Month in review
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10 February 2006
A review of the news of October 2004.
- Up to 7,000 companies worldwide are paying organised criminals 'protection money' to ensure their corporate web sites are not compromised, claimed the SANS Institute, the US independent security organisation. An average of $40,000 is being paid to stop attackers revealing customers' personal data or to prevent denial of service attacks.
- Sainsbury's reported its first-ever loss and pointed to a failed supply chain management project that left its shelves bare as the culprit. The supermarket chain is to write off £140 million in IT assets and a further £120 million spent on automated distribution after a botched overhaul of its logistics and IT systems.
- European competition regulators gave applications giant Oracle the go-ahead for its hostile bid for rival PeopleSoft, mirroring the US decision. Shortly afterwards, Oracle pushed closer to its goal by increasing the amount it is offering shareholders by more than $1 billion to about $8.8 billion. Even if they accept that, Oracle still has to find a way around PeopleSoft's 'poison pill' scheme.
- German software giant SAP prepared to launch a subscription-based version of its enterprise software, despite previously resisting joining the 'pay-as-you-go' software market. SAP will partner with HP to jointly market and sell the SAP business applications suite for a monthly fee of £325 per user, including installation and maintenance costs.
- Following a 12-month investigation into the potential of open source software, the UK's government procurement agency, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), issued a report supporting the use of open source software in the public sector, saying it "can generate significant savings".
- IBM is to start releasing a monthly report detailing threats to corporate networks from hackers, viruses and worms. The Global Business Security Index is intended to provide IT managers with an early warning system of potential vulnerabilities and will be based on information from 2,700 IBM security professionals and half a million monitoring devices. On average, IBM identifies 100 million actual or suspected attacks against their customers every month.
- Search engine colossus Google released a desktop search engine allowing users to seek out information from their hard drives in a matter of seconds and challenged Microsoft to break its control over the PC search environment. Google Desktop Search scans the hard drive and presents its findings in much the same way as a Google web search.
- Sun Microsystems made tentative steps towards regaining its former glory, posting an increase in first-quarter revenues for the first time since 2001, although it continued to report losses. Sun reported first quarter revenues to the end of September of $2.62 billion, up 3.6% on the same quarter in the previous year, but still some distance away from its sales records in the halcyon days of 2001, where first quarter revenues were $5.01 billion. Sun's net loss for its first quarter was $174 million, down from a net loss of $286 million a year ago.
