William Alsup Wednesday refused to decide whether Google had fairly used the Java IP a jury found Android infringed Monday. There are, you see, circumstances that allow copyrighted work to be copied without the owner’s consent such as creating something new that advances the public interest but the jury deadlocked on that issue and returned only a partial verdict. Oracle hoped the judge would intervene and hand down a judgment in its favor as a matter of law since Google’s liability depends on it but he refused. He reportedly said, “I don’t think it would be right to rule in favor of Oracle” at a hearing Wednesday. His decision suggests that Google will get the new trial it’s asked for. “I hate to even contemplate the idea of another trial,” the judge was quoted as saying, “but if it comes to that, that’s the way it will have to be.” It’s unclear whether a new jury would be asked to decide infringement as well as fair use like Google wants. Judge Alsup also reportedly refused to throw out the jury verdict that Google cribbed nine lines of Java code. He is expected to rule on the copyrightability of APIs and of course he has to rule on Google’s motion for a mistrial. The existing jury is currently hearing the patent infringement phase of the case and has heard from folks like Android creator Andy Rubin as well as other engineers.

Yahoo Board Member Quits over ResumeGate

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Yahoo board member Patti Hart, who led the search committee that resulted in Yahoo hiring PayPal president Scott Thompson as its CEO, won’t stand for re-election at the next annual meeting, according to sources tapped by All Things Digital. Activist shareholder Third Point has been agitating for her to go and take Thompson with her since it discovered last week that both of them had faked their college degrees. It’s currently demanding transcriptions of all of Yahoo’s records concerning Thompson’s appointment although what it really wants is to get its slate of candidates on Yahoo’s misbegotten board. The blog says Third Point’s going to find it wasn’t much of a search. Thompson reportedly sent Yahoo board member and Intuit CEO Brad Smith a cold-call e-mail out-of-the-blue looking for the job.

Yahoo Gets New Ultimatum

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:15:00 EDT

When Yahoo ignored Third Point’s ultimatum to fire CEO Scott Thompson for cause by high noon Monday Third Point read Yahoo Delaware General Corporation Law and demanded that the company open all its records about how it came to hire the man at the center of “ResumeGate.” It wants them ready for inspection and copying by Friday, another deadline. Section 220(b) of the Delaware General Corporation Law says any stockholder can inspect certain books and records of a public company on written request. If Third Point doesn’t get what it wants it will doubtless sue in Delaware’s reportedly stockholder-leaning Chancery Court. Meanwhile, the Yahoo board is supposed to be doing its own investigation of how it came to make a regulatory filing saying Thompson got an undergraduate degree in computer science and accounting from Stonehill College, a Catholic school near Boston, when it was only in accounting. Yahoo claimed last week that it was just an “inadvertent error,” but it appears that Thompson has been making that “inadvertent error” for years like at eBay where he was president of PayPal. In a letter to the board Monday Third Point said, “We believe that this internal investigation by this Board must not be conducted behind a veil of secrecy and shareholders deserve total transparency.” Third Point is Yahoo’s biggest shareholder and is embroiled in a proxy fight with the company aimed at filling four board seats with its own people. The hedge fund happened upon and immediately advertised the discrepancy in Thompson’s CV last week. It also discovered that the head of the board’s search committee Patti Hart fudged her resume too and claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics when it’s really in business administration. It wants her gone too. Third Point wants any records related to her appointment to the Yahoo board as well as any records of how Peter Liguori, John Hayes, Thomas McInerney, Maynard Webb, Jr. and Fred Amoroso happened to get board seats. If it gets its hands on the documents, Forbes thinks Third Point is going to find that Thompson wasn’t vetted at all; that no head hunter was involved; that there were no other candidates; and that Thompson simply reached out to the board and two weeks later was CEO. If so it will strengthen Third Point’s case of board mismanagement, an easy enough case to prove given Yahoo’s history. It wants the board to drop its resistance to Third Point’s nominees for the board which include Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb, Maeva Group CEO Harry Wilson, former MTV Networks president Michael Wolf and former NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker. Yahoo claims Loeb isn’t qualified to sit on the board. Meanwhile, and utterly coincidently, Yahoo is supposedly working on a new deal to sell maybe 15%-25% of its holdings in Alibaba back to the China e-commerce company. A deal, which has previously eluded the two companies, could reportedly be done in weeks. Thompson has supposedly been leading the latest negotiations. This deal is supposed to be simpler than the others they tried and would see Yahoo pay heavy taxes on its gains. Of course selling an increasingly valuable asset that’s supposed to represent a large part of Yahoo’s $18.8 billion market cap may not strike everybody as the sensible thing to do right now no matter how much Alibaba complains. Yahoo owns about 40% of Alibaba and the valuation is unclear. Its valuation last year was $32 billion. Yahoo hasn’t been able to bridge a “valuation gap” with Softbank, the majority owner of Yahoo Japan, so that deal’s going nowhere.

