An audit that McLean, Virginia-based KPMG Consulting LLC completed last month found that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) issued between 21,888 and 23,385 too many H-1B visas last year. Congress had set the high-tech visa limit at 115,000 and is considering legislation that would erase the overage or apply it to this year's allotment. The INS attributes the error to a systems problem.
SAP AG said it plans to combine some systems integration business units in Germany and Switzerland with operations that are now partially owned by Siemens AG and Software AG. SAP will have majority ownership of the new company, which will be called SAP Systems Integration AG, but the three vendors expect to offer some shares to the public later this year.
Network appliance: A specialized device that can access the Internet or private networks to perform defined tasks such as browsing a Web site or answering e-mail.
Computer Associates International Inc. has said it will settle litigation filed against it by shareholders over alleged excessive compensation packages awarded to top CA executives. The executives will return to the company 4.5 million shares of stock worth about $260 million, said the Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor. Last November, Delaware Chancery Court Vice Chancellor Myron Steele ruled that the CA executives should return 9.5 million shares valued at approximately $550 million.
Samsung Electronics American Inc. in San Jose has introduced two flat-panel monitors, the SyncMaster 150MP and the 170MP. Both function as monitors or video displays for use with any video device. The 15-in. 150MP costs $1,287; the 17-in. 170MP costs $2,620.
InfoRay Inc. announced the U.S. release of software that allows executives and other end users to do real-time monitoring of their businesses' performance. InfoRay was founded in the Netherlands but moved its headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its InfoRay 4.0 software gives users a Web-based view into corporate systems and databases. Pricing starts at $100,000 for 25 users.
More comments from the ruling and the community:
Actuate Corp. in San Francisco has announced Web content creation software that lets users extract data from any application and produce secure and customized reports for Web-based customers. It also announced an alliance with Allaire Corp. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to integrate the technology into Allaire's ColdFusion Web application server.
-- Back door: A secret way of gaining access to a program or online service. Also known as "trapdoor."
EMC Corp. snagged the top spot from IBM Corp.'s Tivoli Systems Inc. in the storage management software market, according to a Dataquest study. The Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based company totaled $763.5 million in 1999 licensing sales, followed by IBM/Tivoli with $725.6 million. Islandia, New York-based Computer Associates International Inc. finished third with $690.1 million in 1999 sales.
Cabletron Systems Inc. in Rochester, New Hampshire, said last week that it would sell off the networking product group it purchased two years ago from Digital Equipment Corp. The sale includes the NetVantage line of LAN switches used by small businesses.
QAD Inc. in Carpinteria, California, this week plans to release the first pieces of a promised new line of business-to-business order-management applications for manufacturers. The first version of the Java-based eQ software was designed to manage Internet sales and inventory replenishment. Modules for online procurement and other tasks will be added later this year. The applications will work with multiple enterprise resource planning systems, not just QAD's own back-office software. Pricing starts at $185,000.
Speech technology company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. (L&H) has agreed to acquire rival Dragon Systems Inc. in a deal valued at $592.7 million. L&H, which splits its headquarters between Ieper, Belgium, and Burlington, Massachusetts, said it hopes to immediately gain access to new markets from the extra languages that Dragon supports. The company expects to leverage Newton, Massachusetts.-based Dragon's resources in telephony, medical, legal and health care applications to expand its offerings and customer base, L&H officials said.
Caleb Technology Corp. has rolled out Monster Floppy, a high-capacity drive that stores, reads and retrieves up to 144MB of data. The drive is backward compatible, allowing data files, utilities and applications to be transferred from older disks to Monster Floppy. It's available in packs of five disks for $34.99.
Novell Inc. last week shipped an update to NetWare Cluster Services, adding support for NetWare 5.1 and for 32 nodes. The update costs $4,999 per node. More than 80 vendors will demonstrate directory-enabled applications at Brainshare in Salt Lake City this week.