ITWeek.co.uk Latest updates

QlikTech outlines BI product roadmap

Rosalie Marshall — 2009-01-28T18:02:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, vnunet.com, Wednesday 28 January 2009 at 18:02:00

QlikView 9 planned for May or June 2009

Independent business intelligence firm QlikTech has added new support to its QlikView product for HP Neoview, and has given customers a preview of its product roadmap for 2009.

The new support will allow customers with large data volumes in an HP data warehouse to quickly visualise the data and make faster decisions, according to the QlikTech. The vendor had previously announced support for warehouse applications supplied by Sybase IQ and Kalido.

"We are working with a number of other next-generation data warehouse providers, for which we may announce support in the future," said Anthony Deighton, senior vice president of products at QlickTech.

The firm has also been expanding its partnerships with front-end application suppliers in OEM agreements, including with Atex, to allow businesses to view data in a way best suited to their needs.

QlikView 9, due out in May or June this year, will take the product to even more places, according to Deighton. "A strategy called 'QlickView everywhere' will make it easier to do mash-ups and portals," he added.

Additionally QlikView 9 will make it easier for customers to make larger deployments of the software, and offer usability enhancements such as new ways to visualise and simplify data.

"We intend to build in visual analysis and make the output interactive, showing data in a way that makes it easy to answer particular questions," Deighton said.

"We always think of QlikView as a simple product that normal human beings can use, but we never stop thinking about how to make it even simpler and easier to use."

CIOs confused over how to calculate carbon footprint

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-08T16:25:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Friday 8 August 2008 at 16:25:00

Fujitsu Services survey finds lack of advice on what CIOs should be included in carbon footprint

Chief information officers (CIO’s) are split on whether outsourced IT operations should count towards an organisation’s total carbon footprint, according to a Fujitsu Services survey.

While the majority of the CIOs preferred to count outsourced IT operations as part of their carbon footprint, almost a quarter believed the opposite and wanted the contracting company to become responsible. The survey was of 100 CIOs in UK companies employing more than 1000 people.

Fujitsu Services, as a provider of outsourcing services, said industry leaders should work together to agree common standards for calculating carbon footprints.

“This research suggests that many are erring on the side of caution, preferring to double-count rather than risk understating environmental impact,” the Fujitsu Services report noted.

Virgin Media touts 200Mbit/s broadband

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-08T12:43:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Friday 8 August 2008 at 12:43:00

Cable provider says it could deliver 200Mbit/s services within four years.

Virgin Media is touting the possibility of providing customers with broadband speeds of up to 200Mbits/s within the next four years.

Speaking at a conference call on Virgin Media's second quarter earnings, chief executive Neil Berkett said, "Even by 2012, we'll still have an advantage to BT's fibre to the cabinet (FTTC). We'll certainly be able to offer up to 200Mbit/s broadband download speeds, if we so chose."

Also at the presentation Virgin Media unveiled its intention to launch a mobile broadband service in the fourth quarter of 2008, but with no further details. The service would launch on the back of re-negotiated wholesale rates with its mobile partner T-Mobile.

T-Mobile upgraded its 3G network from high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) to high speed uplink packet access (HSUPA) in July. Although limited to users within the M25, uplink and downlink speeds would effectively be around 1Mbit/s and 2Mbit/s respectively.

Elsewhere, reports emerged that Virgin Media may be intending to withdraw from the corporate communications market to concentrate on its cable TV and broadband business. Investment bank Goldman Sachs is reported to have a potential merger plan for the business part of Virgin Media, NTL Telewest Business.

But a Virgin Media spokesman refused to be drawn on the reports. "We never comment on rumour or speculation," he said.

AOL troubles Google

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-08T11:44:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Friday 8 August 2008 at 11:44:00

Google announces in quarterly report its AOL investment could be impaired

Google looks likely to take a shower on its $1bn investment in AOL, as documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Committee say that investment is "impaired".

Google paid $1bn for a 5 per cent stake in AOL in 2005 but now concedes that its value has dropped substantially. But Google is still optimistic that the wilting web giant may recover. "We do not believe that such impairment is other than temporary,” noted Google in the report.

Nevertheless, Google may well have to write down that investment in the near future. . “There can be no assurance that impairment charges will not be required in the future,” it said.

Originally, Google invested in AOL to guard against the possibility of loosing one of its largest advertising partners to Microsoft.