Google and Android Infringed Oracle Copyrights

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

After days of deliberating, a San Francisco jury Monday found that Google and its Android operating system infringed the Java copyrights now held by Oracle. However, the jury remained as deadlocked as it was last Friday over the issue of whether Google made so-called “fair use” of the IP. It couldn’t come to a unanimous decision on that question. Google denied all the allegations and claimed it developed Android from scratch and that the parts of Java it did use aren’t covered by copyright. After the verdict was read Google moved for a mistrial – which would mean a whole new trial and possibly new evidence – while the judge accepted the partial verdict and forged ahead. The partial verdict says Google infringed the sequence, structure and organization of 37 Java APIs by using those APIs in Android. FOSS Patents figures that was the most important decision the jury made. The blog also figures there’s really no “fair use” case here and is critical of the instructions given to the jury about fair use.

Apple in Settlement Talks with Proview over iPad Mark

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Apple has made an offer to resolve the imbroglio over the Chinese iPad trademark according to Roger Xie, a lawyer representing the Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the bankrupt company that claims the mark wasn’t included in the rights Apple acquired from a sister company in 2009. Whatever amount Apple’s offered it apparently isn’t enough to satisfy Proview, which owes $400 million to Chinese banks. Apple has been under pressure from a Chinese appeals court to settle but has been reluctant to sit down. It is believed the court could uphold a lower court’s decision that Proview owns the trademark.

Yahoo Has Until Noon to Fire Its CEO - or Else

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:33:00 EDT

The Yahoo board has until high noon today (Monday) to fired CEO Scott Thompson for cause and to can his confederate in the now infamous “ResumeGate,” board member Patti Hart, or else. Yahoo’s biggest shareholder Third Point, which is also engaged in a proxy fight with the company over the composition of Yahoo’s board, delivered this ultimatum in a letter to that board Friday. It didn’t say what the “or else” would be merely that if it didn’t fire the pair of them Third Point “will consider it grounds for further action.” Third Point said blowing off “years of inaccurate SEC filings, web site biographies and, most likely, D&O questionnaires and curriculum vitae” as “inadvertent errors” – an expression it ascribes to Thompson – was the “height of arrogance” and “insulting to shareholders.”

You Can Kiss That Old 19-Inch Rack Good-Bye

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:45:00 EDT

A growing throng of Open Compute Project (OCP) disciples converged on Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, this week to overturn the established sixty-year-old EIA 310-D rack standard inherited from railroad signaling relays and telephone switching and in its place substitute Open Rack, the very first standard for data centers, especially big hyper-scale data centers like Facebook’s. Facebook set Open Compute in train a year ago to solve problems it was having trying to shoehorn the compute, storage and networking density it needed into the traditional server rack, a form factor its hardware master calls “blades gone bad.” Blades supposedly go bad because of what OCP founding board member Andy Bechtolsheim calls “gratuitous differentiation” on the part of vendors and their lock-in-seeking proprietary designs that sacrifice interoperability.

Inktank to Commercialize Ceph Big Storage

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

Developers behind the open source massively scalable distributed storage system known as Ceph have started a company called Inktank to commercialize the stuff. It’s supposed to be the first company to offer enterprise-level support and services for Ceph. They claim Ceph is the “future of storage,” a self-managing, highly scalable, open source distributed storage system that delivers object storage, block storage and POSIX-compatible file storage in a unified platform that runs on commodity hardware. Sage Weil, who created the Ceph project for his doctoral dissertation at UC Santa Cruz in 2004, will be Inktank’s CEO and chief architect.

