Maureen O'Gara is the Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.
Microsoft on Monday pushed multi-tenant SaaS versions of Exchange and SharePoint out of the beta nest. Some 7,000 concerns participated in the beta. Now the stuff’s available to all comers. Exchange Online will cost $10 per user a month; SharePoint Online will cost $7.25. Eventually ...
Intel’s most complex x86 desktop chip ever, a tiny part loaded with an incredible 731 million transistors that’s been five years in the making, has been released to the most dubious demand environment ever, especially for desktops – dubious enough for Intel to have cut its guidan...
Transmeta, the uppity microprocessor wannabe that pushed Intel to create low-power chips before Intel crushed it, is getting bought by Novafora Inc for $255.6 million in cash, roughly what Transmeta has in the bank thanks largely to an IP licensing deal with Intel. Novafora is a fab-le...
Sun, which desperately needs to monetize its software, has put out a new release of MySQL with a gold-level subscriber-only Query Analyzer tool that it’s praying users will pay for. The tool monitors query performance and quickly pinpoints and corrects problem SQL code. It promises t...
Seems Microsoft, which doesn’t want to buy Yahoo anymore, has rustled Yahoo’s VP of search technology Sean Suchter, the Inktomi legacy who ran Yahoo’s search engine, responsible for engineering and P&L. He’s due to leave Yahoo right before Christmas. Microsoft said at press tim...
Microsoft has filed one of its rare lawsuits against online transaction service provider WebXchange because WebXchange sued FedEx, Allstate and Dell, three of Microsoft’s big customers, back in March. WebXchange claims FedEx, Allstate and Dell’s online services trample on its paten...
Paystar, the unauthorized Florida "cloner" with dreams of breaking Apple's lock on its hardware, has had its horns broken by a California federal court, which threw out its antitrust counterclaim against Apple's EULA. Back in the summer, Apple charged Paystar with copyright and tradema...
Adobe and ARM are gonna put Flash Player 10 and AIR, the stuff of web video and rich Internet apps, on ARM widgets by the second half of next year. They mean phones, set-tops, MIDs, TVs, car mojo and personal media devices, which have so far only had access to Flash Lite, not the best ...
Microsoft is open to a collaborative search deal with Yahoo, “very open” apparently, but CEO Steve Ballmer again nixed the thought of revisiting an acquisition, according to both the AP and Reuters. The AP quotes him as saying, “Let me be clear. We are done with all acquisition d...
At the end of one of the worst days in the history of Wall Street, when every metric ultimately reacted like acid eating through a thin plate of copper, Dell posted its third-quarter results, returning a surprise 9% increase in EPS on deflated revenues and net earnings apparently becau...
Apple’s not the only one telling people to "Think Different." So is an outfit called Mindjet. It's into mind mapping, which isn't as chilling as it sounds. It's merely a way of brainstorming and diagramming non-linear thinking that actually goes back to Porphyry of Tyros in the third...
In a move that looks tailor-made for an antitrust suit, Microsoft says it’s going to give away a consumer security kit that it’s building code named Morro. It should be available in the second half of next year – probably more like mid-year. The freebie widgetry is supposed to de...
Amazon has launched an HTTP content delivery service (CDN) called CloudFront that works with its S3 cloud storage widgetry and EC2. It's now a public beta, having been privately tested the last couple few months. It's the stuff Amazon promised in September and may someday give the like...
Last Friday Sun Microsystems, its fortunes about as low as a snake’s belly, moved its StarOffice franchise into a new Cloud Computing unit with clear instructions to “grow revenues.” StarOffice 9, the latest rev of the Microsoft wannabe, was sent to market Monday priced at $34.95...
IBM is going to buy Transitive, the British cross-platform virtualization firm that salvaged legacy Macintosh programs and made Apple's move from IBM to Intel chips as graceful as a prima ballerina’s pirouette. Transitive is clever at running applications written for one kind of micr...
CA and VMware are going to jointly develop a management solution and, to start, have signed a deal to make CA Data Center Automation Manager interoperate with VMware Stage Manager. The joint solution is designed so enterprises and cloud service providers can seamlessly provision applic...
HP jumped the gun Tuesday and told the worried multitudes a week ahead of when it’s supposed to release its latest numbers that it more than just survived the volatile quarter it just ended in October when the bottom fell out of the economy. Not only that but, unlike the panicky Cisc...
Atlanta-based TechOperators, a new early stage VC targeting cloud computing and SaaS as well as Internet services, security, infrastructure and mobile, is launching its first venture fund and claims it didn’t have too many problems raising the $20 million-$30 million. The four managi...