“We expect that Microsoft will increasingly use its financial and engineering resources to compete with us,” Google noted in its 10-Q filing. “[Microsoft] can use [its] experience and resources against us in a variety of competitive ways, including by making acquisitions, investing more aggressively in research and development and competing more aggressively for advertisers and web sites.”

Government sows seeds for new ID systems

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-07T17:49:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Thursday 7 August 2008 at 17:49:00

Government to invest £5m into identity systems research

The UK government is to invest £5.5 million in developing the next generation of secure identity management systems.

The investment, led by the Technology Strategy Board, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will create three new research projects, called EnCoRe, VOME and Privacy Value Networks.

The projects will be collaborations between business, academia and the public sector and will aim to ensure that the next generation of identity management systems strike appropriate balances with privacy concerns, the Technology Strategy Board said.

“In order to prepare UK businesses for competition in this global market, practical and cost effective solutions need to be developed which inspire public confidence by improving privacy and enabling consent as an integral part of future procurements," said Iain Gray, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board.

Project EnCoRe will focus on providing more rigorous means for individuals to grant and revoke consent for the use, storage and sharing of personal data.

VOME will give a clearer hardware and software requirement for end users’ ideas and concepts regarding privacy and consent.

The final project, Privacy Value Networks (pvnets), aims to generate, a detailed understanding of individuals’ and organisations’ conceptions of privacy and identity.

EPSRC chief executive Professor David Delpy said that the new research had a unique approach, "looking at both the technological advances that need to be made alongside the social considerations and implications. The long term aim is to ensure a good balance between freedom and security for everyone.”

CIOs urged to rethink storage management

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-07T17:31:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Thursday 7 August 2008 at 17:31:00

Gartner recommends IT invest in information-access technologies

IT chiefs have been urged to go on a storage diet. Analyst firm Gartner recommends that enterprises are better served by the introduction of so-called information-access technologies, rather than the current penchant to splurge on cheap storage.

The fear of litigation combined with falling storage costs has encouraged many chief information officers to store masses of data, resulting in unnecessary business expense, argued Whit Andrew, analyst, Gartner in a new report.

The introduction of information-access technology, such as enterprise search, content classification and categorisation, and clustering would be far more efficacious, he said.

“With information access technology, companies that previously made retention decisions based on intuitive judgements about what was important can now designate critically on more advance approaches for measuring the value of content,” said Andrews.

Information-access technology will pay for itself when organisations do not have to upgrade their storage requirements so quickly, he added.

Vendors are also offering data storage services to help companies sort out what data they need to store, said Steve Murphy, managing director Hitatchi Data systems, a firm that offers such a service.

Hitatchi has begun offering customers two years of free storage upgrades, including the use of technologies such as virtualisation and de-duplication, to ensure companies make better use of their storage infrastructure, Murphy added.

Government proposes to slash compliance costs

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-07T16:07:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Thursday 7 August 2008 at 16:07:00

IT will be able to reduce its compliance costs

Central government is to make individual departments accountable for the business cost of introducing new legislation, under new proposals issued by the Department for Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). Those proposals also accentuate the pivotal role IT will play in ensuring that compliance is affordable.

BERR intends to compel government departments to make business-cost assessments of any new legislation. Departments will be allocated annual budgets to ensure those costs do not spiral out of control.

"If the UK is to remain a respected place to do business, we must not expect business simply to absorb the costs of a stream of new Government initiatives,” said John Hutton, secretary of state for business.

"This innovative approach will build on efforts already in place to cut the burden to business by 25 per cent by 2010."

Under the proposals, government departments will publish best-practices guides to ensure the task of automating compliance procedures is as effortless as possible.

Consutlation on the proposed budget system is now underway, and the first budgets could be set later this year.

Microsoft unwraps SQL Server 2008

Gareth Morgan — 2008-08-07T12:55:00.000Z

Gareth Morgan, IT Week, Thursday 7 August 2008 at 12:55:00

Next-generation database software released to manufacturing

Microsoft's next-generation database software SQL Server 2008 has been released to manufacturers.

The upgrade will provide enhanced data handling capabilities, Microsoft claimed, adding enterprise-class business intelligence and data warehousing tools out of the box.