Judge Refuses to Decide Oracle-HP Case

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

As much as the trial judge in the case between HP and Oracle over Itanium would like them to settle, Reuters reported an Oracle lawyer saying it wouldn’t happen. No surprise there. The judge the other day refused to settle the matter himself by finding for one side or another. Probably a smart move considering it would only set off an appeal. His 20-page decision the other day not to decide suggests that Intel may ultimately be forced to divulge financial information about the Itanium it’s refused to turn over for discovery; and allows that Oracle may have a case given the “puffery” of HP’s public statements about Itanium’s roadmap extending until 2017 – Oracle claims it lost $120 million in service and support profits to HP’s “deceptive scheme” – and HP, which has apparently provided some secret sealed documents about Oracle private assurances to continue to support Itanium, may have a point about relying on such promises. HP claims damages of $4 billion in lost profits.

Informatica Upgrades Its iPaaS

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Informatica, which already counts its Cloud processing upwards of a billion cloud integration transactions a day, has upgraded the stuff. It reckons its new Cloud Spring 2012 release will deliver the industry’s most comprehensive cloud integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). The biggest addition is a new Cloud Developer Edition that consists of a cloud connector toolkit and dynamic cloud integration templates for rapid connectivity to applications. Developers can embed end-user customizable integration logic and connectivity into cloud applications and platforms. System integrators and ISVs should be able to build, customize and deliver native connectivity to any cloud or on-premise business and social applications that have published Web Services APIs.

VMTurbo Says It’s OK to Virtualize Critical Apps

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

VMTurbo has added application delivery visibility to its intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments. The new Operations Manager 3.1 basically assures companies that it’s okay to virtualize business-critical applications because it can ensure service and resource availability based on application performance and business priority. That includes transaction time and performance characteristics for multi-tiered applications The widgetry expands VMTurbo’s patented Economic Scheduling Engine (ESE) model to the ADC environment, ensuring application performance for multi-tiered business-critical applications. It says its ESE model provides a fundamentally different method for controlling and managing data center and cloud infrastructures by employing a market-based approach that allocates resources, manages capacity and ensures application performance based on business priority.

Facebook’s Pied Piper IPO Supposedly Priced at $28-$35

Mon, 07 May 2012 07:15:00 EDT

The great Facebook IPO is supposed to happen on Friday May 18. The company's big investor-pitching pre-IPO roadshow is supposed to kick off this Monday and only see some appearances by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, according to the Wall Street Journal. CFO David Ebersman and COO Sheryl Sandberg will reportedly handle the bulk of the meetings. Initial East Coast meetings are supposed to be stuffed to the gills. But you can see the video now (http://facebook.retailroadshow.com/launch.html). Real pricing never happens until the night before an IPO. But it claimed in a regulatory filing late Thursday that it's shooting for $28-$35 a share, a relatively broad range that values the joint at $96 billion under the magical $100 billion, leading the smart money to think it and its underwriters are aiming for a pop. There'll be at least 337.4 million shares on offer. And there might be an overallotment. There will be class A and B stock after the IPO.

Sun Co-Founder Backs Start-Up That Wants to Be the Visicalc of Big Data

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

Metamarkets, the analytics start-up that wants to be the “Visicalc of Big Data,” has gotten a $15 million B round led by new investor Khosla Ventures – Vinod was one of Sun’s founders. Existing backers IA Ventures, True Ventures, Village Ventures and AOL Ventures kicked in. AOL is a customer. Advertising don’t you know The new money brings total capital raised so far to $23 million. It’s earmarked for product development and sales and marketing. It’s pushing into social media and payment start-ups where the data is massive.