Symantec CEO John Thompson, 59, the ex-IBMer who bit off more than he could chew when Symantec acquired Veritas for $13.5 billion three years ago, is going to retire at the end of the company’s fiscal year in March. He will however remain chairman.
Yahoo has confirmed that Jerry Yang will be stepping down as soon as the board can find a new CEO. Yahoo said the executive search has started. Yang, who botched a sale to Microsoft, saw his backup ad deal with Google trumped by the Justice Department and couldn’t put anything resemb...
HP says it can cut the pricey-but-neglected costs of networking virtualized environments by 55%. Your average VMware ESX server busily hosting virtual machines requires six network connections, which means network expansion cards, switches and cables - all of which add up.
EMC has taken its Mozy and Pi holdings – Pi being the stealth-mode mystery start-up it bought to acquire ex-Microsoft kingpin Paul Maritz before it fired Diane Greene and put him in charge of VMware – and Mozy being its year-old $76 million online consumer backup acquisition – an...
In an effort to head off its disappearance below the horizon, Sun is going to lay off 5,000-6,000 people, 15%-18% of its workforce, and restructure its software business, never a great money maker. Among the first to go is the head of software Rich Green. Sun said he has chosen to leav...
Mark Papermaster, the ex-VP of blade development at IBM and the guy that IBM stopped from going to Apple to run its iPod and IPhone development on the strength of the non-compete he signed, has sued his former master looking for a declaratory judgment in his favor.
Dot.com billionaire and owner of the Dallas Maverick basketball team Mark Cuban, 50, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.9 billion during the great bubble and trash-talked his meal ticket earlier this year when it wouldn’t sell out to Microsoft, has been charged with insider tradi...
Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house. Coleman observed that most IT professionals aren’t comfortable outsour...
It appears that VMware quietly bought a little California number last month called Blue Lane Technologies, which, according to its web site, is no longer selling its wares on VMware’s instructions. Blue Lane’s stock in trade was securing physical and virtual data centers with “ze...
Citrix has upgraded its NetScaler web application delivery appliance with a welter of 350 new features whose biggest trick is configuring each web application automatically and optimally. This new NetScaler 9 facility is supposed to cut the cost of delivering enterprise web application...
Intel didn’t wait for its scheduled mid-quarter update on December 4. It came out after the market closed this evening and said business stinks. It took down its fourth-quarter projections. The company now expects Q4 revenue to be $9 billion, plus or minus $300 million, over 10% lowe...
The day after Intel slashed its guidance and told the press that “orders just died,” AMD, a company laboring under a really bad karma, said it’s started selling Shanghai, its first 45nm quad-core Opteron chip, a few months earlier than expected and plunk in the middle of an econo...
Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house. Coleman observed that most IT professionals aren’t comfortable outsour...
LG, Sharp and Chunghwa have pled guilty to charges of fixing the price of LCD panels in defiance of the Sherman Antitrust Act and have agreed to pay $585 million in fines, the Justice Department said Wednesday. LG will pay $400 million, the second-highest criminal fine ever imposed by ...
John Wookey, who until a non-compete-suggestive 13 months ago ran Oracle’s applications development – you know, its crucial next-generation “stitch-$20-billion-together” Fusion program – has gone to work for Oracle’s hereditary enemy SAP. He has been named EVP of large ente...
IBM has found something else to do with Linux. Its Lotus software operation is going into the hardware business – it’s concocted a Linux-based server appliance for e-mail, calendaring and its OpenOffice-based Symphony software for SMBs called IBM Lotus Foundations Start.
Google, whose stock was worth $741 a share a year ago – and was touted as inevitably seeing $1,000 – hasn't been able to hold its head above $300 because of widespread fears of advertising collapsing. The stock slipped to a multi-year low today below $290, down ~7% in the midst of ...
Elastra’s Cloud Server widgetry is supposed to eliminate manual processes and the complexity of managing application infrastructure and middleware in the cloud – without recourse to any time-consuming and error-prone scripting – and deliver a complete, scalable, pay-for-use appli...
Well it appears that non-compete agreements may carry a bit more weight in New York than they do in California – at least to a judge right down the block from IBM headquarters. Steve Jobs’ pick to run Apple’s iPod and iPhone development has been told by a New York federal court t...
SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global Cloud Computing technology provider Cycle Computing to exhibit at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com) 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, (www.virtualizationconference.com), whic...
Cisco has got a new “close to the user” edge router that can push 250,000 songs or 200 feature films a second. (Figure 6.4 terabytes a second.) The widget, which starts at $80,000 and reportedly took $200 million to develop, is called the Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 Seri...