The ability to scale is one of the key new features of SQL Server 2008, said Ted Kummert, Microsoft's corporate vice president of data and storage platforms. SQL Server 2008 is far more scalable, improves performance and can handle higher levels of user concurrency, he added.

The release is also a significant milestone for Microsoft in terms of its overall software licensing strategy.

Microsoft made predictable and regular product upgrades a cornerstone of its Software Assurance programme, and the firm has fulfilled its obligations by delivering SQL Server 2008 within the anticipated 24-36 month window.

"Wow, this is a great day," said Dan Jones, SQL Server group programme manager at Microsoft, "we nailed it."

SQL Server 2008 is available immediately to download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

It will be offered in several editions, such as Enterprise, Workgroup and Standard. And for the first time, Microsoft is offering a version specifically for the web, which will be tuned for partners wanting to offer a hosted version of SQL Server 2008.

Other new features include: improved ability to load data from Oracle, Teradata and SAP NetWeaver; enhanced security features, allowing adminstrators to encrypt data and provide audit trails, policy-based managed, enabling users to enforce group policies; and support for spatial data, for compatibility with location-based applications.

Fujitsu-Siemens denies break-up reports

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-06T16:26:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 6 August 2008 at 16:26:00

Contract negotiations underway, but no break-up plans yet, says computer maker

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has moved to quash reports of its impending break up, describing the talk as "baseless".

Earlier, the Wall Street Journal had reported that leaders at Siemens were looking to dissolve the partnership, citing unnamed sources.

Fujisu Siemens' head of corporate communications dismissed that suggestion but admitted that all parties were in contract discussions.

The original partnership agreement started in 1999, he explained, and was due to run for 10 years. "If nobody sells its stake, then the partnership will continue for a further five years," he added.

Should Siemens not renew that partnership agreement, Fujitsu has first refusal over its 50 per cent stake.

And as the German engineering giant looks to restructure, as it aims to reduce operating costs by €1.2b by 2010, several of its partnership agreements are under the spotlight.

Orange launches mobile management tools

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-06T14:41:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 6 August 2008 at 14:41:00

New service to help IT manage mobile devices

Mobile operator Orange has launched its hosted Device Management service which allows IT teams to manage and support devices mobile remotely.

The system enables IT to update, troubleshoot and even lock or wipe devices remotely and requires no back-end servers.

Security features included in the system allow IT administrators to remotely enforce password policies, lock down Bluetooth and camera functionality, and remove unauthorised applications, which could be affecting the mobile device's performance.

Managers can also apply company-specific settings over the air to all devices simultaneously, and can view logs of all user activity.

"It is becoming increasingly important for organisations to be able to manage their device fleet in a cost-effective and time-efficient way," said Anthony Keyworth, director of business products,at Orange's UK business services division.

Orange Device Management costs £3.50 + VAT per user, per month plus data charges, including Orange technical support.

New ECM standard is coming

Phil Muncaster — 2008-08-06T10:55:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, IT Week, Wednesday 6 August 2008 at 10:55:00

BSI and The Content Group launch new Steering Group

A new steering group has been launched with the aim of creating the first ever publically available specification (PAS) for enterprise content management applications, to create more clarity for IT buyers around the term.

The new Steering Group will be led by ECM consultancy The Content Group and the BSI British Standards to create a PAS by the end of the year, according to The Content Group. The PAS is a vital first step on the road towards an internationally agreed standard, accordint to Content Group founder, Ben Richmond.

Members of the steering group have been gathered from industry associations, analyst firms such as CMS Watch, system integrators like Logica, technology vendors and end user organisations including Credit Suisse.

"Unless organisations take a step back from the technology and adopt a best practice approach to defining and implementing an ECM strategy, the potential of this powerful solution set will never be realised," said Richmond in a statement. "This standard will provide a clear frame of reference for those engaging in ECM initiatives.”

Microsoft opens up to security vendors

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-06T10:46:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Wednesday 6 August 2008 at 10:46:00

Microsoft launches Active Protection Programme and an Explotability Index

Microsoft has confirmed it will give security vendors advance notice of vulnerabilities that it intends to address in its monthly patches, in order to provide users with better safeguards.

Microsoft's Active Protection programme will reduce the chances of cyber criminals outpacing the security professionals, said George Stathakopoulos, Microsoft general manager of security engineering and communications,

It will also issue a new Exploitability Index, which will provide customers with early information on the likelihood of exploit code being developed.

