Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

All the top stories from July 2008

• July saw C-level carnage across several high-profile parts of the industry, with corporate heavyweights from AMD, Alcatel-Lucent and VMware stepping down. AMD announced the resignation of CEO Hector Ruiz. The chipmaker reported its seventh consecutive quarterly loss (this time, of $1.2 billion), following disastrous delays to its Opteron server chip.
• Meanwhile, French/American telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent announced the resignation of CEO Pat Russo and Chairman Serge Tchuruk, following reported losses of E1.1bn for its second financial quarter. The resignations are being seen as an admission that the merger of the two companies was a failure.
• Virtualisation pioneer VMware has opted to make the company’s ESX Hypervisor software available free. Senior director of products and marketing, Reza Malekzadeh told Information Age the move was “a natural progression for the product,” intended to increase adoption of the technology. VMware’s previous hypervisor product GSX was made free in 2006, “triggering thousands of downloads”.
• Having escaped from a minimum-security prison in Colorado, convicted ‘Spam King’ Edward Davidson murdered his wife and three-year-old daughter, before turning the gun on himself, according to US prosecutors. A seven-month-old boy found alongside the three bodies was unharmed. In April, Davidson was sentenced to 21 months of prison after making an estimated $3.5 million from spamming people with adverts for high-risk penny stocks.
• Indian outsourcing companies in Bangalore were forced to tighten their security after seven bomb blasts claimed the lives of two people. An eighth, unexploded, device was found and defused in a popular shopping centre. A group named the ‘Indian Mujahadeen’ claimed responsibility.
• Troubled UK retailer Marks & Spencer plans to spend its way out of its stock price woes, earmarking almost half a billion pounds for IT over the next three years. The company intends to push into international markets and augment its online business, M&S Direct, which is growing 70% a year and now accounts for £300m in sales. The company’s annual report also revealed that it would replace its 40-year-old warehouse and distribution infrastructure with a new logistics network.
• The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) was promised the ability to raid government departments it suspects of wrongdoing or negligence, in a move that sharpens the teeth of the UK data security watchdog. The ‘spot checks’ look for weaknesses in data policies that might lead to breaches on the scale of that suffered by HM Revenues & Customs in November 2007. While the powers do not yet permit the ICO to raid business premises, information commissioner Richard Thomas said “alarm bells must ring in every boardroom”.