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News
IBM
Wins Deal With Telefonica full
story...
Dot-Com
Death Rate Slides In 1Q full
story...
GeoTrust
Adds Voice Recognition To Authentication Platform
full
story...
IBM
Adds Auditing Tool To Lotus Sametime full
story...
HP To Build Supercomputer For Energy
Department full
story...
Microsoft
Sees Profits Ahead In PC Marke full
story...
Microsoft
Brings .Net To Mobile Devices full
story...
IBM Wins Deal With Telefonica
Under a deal worth up to $90 million, IBM will implement the hardware and software needed to improve the networking capabilities of Telefonica Data's Miami data center.
Telecommunications provider Telefonica Data USA has tapped IBM to help offer its customers business-continuity and disaster-recovery services over network lines. Under the terms of a three-year contract worth as much as $90 million, IBM will implement the hardware and software necessary to improve the networking capabilities of Telefonica Data's Miami data center.
IBM and Telefonica Data, a subsidiary of $27.7 billion Spanish telco Telefonica S.A., have been working together for months on a pilot program to digitize Telefonica's business-continuity and disaster-recovery services. Customers worldwide will be able to replicate their data over a network rather than shipping tapes and other media to Telefonica Data's facility.
Telefonica Data and IBM in March tested the new services with several banks in Puerto Rico, says a Telefonica Data spokesman. Puerto Rican banks have regulatory requirements to safeguard their data by having it backed up outside the commonwealth, he says. Rather than shipping tapes to Miami, these banks can now replicate data through Telefonica Data's network and be charged per gigabyte.
IBM technology will provide the backbone for Telefonica Data's upgraded IT systems in Miami. IBM Global Services will install eServer systems and TotalStorage storage servers as well as DB2, Tivoli, and WebSphere software.
Dot-Com Death
Rate Slides In 1Q
Only 54 Internet companies shut down or filed for bankruptcy in the quarter, compared with 164 during the same period last year.
The dot-com death rate appears to have leveled off, with shutdowns during the first quarter of 2002 amounting to only a third of the number that shut down during the first quarter last year, according to research firm Webmergers.com.
Only 54 Internet companies shut down or filed for bankruptcy in the quarter, compared with 164 during the same period last year. That brings the total number of dot-com failures to at least 823 since January 2000.
There were 17 casualties in March, down slightly from 18 in February and 19 in January. In contrast, 49 companies called it quits in March 2001. Last month's prominent passings range from data service providers Yipes Communications and Adelphia Business Solutions to consumer electronics retailer 800.com. March's death rate is the lowest since August 2000, when 10 companies shut down. The peak of the shakeout occurred in May 2001, when 64 companies gave up the ghost.
"The worst appears to be over, but the tail appears to be pretty long, given that there's a number of holdouts," says Tim Miller, president of Webmergers. "Some of the longtime holdouts are just now throwing in the towel." Miller says he expects to see the shutdown rate continue its gradual decline the rest of the year, perhaps with small spikes as shutdowns occur in related sectors such as optical equipment manufacturing.
GeoTrust Adds Voice
Recognition To Authentication Platform
Security vendor GeoTrust today said it has cut a deal with Authentify Inc. to add telephone-based verification to its authentication products.
GeoTrust will integrate Authentify's automated telephone-validation service as part of the authentication process for its QuickSSL product.
Adding an additional layer of voice recognition significantly strengthens the authentication process, the vendors said. Before its QuickSSL product issues an SSL certificate, the system now not only validates domain control by ensuring the persons receiving certificates are who they say they are, it also provides a stronger audit trail—in the form of a voice print—in case fraud occurs.
The addition of voice recognition is entirely automated—and businesses can still receive certificates in ten minutes or less.
QuickSSL provides 128-bit, SSL digital certificates for encrypting communications between Web browsers and servers.
IBM Adds Auditing Tool
To Lotus Sametime
As instant messaging becomes a more widely used corporate tool, IT departments need a way to monitor the burgeoning communications channel. This week, IBM's Lotus Software unit said it has integrated an auditing tool into its Sametime collaboration platform to let IT centrally manage, store, and supervise IM networks.
IBM is integrating FaceTime Communications' IM Auditor program into Sametime, which IBM claims has more than 5 million users worldwide.
Sametime features a variety of collaboration tools, including IM. Any enterprise might want to monitor IM, but in particular companies that have regulatory compliance issues.
The IM Auditor Gateway for Lotus Sametime is available as an add-on option to FaceTime's standard IM Auditor application. IM Auditor works as a back-end server that can manage and monitor IMs across all IM networks, both internal and external.
Enterprises typically use the tool to monitor message content for words or phrases restricted by employee role; to control access and use of IM by certain employees; to map IM screen names with corporate IDs; and to export complete IM conversations.
HP To Build Supercomputer For
Energy Department
The government will use the system to study biotechnology, radioactive waste detection, and materials design.
Hewlett-Packard has won a $24.5 million contract from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the world's fastest supercomputer running the Linux operating system. HP plans to begin installing the system, which will consist of 1,400 Intel Itanium 64-bit microprocessors, at the department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., this year.
