Top 10 IT News Stories of the Week

By Nancy Weil
Fri, August 17, 2007

IDG News Service —

1. "Skype Issues May Continue Through Friday,"
CIO.com, August 17

Millions of Skype customers remained without VOIP service Friday as a massive outage went into its second day. The service outage was caused by "a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software," the company said, ruling out as possible culprits the planned maintenance of its Web-based payment service on Wednesday or a cyberattack. The company had said it would restore service within 12 to 24 hours, but it was quickly running out of time to meet that pledge as the week wound down. Business users were particularly vexed by the problem, according to analysts and those posting messages on discussion forums and the like.

2. "Novell Won't Pursue Unix Copyrights,"
PC World, August 15

"SCO to Partners, Customers: It's Business as Usual,"
LinuxWorld, August 16

The big news of last week, which hit after the installment of the Top 10 had been posted, continues into this week with fallout from the federal court ruling that Novell does in fact own Unix copyrights that SCO tried to claim it owned. The copyrights were the basis for SCO's still ongoing Linux patent-infringement lawsuit against IBM. Even though it prevailed, Novell says it doesn't have any interest in pushing its own copyright-infringement claims on SCO. There are still claims that will go to trial next month, including payments SCO got from Microsoft and Sun for Unix licenses. Meanwhile, SCO CEO and President Darl McBride said in a letter filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week that SCO intends to keep doing business as usual and that the ruling has no effect on its ability to continue to develop and support UnixWare and OpenServer. Although the issue is more likely to be whether, and how quickly, customers are willing to be forgiving.

3. "Update: IBM Extends Support for Sun's Solaris,"
CIO.com August 17

IBM will support Sun's Solaris in more of its x86 servers and blades, the rivals announced this week. IBM wants to offer a bigger range of operating systems and Sun wants Solaris to be on more hardware, so the match was made. Sun has for a while now been promoting Solaris as an alternative to Linux, but hasn't gotten much support in that effort from server vendors. IBM has historically been out in front promoting Linux, so the deal is a big move all the way around. IBM will distribute and resell Solaris and Sun will offer support for the OS, under terms of the agreement.

1 2 3 next page »

You are here: Business/Management Topics » IT Organization » News Short

Most Recent IT Organization Stories

White Papers »

Converged Infrastructure for Dummies

As you know, everything is mobile, connected, interactive, and immediate. This is exactly why organizations need a highly agile IT infrastructure in order to keep pace with extreme fluctuations in business demand. This book will help you understand why infrastructure convergence has been widely accepted as the optimal approach for simplifying and accelerating your IT to deliver services at the speed of business while also shifting significantly more IT resources from operations to innovation.

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View

For this white paper, IDC performed an in-depth analysis of the business value of VMware View, defined as the expected ROI associated with the use of the solution as a platform for the targeted deployment of a virtual desktop infrastructure.

Virtualization reduces costs and complexity for mid-sized businesses

This paper explains virtualization, its benefits for mid-sized business and how IBM's virtualization strategy can help these companies reduce costs, improve services and simplify management.

A Standard Branch Office IT Platform to Optimize and Consolidate

Forrester Research makes recommendations on best practices to optimize branch virtualization and consolidation initiatives. See how a "thin" branch architecture, with key servers, services and applications in the data center that relies on a high-performing WAN connection, can offer the greatest efficiencies.

Maintaining Continuous Compliance - a new best practice approach

When trying to achieve continuous compliance with internal policies and external regulations, organizations need to replace traditional processes with a new best practice approach and new innovative technology, such as that provided by IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager.

Rewriting the rules of Patch Management

IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager helps organizations automatically manage patches for multiple operating systems and applications across hundreds of thousands of endpoints regardless of location, connection type or status.

Webcasts »

Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere

Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Introduction to VMware View 5

VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment

The CIO's View: Time-to-Value Through Automation

IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation

Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter