Acquisition starts Novell travelling on ASP track
Novell has joined the ever-expanding list of software vendors planning to become application service providers and will release specific details on its strategy later this year.
Novell has joined the ever-expanding list of software vendors planning to become application service providers and will release specific details on its strategy later this year.
IBM Corp. hopes to turn Windows 2000 servers into minimainframes, using a chip set that incorporates Intel Corp.'s upcoming 64-bit processor architecture. IBM claims its chip set, code-named Summit, will put mainframe capabilities on the Windows 2000 platform, helping IBM to differentiate its offerings from competitors' and elevate its products out of the low-end commodity market.
IBM Corp. isn't the only server vendor hoping that innovations in its I/O systems will help it grab market leadership and users' attention. The future of I/O architectures was the topic of Strategic Research Corp.'s Server I/O 2000 Conference in Monterey, Calif., last week.
Novell last week said it wants to become an application service provider, but it won't provide detailed plans until later this year.
Network software giant Novell Inc., which today said it would acquire application service provider (ASP) JustOn Inc., intends to become an ASP itself and will announce specific plans to do so sometime this year, a company spokesman said.
City officials in Ann Arbor, Mich., estimate that trouble with utility billing software caused the city's water department to underbill customers by $2.8 million.
Users who took the advice of Y2K doomsayers and powered down disk drives that usually run nonstop could regret doing so. The drives could fail on power-up due to a condition called "stiction," which has nothing to do with the Y2K rollover.
Cathy Hotka, vice president of information technology at the National Retail Federation in Washington, spent much of last week at the White House's Information Coordination Center. The center is still on the lookout for year 2000 problems. Hotka spoke with Computerworld reporter David Orenstein.
Retailers handle a majority of the dollars in the U.S. economy so their year 2000 efforts are a national concern.
For the love of data, don't power down that old disk.
Even with its Web emphasis, the new version of NetWare appears unlikely to stem the operating system's eroding market share that has resulted from its pounding from Windows, users and analysts said.
Sun Microsystems apologised to members of Blackdown, the open-source development group that made the port of Java 2 to Linux possible.
Microsoft and government lawyers are more likely to settle the antitrust case against the software giant with Judge Richard A Posner as a mediator than they would be without such a well-respected guide, several legal experts said.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds told a Comdex audience of thousands last week that user demands rather than purely technological interests have begun to drive the development of the free, open-source operating system.
In his Comdex Fall 99 keynote address, Novell CEO Eric Schmidt announced the availability of Novell Directory Services 8 for Solaris and Windows NT and previewed new interoperability features in the next version of NDS due the first half of next year.