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Month in review

10 February 2006  

All the main IT industry news stories from October 2003.

  • Rumours swirled about Novell's interest in Linux distributor SuSE. But, when it came, the acquisition for $210 million in cash was even more intriguing than expected. Always keen to grow its Linux power base, IBM partly funded the deal by taking a 2% stake in Novell for $50 million. The SuSE acquisition follows a series of other open source and web services moves by Novell.

  • Microsoft blamed a series of security scares for a disappointing set of quarterly financial results. The Blaster and SoBig worms, claimed the company, had scared customers into deferring operating system upgrades. However, an unexpected decline in deferred revenues suggests that Microsoft has lost significant income as a result of the introduction of its Software Assurance licensing scheme introduced last year.

  • Press reports in Japan suggested that Sun Microsystems was contemplating a deal with Japanese hardware giant Fujitsu to merge their respective Sparc chip and Unix development teams. Fujitsu makes Unix servers based on Sun's Sparc technology, several of which offer better price/performance than Sun's own machines. For its part, Sun has come under pressure to cut costs - not least of all from Merrill Lynch's Steve Milunovich, who published an open letter urging the company to take drastic action.

  • Siebel Systems announced its return to the application service provider (ASP) market just over two years after founder Tom Siebel closed the company's Sales.com ASP and dismissed the concept. Only weeks after re-embracing the ASP model, the company underscored its restored faith by paying $50 million to acquire customer relationship management ASP UpShot.

  • EMC splashed out $1.7 billion to buy Documentum, a surprising move that had many analysts questioning the likely 'synergy' between the storage systems maker and the document management software vendor.

  • SchlumbergerSema emerged as the surprise winner of the first contract to be handed out under the NHS's modernisation programme. Early favourite EDS had walked away from the bidding, reportedly concerned about the draconian penalties for failing to deliver on time and to budget that NHS IT director general Richard Granger had insisted were written into the contract.

  • SAP CEO Henning Kagermann admitted that the company was facing strong price competition from Oracle. However, he also suggested that recovery was already underway in the US and forecast a rebound for Europe within the next six months.

  • EDS, Computer Associates and Marc Andreessen's OpsWare unveiled plans for an XML mark-up language to automate the provisioning and management of data at large centres, called Data Centre Mark-up Language (DCML).

  • In one of the few high-tech stock market flotations of the year, Wolfson Electronics got its initial public offering (IPO) underway on the London market despite an eleventh-hour attempt by Cirrus Logic to derail it with a patent infringement suit. Wolfson, a 1980s spin-off from Edinburgh University, makes microchips that convert analogue signals to digital, and vice versa.

  • Spammers suffered a humiliating courtroom defeat when their attempt to sue anti-spam organisations - most of them non-profit making - was dismissed "with prejudice" on all counts. "[The spammers' lawyer] had a near-death experience when he realized we were going for full discovery on the spammers... their tax records for the last five years, their contracts with ISPs, everything," said Steve Linford of Spamhaus.


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