Previously security professionals had to wait for Microsoft’s monthly security update process to address vulnerabilities.

“As security threats become more sophisticated, the global security community must combine its resources and work together to provide maximum security protections to worldwide internet users,” said Stathakopoulos in a statement.

Symantec snaps up nSuite for virtualisation

Phil Muncaster — 2008-08-05T15:38:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 15:38:00

New technologies will help improve user productivity, says Symantec

Security and systems management giant Symantec has beefed up its virtualisation offerings with new technologies it plans to acquire with the purchase of virtual workspace management firm nSuite.

The proposed acquisition, slated to be completed by the end of the month, will give Symantec presentation virtualisation technology, which enables staff to use applications running on remote servers as if they were running locally.

Symantec will also gain nSuite's expertise in connection broker technology, which allocates resources such as user profiles and applications to the endpoint, whether virtual or traditional.

NSuite's heritage has been in selling its products to hospitals. There, medical staff are able to take advantage of the technology which can virtualise their data and applications, port them to which ever desktop they happen to be working on at the time, and remove them from the desktop once they move on.

“The real promise of endpoint virtualisation is improving the end-user experience while helping to lower the cost of managing endpoint devices,” said Ken Berryman, vice president of endpoint virtualisation at Symantec. “Symantec’s strategy is to help enable a truly dynamic endpoint where applications and information are delivered to any computing environment in a seamless manner."

LogMeIn makes support integration easier

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-05T15:16:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 15:16:00

Help desk tools to be integrated with other on-demand apps

Secure remote access vendor LogMeIn today published the application programming interface (API) for its on-demand support tool, which it claimed will make it easier for customers to integrate the tool with third-party applications.

Firms will be able to better serve the needs of remote workers by integrating the LogMeIn Rescue tools with other critical business applications, such as customer relationship management systems, said Kevin Bardos, vice president for product management at LogMeIn.

"The API makes it easy to connect Rescue with other critical on-demand tools, " he said.

LogMeIn Rescue was first made available on the Force.com AppExchange from Salesforce.com in July. LogMeIn's Rescue API available now to current LogMeIn Rescue subscribers at no extra cost.

Vyatta ships open source routing appliance

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-05T14:20:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 14:20:00

Open source networking takes a step forward with enterprise-class appliance

Open source vendor Vyatta has begun shipping a mid-range firewall and routing appliance, the Vyatta 2501, which it claims offers unparalleled price-performance.

The Vyatta 2501 is intended to meet the connectivity and security demands of medium and large enterprises, but costs a fraction of proprietary alternatives.

"The Vyatta 2501 combines features, performance, flexibility, and value on high-performance hardware, making it a clear alternative in a market saturated with expensive proprietary solutions," said Kelly Herrell, chief executive, Vyatta in a statement.

The 2501 uses Vyatta's open-network operating system and has two integrated gigabit Ethernet ports for LAN connections, together with two expansion slots, one PCI-X and one PCIe, for additional LAN/WAN connectivity.

The 1U high 2501 appliance has support for internet routing protocols, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) and the Routing Information Protocol (RIP).

The appliance has gigabit LAN connectivity, with an option for 10 gigabit Ethernet optical connections. The wide area network interfaces range from ADSL, up to T1/E1 and T3 connections, and can be load-balanced.

The 2501 also incorporates a firewall, IPSec and point-to-point tunneling (PPTP) virtual private network (VPN) connections, and has integrated the Wireshark network packet analysis and capture system.

Vyatta say that the 2501 is available now, starting at £1,200 ($2,347) including service and support.

Orange offers to boost application performance

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-05T13:58:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 13:58:00

Orange's Network Boost guarantees application performance across the globe

Mobile operator Orange has launched Network Boost which promises to make it easier for customers to manage enterprise applications running over its wired network.

Network Boost can be used by firms to prioritise, accelerate and optimise specific applications, with Orange guaranteeing uptime. This will enable customers to deploy applications across the globe, while managing them through a single service desk.

Orange also claimed that Network Boost can improve incident management, and will provide guaranteed time-to-repair service level agreements.

Other features include the ability to compress data to minimise network delays, as well as monitor and anticipate network performance degradation.

Orange said that the new service would be available in 220 countries.