Google Wins the Battle of the Interior Department

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:00:00 EDT

The US Department of the Interior has moved its e-mail business to Google, which sued when the agency gave Microsoft a five-year $59.3 million cloud-based e-mail contract in 2010 claiming the department’s research was “stale” and Microsoft’s security wasn’t certified for government use. It’s going with Google Apps for Government and Gmail instead. It will cover upwards of 90,000 seats. The agency’s been reconsidering its original decision since late last year. The deal is worth $34.9 million over seven years to Google and its reseller Onix Networking. Microsoft said it “will engage with our partners and DOI to review and understand the reasons for this decision.”

Activist Shareholder Finds Yahoo CEO Fudged His Resume

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:15:00 EDT

Ah, it seems that Yahoo’s new master Scott Thompson fudged his resume and claimed that his bachelors’ degree from Stonehill College was in accounting and computer science when it was really only in accounting. The college didn’t even offer a computer science degree when he was there. Yahoo has confirmed the “inadvertent error” which was made in the filings it sent to the SEC. According to All Things Digital, the “error” goes back 10 years to eBay where he became president of PayPal and could become a real problem for Yahoo. Third Point, the major Yahoo investor that has started a proxy fight to seat its own people on Yahoo’s board, is circulating the letter it wrote Thursday to the Yahoo board saying the padded credentials undermine Thompson’s credibility as a technology expert and reflect poorly on his character. It says, “Now more than ever Yahoo! investors need a trustworthy CEO.”

Oracle Wants At Least $777 Million from SAP in Retrial

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Oracle wants at least $776.7 million in damages from SAP when the pair returns to court July 18 to retry Oracle’s copyright infringement case against its German rival and SAP’s now defunct third-party maintenance subsidiary TomorrowNow. A jury last year awarded Oracle a record $1.3 billion. The judge thought the award was way too fabulous and knocked it down 80% to a mere $272 million, saying it wasn’t supported by the evidence. Oracle refused to take the money, which is how it got a new trial. It wants that $1.3 billion back and told the judge it has a right to pursue what it claims are actual damages based on the “fair market value of the rights infringed.” It’s asked to be allowed to present evidence of what a hypothetical license would have been worth had it been willing to give TomorrowNow a license to the massive amount of IP it illegally downloaded off of Oracle’s servers. Oracle used that trick the last time through and it paid off.

IBM Slurps Up Tealeaf

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:16:00 EDT

IBM is going to buy Tealeaf Technology for its tealeaf-reading software, which lets marketing types analyze online buying data, spot trends in real-time and see if promotions work or not. They call the stuff Customer Experience Management (CEM) software. It’ll replay all the details of a customer’s visit to a web site to find site errors or issues and understand the impact that transaction failures have on business processes. It works across online and mobile devices. Terms were not disclosed.

MMI Gets Toothless Injunction Against Microsoft

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:00:00 EDT

In what FOSS Patents calls the “most anticipated German patent ruling ever,” the Mannheim Regional Court Wednesday gave Motorola Mobility the permanent injunction it was looking for against Windows 7, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and Xbox and they might be using those things for landfill right now if it wasn’t for one little thing. MMI’s infringement case is based on two patents essential to the widely used H.264 video codec standard and on April 11 the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington gave Microsoft a temporary restraining order staying Motorola’s hand worldwide. The US court is supposed to hear Microsoft’s motion for summary judgment on its breach-of-contract claims against MMI this coming Monday. Microsoft sued 18 months ago – before any German litigation was lodged – seeking to force Motorola to stand by its FRAND pledges.

Carlyle Cuts its IPO Price

Thu, 03 May 2012 03:00:00 EDT

The big and presumably still powerful Carlyle Group, the private equity house that used to collect famous former politicians like dandelions and where ex-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner went after he retired, cut its IPO price Wednesday evening to $22 a pop. The Wall Street Journal said Carlyle spent weeks contending its $23-$25 range was “conservatively priced.” Evidently it’s looking for a good first day out. Guess we’ll see. Carlyle has $147 billion under management. It should raise around $671 million although private equity as a class is down. Its Nasdaq symbol will be CG.

