Top Ten IT News Stories of the Week: Impact of Alcatel, Lucent Merger May Take Time
Fri, April 07, 2006
CIO —
1. "Impact of Alcatel, Lucent Merger May Take Time,"
Network World, 4/3. As the week began, telecommunications equipment manufacturers Alcatel and Lucent announced a plan to merge. It’s going to take between six and 12 months for the deal to clear and then a couple of years to integrate the two players in what’s likely to be a very complex undertaking, according to analysts. The merger, which would create a networking company with an annual revenue of US$25 million, has been expected for several weeks. The pair have been down the merger path before, five years ago, only for discussions to fall apart at the last minute.
2. "CIOs Say Storage Vendors Are Gouging,"
Computerworld, 4/5. Chief information officers and other IT managers are unhappy about what they see as inflated storage costs and bad storage management software pricing models. In some cases, users are discovering it’s less expensive to adopt a new storage environment than to pay for maintaining its existing equipment. They resent having to pay separately for storage management software, which they’d prefer to come bundled on storage hardware. Additionally, storage vendors aren’t doing enough to come up with interoperable products designed to work in heterogenous environments, users said.
3. "Microsoft Launches Linux Website,"
CIO.com, 4/6. Gates Inc. has unveiled a new website to provide users with information about Microsoft’s interoperability efforts with Linux and other open-source software. What Microsoft’s waking up to is that customers are running different technologies and hence require interoperability between the vendor’s Windows operating system and its applications, and its equivalents in the open-source world. In the same vein, Microsoft is now offering its Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtualization environment for Windows free of charge. The software also supports the client and server versions of Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell.
4. "SAP to Expand On-Demand Offerings,"
InfoWorld, 4/6. Enterprise applications vendor SAP doesn’t plan to limit its hosted software efforts to CRM software, according to the company’s CEO, Henning Kagermann. SAP is likely to offer on-demand versions of its other applications, but the company doesn’t intend to "cannibalize" its existing enterprise software business to support the software-as-a-service business model, he said.
5. "Users Told to Avoid Ad Hoc Outsourcing Moves,"
Computerworld, 4/4. Analysts at Gartner are recommending that IT managers adopt a disciplined approach to outsourcing. Otherwise, they may risk facing large-scale business disruption in a few years. Outsourcing is becoming more complex for users to manage as they deal with increasing numbers of service providers, Gartner said.