Sybase unveils analytics appliance

Gareth Morgan — 2008-08-05T13:29:00.000Z

Gareth Morgan, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 13:29:00

Sybase touts appliance as easy way to tackle "exploding" data volumes

Database vendor Sybase has today released a new analytics appliance, which it claims will help users rapidly glean business-enhancing intelligence from over-burdened data warehouses.

The Sybase Analytic Appliance combines the vendors IQ data warehousing tools and PowerDesinger data modelling software with business intelligence tools from MicroStrategy, all pre-installed on an IBM Power Systems server.

Many business leaders are struggling to cope with "exploding data volumes", said David Jacobson, senior director of marketing, Sybase; existing data warehouses buckle under the strain of processing such volumes, he added.

"Sybase Analytic Appliance [can] alleviate analytics workloads in a cost-effective manner that is also easy to deploy and maintain," he said in a statement.

The Sybase Analytic Appliance, available immediately comes in three models: Series 100, Series 200 and Series 300. Sybase estimates that the cost of the appliance will average £14k per terabyte.

EMC's releases Clariion CX4 Series

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-05T13:06:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 13:06:00

EMC's latest midrange system promises flash drives and virtual provisioning

Storage heavyweight EMC has confirmed that the latest versions of its Clariion midrange storage systems is ready to ship.

The Clariion CX4 Series will make it easier for customers to rapidly deploy greater volumes of storage capacity. The CX4 range will include EMC's virtual provisioning technology from October, which allows users to present a nominal storage allocation to applications without having to allocate the physical capacity until it is needed.

The new Clariion systems also feature EMC's UltraFlex technology, which supports both dual-protocol Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) connections in the same array. It will also allow users to easily connect to future technologies, such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

The addition of flash drives in October will provide the CX4 Series with up to 10 times the performance the CX3 series contained, EMC claimed.

Flash drives store data using flash memory, unlike conventional hard drives that use mechanically rotating discs.

Drive spin-down that will autonmatically place inactive drives in sleep mode will be available some time in 2009.

"The CLARiiON CX4 Series is unmatched in the industry when it comes to scalability, features, energy efficiency and ease of use," said David Donatelli, president of EMC's storage division in a statement.

Clariion CX4 Series is comprised of four models: 120, 240, 480 and 960. The numbers correspond to the number of disk drives.

The CX4 Series was first unveiled in June at the firm’s annual customer conference, EMC World.

Lenovo enters mini-laptop fray

Gareth Morgan — 2008-08-05T11:29:00.000Z

Gareth Morgan, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 11:29:00

Lenovo's ultra-small laptops to hit the shelfs this autumn

Chinese hardware maker Lenovo will release its first range of mini-laptops this autumn, becoming the latest vendor to try an take a slice of this white-hot market.

Lenovo's IdeaPad S9 and S10 netbooks, based on Intel's Atom processor, will offer up to 1GB of memory and either a 160GB hard drive, or 4GB of solid state storage. They will also be available with a choice of Windows XP or Linux.

The mini notebooks "feature the best of basic computing functions in an extremely compact and affordable form," said Liu Jun, senior vice president of Lenovo's consumer business group, in a statement.

The S9 features a 8.9in screen, while the S10 has a 12.2in display. Both are available in a range of colours, including white, black, blue, red and pink.

The IdeaPads are due to ship in early October 2008. The IdeaPad S9 will cost from £279, the S10 from £319.

Lenovo has become the latest computer maker, along with Asus, Acer and HP, looking to exploit the demand for low-cost, lightweight, basic laptops.

Secure Computing launches new reporting tool

Phil Muncaster — 2008-08-05T00:15:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, IT Week, Tuesday 5 August 2008 at 00:15:00

SC releases new product to help firms improve their security and compliance efforts

Enterprise gateway security firm Secure Computing boosted its reporting capabilities today with the launch of a new tool to help firms gain greater insight into their web traffic and improve security, compliance and performance.

Secure Web Reporter is comprised of the firm's SmartReporter and Content Reporter tools and enables administrators to view enterprise data, such as web surfing and downloading activity and amount of malware blocked, in real-time.

With this information, firms can then change security policies and investigate potential problems, according to Secure's Mike Smart.

"There's been a massive surge in threats targeted at the web," he said. "A lot of people are struggling to make sense of it – but this tool helps you to do this."

The Premium version of the product also features distributed reporting functionality to help spread the reporting burden throughout an organisation, and the ability to produce highly configured reports, said Smart.

In related news security vendor Kaspersky Lab has expanded its hosted offering to include web and instant messaging security.

Kaspersky Hosted Security Services previously contained just anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities.

Juniper upgrades network access protection

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-04T17:52:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Monday 4 August 2008 at 17:52:00

Juniper updates its line of unified access control tools

Juniper Networks has refreshed its line up of its unified access control (UAC) tools, adding new server hardware and firmware upgrades.

Juniper's new Network and Security Manager is based on its existing NetScreen Security Manager, adding support for its J-Series services routes, EX-Series switches, secure sockets layer (SSL) connections and UAC.

The ability it manage SSL and UAC from a single panel will ease the workload of security staff, said Anton Grashion, Juniper's security strategist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"You could have an access control policy for people working remotely or locally," he said.

Juniper has also launched two new UAC management systems, the Infranet Controller (IC) 4500 and the 6500, which allow businesses to implement security policy controls from a central server. The IC 6500 is targeted at large, multinational organisations and can support 30,000 devices simultaneously.

Juniper's UAC 2.2 firmware is built on the open, standards-based Trusted Computing Group's (TCG) Trusted Network Connect (TNC).

With its latest release, Juniper had also added support for Microsoft's Windows Statement of Health (SoH) protocol and its embedded network access protection (NAP) agent, so any Windows Vista users or Windows XP users with service pack 3 installed, could have their network access managed through Juniper Infranet Controllers.

Juniper's UAC 2.2 firmware and the IC 4500 and IC 6500 platforms are available now. UAC 2.2 software is free for customers with current maintenance contracts, but lists at $1,500 a 25 simultaneous endpoint device.

Dell gears up for HPC pilot

Dave Bailey — 2008-08-04T14:32:00.000Z

Dave Bailey, IT Week, Monday 4 August 2008 at 14:32:00

European firms will trial Dell's new HPC systems this autumn

IT systems giant Dell will launch a high performance compute (HPC) cluster pilot this autumn.

Dell will unveil a pre-configured range of HPC systems, with between four and 32 nodes, based on the combination of its server and storage hardware with open source software.

The systems will be based on Dell's PowerEdge M-Series blades, with initial system roll outs running under Linux operating systems like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Dell added it would introduce a Windows-based alternative by the end of the year.

The systems will be trialled at a number of European firms, including UK provider of high street foreign currency, No 1 Currency.

Dell's enterprise solutions director James Quarles said that its pilot programme was designed to provide the compute power needed to accelerate the research process, reduce costs and simplify deployment of HPC systems, allowing European organisations to extend HPC capabilities departmentally.

IT chiefs urged to take lead on carbon

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-04T12:43:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Monday 4 August 2008 at 12:43:00

Communications Managers Association to show how IT can cut carbon emissions

Trade body the Communications Management Association (CMA) has urged IT leaders to make technology the cornerstone of organisational efforts to cut carbon emissions.

The CMA has joined forces with the Carbon Trust to develop best practice guidelines on how businesses can use information communication technology, such as tele-conferencing and home working, to realise carbon savings.

A joint project, called Carbon Intent, will include a thorough review of all existing research on energy saving strategies businesses have been employing and highlight companies that deploy green products, systems and business processes efficiently.

“Through the Carbon Intent initiative we propose to draw together and share examples of current best practice from video-conferencing to logistics and transport planning to home working,” said Glenn Powell, CMA chief executive, in a statement. "The aim is to create industry-wide guidelines and benchmarks that any ICT professional anywhere can tap into for assistance.”

Intel reveals first Larrabee details

Daniel Robinson — 2008-08-04T05:00:00.000Z

Daniel Robinson, IT Week, Monday 4 August 2008 at 05:00:00

Chipmaker provides glimpse of next-generation multi-core architecture

Intel has disclosed more details of its forthcoming Larrabee chip architecture that will use multiple processing cores to boost processing speeds in applications such as 3D graphics and scientific and engineering simulations.

Due to ship in 2009 or 2010, the first Larrabee chip will target the personal computer graphics market, Intel said. The firm will present a paper on the architecture at the SIGGRAPH 2008 computer graphics conference in Los Angeles next week.

Larrabee is based on processor cores with the same x86 architecture used in PC chips, but with enhancements such as vector processing and dedicated hardware for functions such as processing graphics textures.

It is designed to be more flexible and programmable than the graphics processor unit (GPU) chips that power today's graphics adapters, according to Intel, while keeping the familiarity and ease of programming of the Intel architecture.

Although each Larrabee core is said to be based on technology from the Pentium, it has been enhanced with features such as multi-threading and 64bit extensions. Intel said that Larrabee's native programming model supports highly parallel applications, and will enable development of graphics APIs and new graphics algorithms as well as general purpose computation.

Icahn gripes about Yahoo board place

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-08-01T16:02:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Friday 1 August 2008 at 16:02:00

Yahoo new shareholder Carl Icahn will not attend firm's annual meeting

The day before Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting, activist shareholder Carl Icahn announced in his blog he would not be attending and described his new appointment on the Yahoo board as an unhappy compromise.

Icahn agreed to join Yahoo's board 10 days ago, having previously attempted to replace it altogether with a team more compliant to a Microsoft acquisition.

If Icahn’s proxy fight had been successful, the annual meeting would have seen Icahn’s nominated board candidates stand in an election, a negotiation with Microsoft on the cards and the likely dismissal of Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang.

But Icahn blamed “today’s corporate governance system” for his failure to overthrow the board. “Where large mutual funds control so much of the stock, it is extremely difficult to oust an entire board, no matter how strongly a large number of shareholders feel about the board’s previous actions,” he said.

Icahn said he had joined the board as a last resort. “Realising I could not gain control, I saw no point in spending the final two weeks in a debilitating fight, where little would be accomplished except to build animosity between both caps”.

Icahn will now miss any disappointment aired by Yahoo shareholders on how the board handled the Microsoft purchase offer. His argument for not attending the meeting was because it would turn it into “a media event for no purpose”.

McAfee boosts data loss toolkit

Phil Muncaster — 2008-08-01T15:04:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, IT Week, Friday 1 August 2008 at 15:04:00

McAfee prepares £23 million deal for DLP vendor Reconnex

Web security firm McAfee has sought to expand its outbound security capabilities with the acquisition of data loss prevention (DLP) vendor Reconnex.

The proposed £23 million cash deal will give McAfee technology which can proactively identify which information in an organisation should be kept confidential and who should have access to it.

The deal follows the purchase of DLP firm Onigma by McAfee last year, and comes after a flurry of recent acquisitions in the space by rivals Symantec and Trend Micro.

“The growing number of high-profile incidents in which customer records, confidential information and intellectual property were leaked, lost or stolen has created an explosive demand for [DLP] solutions,” said IDC analyst Brian Burke, in a statement. “This acquisition creates a great opportunity for McAfee to fulfill a critical need in this space.

IDC predicts the market for these types of solutions, which it has termed information protection and control (IPC) to grow by 33 per cent a year to $1.6 billion in 2011.

IBM heads to the cloud

Gareth Morgan — 2008-08-01T13:24:00.000Z

Gareth Morgan, IT Week, Friday 1 August 2008 at 13:24:00

Big Blue to build £180m datacentre to host cloud computing services

IBM has confirmed it plans to start offering cloud computing services, which will be housed in a £180m datacentre it is building in North Carolina.

The new facility will also be the testbed for IBM's green datacentre plans, and will be the first one to incorporate its state-of-the-art design principles aimed at making IT more energy efficient.

"This new datacentre is part of IBM's commitment to construct the world's most advanced datacentres," said Bob Greenberg, general manager of IT optimization, in a statement. "We open for business in late 2009."

The new facility will replace existing buildings on IBM's Research Triangle Park site in North Carolina with a 60,000 datacentre, packed with energy-efficient kit and designed to allow additional modules to be built on.

The building will use a mixture of air-, water- and fresh-air-cooling to ensure an optimum operating temperature, delivered in the most energy-efficient manner.

IBM has yet to confirm what services it will offer from the facility.

Oracle acquires Global Knowledge Software

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-07-31T17:42:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Thursday 31 July 2008 at 17:42:00

Oracle aims to build up its offerings in software training

Oracle will acquire Global Knowledge Software for an undisclosed sum, to boost it software training offerings.

Global Knowledge Software (GKS) produces programmes that train users on different business software, including that from Oracle, Microsoft and SAP.