Piston to Integrate Cloud Foundry & OpenStack

Wed, 02 May 2012 08:45:00 EDT

Piston Cloud Computing, the start-up peddling an OpenStack distribution for enterprise private clouds, is co-operating with VMware of all people to develop a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) that integrates OpenStack cloud infrastructure with Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source Platform-as-a-Service. Piston means to distribute and support this new integrated capability in a future release of its Piston Enterprise OS (pentOS), explaining that it takes advantage of Cloud Foundry BOSH, the recently announced open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of very large-scale instances of Cloud Foundry. BOSH currently works with VMware’s own vSphere and Amazon Web Services.

First Decision in Java Trial Goes to the Jury

Wed, 02 May 2012 07:45:00 EDT

Two weeks after the trial started, the first part of the three-part Oracle case against Google went to the jury mid-day Monday. Among other things the poor jury – one of whom reportedly didn’t want to continue but the judge persuaded her to – has to struggle with are the judge’s 19 pages of instructions, instructions neither side appreciated. A pity judges aren’t required to make instructions comprehensible to the average juror instead of an eventual appeals court. This jury has to decide if Google infringed Oracle’s Java copyrights, or rather parts of Java, to wit, the structure, sequence and organization of 37 Java APIs – as the judge instructed them – in developing Android and then whether Google made “fair use” of the widgetry and thereby advanced the public interest by adding something new and different to the whole megillah – and not necessarily something profitable – two separate decisions.

CollabNet Launches Industry’s First Development PaaS

Wed, 02 May 2012 02:00:00 EDT

CollabNet went into public beta Monday with a strategic new enterprise- grade development-Platform-as-a-Service (dPaaS) called CloudForge so distributed teams can manage and scale cloud-based development using a broad set of tools, application frameworks and deployment clouds. It’s supposed to integrate with cloud services and function as a one-click front-end for deploying on a private data center or public PaaS including Amazon, Joyent, Google App Engine and Salesforce.com’s Force.com.

‘Google Totally Slimed Sun’: Gosling

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:15:00 EDT

After Sun’s ex-CEOs Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz testified for and against Oracle, respectively, last week at the Oracle v Google infringement trial, Java creator James Gosling, who hasn’t been able to hold a job at either Oracle or Google for more than a few months, waded into the discussion over the weekend on Oracle’s side. “Just because Sun didn’t have patent suits in our genetic code doesn’t mean we didn’t feel wronged,” he wrote on his web site. “While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”

Microsoft Buys into Nook Business

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:00:00 EDT

Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have struck a strategic deal that will end their patent litigation and put the substantial Barnes & Noble e-book library including college textbooks on Windows 8. Microsoft is investing $300 million in a new Barnes & Noble subsidiary that is called Newco for the moment and is valued at $1.7 billion. Microsoft will have 17.6% of the unit, which may or may not be spun off. Barnes & Noble will pay Microsoft an unsung royalty for a patent-settling license that covers its Nook e-readers, which are based on a forked version of Android.

Judge Plans to Tell Jury Java APIs Are Copyrighted

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

Judge Alsup – who really wishes Oracle and Google had settled so he wouldn’t have to hear the Java trial – is proposing to decide whether APIs are copyrightable himself and not have the jury wade into that legal brier patch. However, he is also proposing to instruct the jury that the structure, sequence and organization of the asserted Java APIs are copyrightable, which between you, me and those angels dancing on the head of a pin over there is the same as saying the APIs are copyrighted. The good judge is going to wait for the jury to come home with a verdict on whether Google infringed the Java APIs – and the overwhelming evidence presented at trial suggests it did – before he says whether or not they are copyrightable and springs that tiger out of its cage.

McNealy & Schwartz Testify for Opposite Sides in Java Trial

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT

Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, testified for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android. His surprise appearance – in the middle of Google’s laying out its copyright defense – was used to scotch testimony given minutes before by his pony-tailed successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who testified for Google. (It’s just so utterly Sun.) As in all jury trials the decision could come down to personalities. From the industry’s point-of-view it’s the first – and long-overdue – time McNealy has publicly butted heads with Schwartz whose appointment as Sun CEO is at least as unfathomable as why HP ever let Mark Hurd go.