The lab will use the system to study biotechnology, radioactive waste detection, materials design, and other disciplines, says Dave Dixon, associate director of theory, modeling, and simulation at the lab. It replaces an IBM system that, when purchased five years ago, was among the world's fastest. That system now ranks 190th on a list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. Dixon says HP's system will run 30 times faster, include 10 times as much memory, and house 50 times as much disk space as the supercomputer it replaces. He says HP won the deal to supply the system in a "competitive bidding process" but declined to say whether IBM was one of the bidders.
The HP-Linux supercomputer, which will consist of next-generation Intel computer chips code-named McKinley and Madison, will run at a peak performance of 8.3 trillion floating point operations per second, HP says. HP says customers in the high-performance technical computing market increasingly want to run their programs on industry-standard Intel-based servers, which provide cost savings.
HP says the contract also shows that the company is a significant presence in the technical computing market. "This deal demonstrates to the world that there's more than one player in the high-performance technical computing space," says Martin Fink, general manager for Linux systems at HP. Installation of the system is expected to be completed by next year.
Microsoft Sees Profits
Ahead In PC Market
SEATTLE—Stressing the interdependence of hardware, software, and the user experience, Microsoft Corp. is urging hardware developers to build more innovative devices—from smaller, more powerful PCs to easier-to-manage data centers.
Microsoft opened its 11th annual Windows Hardware Engineers Conference Tuesday, encouraging developers to advance the PC platform through a broad array of technical and design improvements and specifications from 802.11b to IPv6 to 3GIO.
"The PC is still the platform—no ifs, ands, or buts," said Jim Allchin, Microsoft group vice president of the platforms division. "There is plenty of money to be made, and we are just now at the beginning of this next decade of all the things that are possible."
While facing a sluggish PC market, Allchin remains unabashedly optimistic about the market for IT products. Essentially, he offered attendees a folksy combination sales presentation for Microsoft's view of the future and motivational speech aimed at the software giant's business partners. About 2,500 hardware engineers attended the show, which is being co-sponsored by Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, SMSC, VIA, Azius, Wistron, Orinco, and NEC.
On the Windows operating systems roadmap front, Allchin said Windows XP Service Pack 1 was due later this year, as is an OEM edition of Windows XP Tablet Edition. The Windows .Net Servers—Web, Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter—will be released to manufacturing later this year and in customers' hand early next year, he said. Beyond 2003, Microsoft working on a new OS code-named "longhorn," which may comprise both server and client.
He touched on several longstanding themes often heard from company evangelists—quality, reliability, reducing complexity, improving security—and he touched on some newer ones, such as interconnectedness, remote control, and wireless connectivity as well.
"I believe in growing the market but I don't believe its' going to happen by just cutting costs. Too often we focus on that. It's about adding innovation. If you add innovation people will pay additional money for that value," Allchin said. "Unclutter the end-user experience. People just don't like complexity. Make it uncomplex for the end user or consumer.
"PC-architected systems will continue to morph," Allchin continued. "You will see systems the size of a Pocket PC running Windows XP. They'll have all the advantages of taking with you your storage and all your capabilities, and you are going to see that very soon."
Proving that technical glitches can bother even the world's largest software company, one live demo bombed completely during the keynote. In the demo, Allchin attempted to connect a desktop PC, a Bluetooth mouse, keyboard, and printer. But the wireless network failed, causing a "Page not found" error to be displayed on two huge monitors, and drawing laughter.
In a flawless demo, Valerie See, group manager of Windows hardware evangelism, showed a technology preview of "IBIG," a set of software management tools that facilitate the rapid deployment of images of client operating systems and applications in data centers. It is targeted at Windows 2000 server appliance devices.
"Customers want faster data center turnovers, and this will make it really, really fast to deploy," she said. "It used to be you had to be like a rocket scientists to drive a data center, but this is a very easy interface."
In an interview, Tom Phillips, general manager, Microsoft's Windows hardware and experience group, explained that the server software management tool that shown can significantly impact the effectiveness of IT organizations. The goal is to change "static configurations" into "dynamic data centers," he said.
"We're taking the OS and applications and applying it to the compute elements on a just-in-time basis, so that you really leverage the [hardware] assets across the board," Phillips said. "If you have 10,000 servers in an environment, many of them have specialized functions and periods of idle time that you pay for."
It's the next evolution of where server appliances are heading, Phillips said. "Instead of your software being the system drive on this device, think about there being a repository of images," he said. "You've got these compute elements and from this repository, basically load the OS and images necessary for specific tasks, and through Network Attached Storage map that storage to those servers in an on-demand basis."
Microsoft Brings .Net To Mobile Devices
Microsoft Wednesday released a beta version of .Net Compact Framework, which extends the vendor's application architecture to handhelds and cell phones.
The framework is a subset of the .Net framework, and focuses strongly on XML-based Web services. Target devices would need to run Pocket PC 2000/2002 or Windows CE .Net
The .Net Compact Framework shares the same programming model and application development tools as the full .Net release. That means developers can use their same skills and tools to target devices alongside the desktop and the Web.
If there are two areas as full as promise -- yet still short on delivered apps -- as Web services and wireless devices, you'd be hard-pressed to find them. At the same time, the lightweight, loosely coupled Web services application model seems custom-built for delivery to handhelds.
Microsoft also announced the beta release of the Smart Device Extensions (SDE) for Visual Studio .Net, which will let developers target handhelds from within the popular integrated development environment (IDE). The add-on includes support for new project types, device emulator support, remote debugging, and automatic deployment that will help developers build apps for small-scale devices.
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