HP has said it doesn’t want to be in the cloud business itself – merely sell gear to cloud makers – but it’s lined up with little Salesforce.com rival NetSuite – owned mostly by Larry Ellison – to offer NetSuite’s SaaS CRM and ERP applications to SMBs through its 15,000 U...
Microsoft on Monday pushed multi-tenant SaaS versions of Exchange and SharePoint out of the beta nest. Some 7,000 concerns participated in the beta. Now the stuff’s available to all comers. Exchange Online will cost $10 per user a month; SharePoint Online will cost $7.25. Eventually ...
Intel’s most complex x86 desktop chip ever, a tiny part loaded with an incredible 731 million transistors that’s been five years in the making, has been released to the most dubious demand environment ever, especially for desktops – dubious enough for Intel to have cut its guidan...
Transmeta, the uppity microprocessor wannabe that pushed Intel to create low-power chips before Intel crushed it, is getting bought by Novafora Inc for $255.6 million in cash, roughly what Transmeta has in the bank thanks largely to an IP licensing deal with Intel. Novafora is a fab-le...
Sun, which desperately needs to monetize its software, has put out a new release of MySQL with a gold-level subscriber-only Query Analyzer tool that it’s praying users will pay for. The tool monitors query performance and quickly pinpoints and corrects problem SQL code. It promises t...
Seems Microsoft, which doesn’t want to buy Yahoo anymore, has rustled Yahoo’s VP of search technology Sean Suchter, the Inktomi legacy who ran Yahoo’s search engine, responsible for engineering and P&L. He’s due to leave Yahoo right before Christmas. Microsoft said at press tim...
Microsoft has filed one of its rare lawsuits against online transaction service provider WebXchange because WebXchange sued FedEx, Allstate and Dell, three of Microsoft’s big customers, back in March. WebXchange claims FedEx, Allstate and Dell’s online services trample on its paten...
Paystar, the unauthorized Florida "cloner" with dreams of breaking Apple's lock on its hardware, has had its horns broken by a California federal court, which threw out its antitrust counterclaim against Apple's EULA. Back in the summer, Apple charged Paystar with copyright and tradema...
Adobe and ARM are gonna put Flash Player 10 and AIR, the stuff of web video and rich Internet apps, on ARM widgets by the second half of next year. They mean phones, set-tops, MIDs, TVs, car mojo and personal media devices, which have so far only had access to Flash Lite, not the best ...
Microsoft is open to a collaborative search deal with Yahoo, “very open” apparently, but CEO Steve Ballmer again nixed the thought of revisiting an acquisition, according to both the AP and Reuters. The AP quotes him as saying, “Let me be clear. We are done with all acquisition d...
At the end of one of the worst days in the history of Wall Street, when every metric ultimately reacted like acid eating through a thin plate of copper, Dell posted its third-quarter results, returning a surprise 9% increase in EPS on deflated revenues and net earnings apparently becau...
Apple’s not the only one telling people to "Think Different." So is an outfit called Mindjet. It's into mind mapping, which isn't as chilling as it sounds. It's merely a way of brainstorming and diagramming non-linear thinking that actually goes back to Porphyry of Tyros in the third...
In a move that looks tailor-made for an antitrust suit, Microsoft says it’s going to give away a consumer security kit that it’s building code named Morro. It should be available in the second half of next year – probably more like mid-year. The freebie widgetry is supposed to de...
Amazon has launched an HTTP content delivery service (CDN) called CloudFront that works with its S3 cloud storage widgetry and EC2. It's now a public beta, having been privately tested the last couple few months. It's the stuff Amazon promised in September and may someday give the like...
Last Friday Sun Microsystems, its fortunes about as low as a snake’s belly, moved its StarOffice franchise into a new Cloud Computing unit with clear instructions to “grow revenues.” StarOffice 9, the latest rev of the Microsoft wannabe, was sent to market Monday priced at $34.95...
IBM is going to buy Transitive, the British cross-platform virtualization firm that salvaged legacy Macintosh programs and made Apple's move from IBM to Intel chips as graceful as a prima ballerina’s pirouette. Transitive is clever at running applications written for one kind of micr...
CA and VMware are going to jointly develop a management solution and, to start, have signed a deal to make CA Data Center Automation Manager interoperate with VMware Stage Manager. The joint solution is designed so enterprises and cloud service providers can seamlessly provision applic...
HP jumped the gun Tuesday and told the worried multitudes a week ahead of when it’s supposed to release its latest numbers that it more than just survived the volatile quarter it just ended in October when the bottom fell out of the economy. Not only that but, unlike the panicky Cisc...
Yahoo has confirmed that Jerry Yang will be stepping down as soon as the board can find a new CEO. Yahoo said the executive search has started. Yang, who botched a sale to Microsoft, saw his backup ad deal with Google trumped by the Justice Department and couldn’t put anything resemb...