Teradata Claims to Put Wings on Big Data Analytics

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:45:00 EDT

Teradata, the doyen of the Big Data set, has got a new purpose-built appliance for SAS high-performance analytics that uses an in-memory approach for hyper-fast results. In other words, it distributes complex analytics in parallel across a vast pool of memory looking for patterns in large volumes of data. It reportedly whittled what would normally have been a 167-hour project in financial risk analysis at some Wall Street bank or another down to 84 seconds. Teradata claims other customers can expect as much and expects it to “kick competitive butt.” It claims IBM, Oracle and SAP, which have their own in-memory systems, “lack the foundational analytics.”

Fabled Google Drive Arrives, Creates Rights Panic

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EDT

Google finally introduced its long-trumpeted cloud-based Google Drive Tuesday hours before Apple released its Q2 results. Drive happens to compete with iCloud and Apple’s results, which could have been, shall we say, edgy, turned out to be over-the-top. Drive also competes with Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and SugarSync. Google says Drive users will get 5GB of free online storage for videos, photos, songs, files and PDFs that they can upload, create, edit, view, sync, share by way of different rights, collaborate on, get notifications, recognize scanned files, store, search (by word, owner, even some images to a point) and access from anywhere from PCs, Macs and Android devices (Gmail, iPhones, iPads, Chrome OS and Linux to come).

Can You See Apple in a Tooth Fairy Tutu?

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:00:00 EDT

The Guangdong High Court in southern China that heard Apple’s appeal of a lower court decision awarding ownership of the iPad trademark in China to Proview Technology (Shenzhen), the financially desperate Chinese display maker that ostensibly sold Apple the trademark, is now reportedly trying to mediate a settlement between the two. Despite claims to the contrary, it’s unclear whether Apple is actually considering settling knowing full well it’s expected to buy its way out of a predicament it believes it’s on the right side of for some sky-high sum. Apple won’t say anything about it while Proview booster Ma Dongxiao, its chatty public-facing lawyer, claimed last week that “I don’t know if Apple has changed its attitude, but I believe that the key point now is the price.” (Yes, well then Apple’s attitude would have to have changed now wouldn’t it.)

Microsoft Gets Another Android Vendor to Pay Up

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:00:00 EDT

If anybody’s making money off of Android, it’s Microsoft, which has just signed another licensing deal with another Android merchant. This time it’s Pegatron, which is gonna pay Microsoft to run Android and Chrome on its e-readers, tablets and phones. How much is secret like Microsoft’s other licensing arrangements. Nailing Pegatron means Microsoft now has four of the top five Taiwanese ODMs, according to Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez. That would give it 70% of all US Android devices.

Facebook IPO May Be Delayed

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:00:00 EDT

The great mid-May Facebook IPO has reportedly been delayed maybe until mid-June waiting on Mark Zuckerberg to wrap up whatever else is distracting him right now besides his billion-dollar Instagram acquisition or the $550 million patent deal with Microsoft, which also mean the company needs to make more financial disclosures. According to CNBC the pre-IPO roadshow may have slipped from May 7 to May 14 or even the end of May when the Memorial weekend then becomes a problem.

Hacker Leaks VMware ESX Source Code File

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EDT

VMware has confirmed that one of its ESX hypervisor source code files was posted online. Iain Mulholland, director of VMware’s Security Response Center, posted the following event-minimizing message: “Yesterday, April 23, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of a single file from the VMware ESX source code and the possibility that more files may be posted in the future. The posted code and associated commentary dates to the 2003 to 2004 timeframe. “The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers. VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available.”

Apple Taunts the Bears, Posts Blow-Out Quarter

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:30:00 EDT

After the bears lopped $70 billion off of Apple’s value in the last few days, the company went bear hunting Tuesday crushing estimates. Net profits in the March quarter were up 94% year-over-year to $11.6 billion returning $12.30 a share compared to estimates of $10.04 on revenues of $39.28 billion against projections of $36.81 billion. Apple sold a completely unexpected 35.1 million iPhones, up 88% and only two million short of Christmas, plus 11.8 million iPads – up 151% even though the new one was only released mid-quarter – and even a respectable 7.7 million iPods, down 15%. Macs, another spot that had the bears worried, were good for four million units, up 7% and in line with estimates, although Apple admitted they suffered iPad cannibalization. International sales accounted for 64% of revenue.