“Our customers are looking for a consistent, cost effective training solution across the enterprise to speed software adoption by end-users,” said Ed Abbo, Senior Vice President of Oracle Application Development.

GKS’ products will complement Oracle’s existing training software, Oracle Tutor, along with its learning management software, iLearning and eLearning. Oracle intends to form a global sales unit to extend all its software training offerings across the enterprise.

The transaction is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2008.

ECM needs "exploding" says Interwoven

Phil Muncaster — 2008-07-31T17:37:00.000Z

Phil Muncaster, IT Week, Thursday 31 July 2008 at 17:37:00

Confusing term is misleading IT buyers,according to WCM vendor

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an inaccurate term causing buyer confusion and needs to be "blown apart into its constituent parts" according to web content management firm Interwoven.

Speaking exclusively to IT Week, Interwoven's vice president of Europe, James Murray, argued that the term ECM covers such a broad range of technologies that it lacks any real meaning. The industry should instead revert to talking about its individual components such as document management, search, and records management, he added.

"ECM is poorly understood and our [part of it] is poorly understood – it's time for ECM to be blown apart into its constituent parts because it's confusing for customers," Murray argued.

He added that customers are often misled by the term ECM when applied to technology products, thinking that it will take care of all their content management problems, when in fact an ECM solution is likely to only address a small part of their requirements.

Gartner dismisses $100 laptop claims

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-07-31T17:07:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Thursday 31 July 2008 at 17:07:00

Gartner rubbishes OLPC claims that it will produce a $100 laptop within three years

Analyst group Gartner has poured scorn on claims by the One Laptop Per Child group, that it will be able to produce a laptop costing £50 ($100) within the next three years. But Gartner does acknowledge that prices for portable computers are set to tumble.

Prices will be driven down by the combination of demand and declining component costs, said Gartner analyst Annette Jump. But those costs are not falling fast enough to make a $100 laptop a viable proposition within three years, she noted.

Gartner's latest market figures show sales of laptops in Western Europe grew by 45 per cent year-on-year for the second quarter of 2008.

The cheapest laptop in the market, according to a cost breakdown from Gartner, is the OLPC Device. “The OLPC-XO device is slightly cheaper than the other products because of lower processor and motherboard cost, and battery and packaging cost,” noted Jump’s report. Closely following the OLPC-XO in cost is Intel’s Classmate PC and the Asus Eee PC.

Nevertheless, OLPC remains adamant that its target of developing a $100 laptop is on track. “OLPC is going to bring the cost down to a lot less than $100 much sooner than three years,” a company spokesman told IT Week.

SAP refuses to budge on hikes in support costs

Rosalie Marshall — 2008-07-31T14:55:00.000Z

Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Thursday 31 July 2008 at 14:55:00

SAP admits some customers will not benefit from rising support costs

SAP has admitted that its plans to force its customers on to new support contracts will result in many of them paying for services they do not need.

The software maker has angered many of its users by insisting on changes to its support contracts.

Earlier this month, SAP confirmed customers on its Standard Support contracts would be transitioned to Enterprise Support agreement, which provides a more comprehensive level of support.

The UK User Group chairman Alan Bowling argued the new offering was “a one size fits all strategy for support”, and that many users would not use the extensive support package they would be paying nearly 30 per cent more for.

But SAP has no intention to add more flexibility to the support offering, even if it means users paying for services they do not need.

Bill Wohl, SAP vice president of product technology group communications, acknowledged not all customers would benefit from the new offering. “Is it perfect for 100 per cent of our customers? No, but neither is our software. We will go ahead with the programme as planned.”

Wohl maintained that the majority of its user base would benefit from the changes.

“Our job is to be broad enough to help the majority of our customers,” he said. Most customers need a level of support that addresses expanding IT complexity and increased adoption of a service-oriented-architecture (SOA) strategy.

With Enterprise Support, which SAP calls “proactive risk reduction”, customers will be given guidance on how to improve business processes and how an SOA strategy can be successfully delivered.

Wohl added the remaining customers that did not need the next generation of support now would do in years to come. “Our job is to provide support offerings whether they [SAP customers] need it now or in the future,” he added.

But users remain unconvinced by these arguments. “The fact still remains that our members are unhappy about the mandatory nature of this change,” said SAP UK User Group chairman, Alan Bowling.