HP says it can cut the pricey-but-neglected costs of networking virtualized environments by 55%. Your average VMware ESX server busily hosting virtual machines requires six network connections, which means network expansion cards, switches and cables - all of which add up.
EMC has taken its Mozy and Pi holdings – Pi being the stealth-mode mystery start-up it bought to acquire ex-Microsoft kingpin Paul Maritz before it fired Diane Greene and put him in charge of VMware – and Mozy being its year-old $76 million online consumer backup acquisition – an...
In an effort to head off its disappearance below the horizon, Sun is going to lay off 5,000-6,000 people, 15%-18% of its workforce, and restructure its software business, never a great money maker. Among the first to go is the head of software Rich Green. Sun said he has chosen to leav...
Mark Papermaster, the ex-VP of blade development at IBM and the guy that IBM stopped from going to Apple to run its iPod and IPhone development on the strength of the non-compete he signed, has sued his former master looking for a declaratory judgment in his favor.
Dot.com billionaire and owner of the Dallas Maverick basketball team Mark Cuban, 50, who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.9 billion during the great bubble and trash-talked his meal ticket earlier this year when it wouldn’t sell out to Microsoft, has been charged with insider tradi...
Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house. Coleman observed that most IT professionals aren’t comfortable outsour...
It appears that VMware quietly bought a little California number last month called Blue Lane Technologies, which, according to its web site, is no longer selling its wares on VMware’s instructions. Blue Lane’s stock in trade was securing physical and virtual data centers with “ze...
Citrix has upgraded its NetScaler web application delivery appliance with a welter of 350 new features whose biggest trick is configuring each web application automatically and optimally. This new NetScaler 9 facility is supposed to cut the cost of delivering enterprise web application...
Intel didn’t wait for its scheduled mid-quarter update on December 4. It came out after the market closed this evening and said business stinks. It took down its fourth-quarter projections. The company now expects Q4 revenue to be $9 billion, plus or minus $300 million, over 10% lowe...
The day after Intel slashed its guidance and told the press that “orders just died,” AMD, a company laboring under a really bad karma, said it’s started selling Shanghai, its first 45nm quad-core Opteron chip, a few months earlier than expected and plunk in the middle of an econo...
Cassatt, the company started by BEA founder Bill Coleman, is redirecting its data center widgetry into creating internal clouds comparable to Amazon or Google out of infrastructure customers already have in-house. Coleman observed that most IT professionals aren’t comfortable outsour...
LG, Sharp and Chunghwa have pled guilty to charges of fixing the price of LCD panels in defiance of the Sherman Antitrust Act and have agreed to pay $585 million in fines, the Justice Department said Wednesday. LG will pay $400 million, the second-highest criminal fine ever imposed by ...
John Wookey, who until a non-compete-suggestive 13 months ago ran Oracle’s applications development – you know, its crucial next-generation “stitch-$20-billion-together” Fusion program – has gone to work for Oracle’s hereditary enemy SAP. He has been named EVP of large ente...
IBM has found something else to do with Linux. Its Lotus software operation is going into the hardware business – it’s concocted a Linux-based server appliance for e-mail, calendaring and its OpenOffice-based Symphony software for SMBs called IBM Lotus Foundations Start. 
Google, whose stock was worth $741 a share a year ago – and was touted as inevitably seeing $1,000 – hasn't been able to hold its head above $300 because of widespread fears of advertising collapsing. The stock slipped to a multi-year low today below $290, down ~7% in the midst of ...
Elastra’s Cloud Server widgetry is supposed to eliminate manual processes and the complexity of managing application infrastructure and middleware in the cloud – without recourse to any time-consuming and error-prone scripting – and deliver a complete, scalable, pay-for-use appli...
Well it appears that non-compete agreements may carry a bit more weight in New York than they do in California – at least to a judge right down the block from IBM headquarters. Steve Jobs’ pick to run Apple’s iPod and iPhone development has been told by a New York federal court t...
SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global Cloud Computing technology provider Cycle Computing to exhibit at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com) 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, (www.virtualizationconference.com), whic...
Cisco has got a new “close to the user” edge router that can push 250,000 songs or 200 feature films a second. (Figure 6.4 terabytes a second.) The widget, which starts at $80,000 and reportedly took $200 million to develop, is called the Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 Seri...
HP has said it doesn’t want to be in the cloud business itself – merely sell gear to cloud makers – but it’s lined up with little Salesforce.com rival NetSuite – owned mostly by Larry Ellison – to offer NetSuite’s SaaS CRM and ERP applications to SMBs through its 15,000 U...
