News briefs: Supreme Court to rule on sharing

The U.S. Supreme Court this week hears arguments for forcing cable TV operators to share their lines with other service providers, much the same way that phone companies are required to lease phone lines to their competitors. Currently, the FCC says cable companies don't have to share, but a federal appeals judge has ruled that they must. If the Supreme Court rules against sharing, broadband ISPs that don't own wires to customers' homes will have one less option for hooking them up. The FCC argues that cable TV lines should not be subject to open-access rules that govern voice networks because cable TV is a data service, not a voice service - although voice services can run over the same lines. Supreme Court decisions typically take months.

Just before Cisco closed its $450 million acquisition of Airespace last week, competitors Nortel and Alcatel, which previously resold Airespace gear, announced new wireless LAN partners. Nortel said it will resell WLAN switching gear from Trapeze Networks. The new Nortel WLAN switch line will be called the Nortel WLAN 2300 - based on Trapeze's MX products - and will ship by midyear. Nortel also said it will continue to support the Airespace-based gear it has sold since March 2003. Meanwhile, Alcatel last week partnered with Trapeze rival Aruba Wireless Networks to fill its WLAN technology gap. Alcatel will integrate Aruba's WLAN switching and access point technology into its CrystalSec architecture for LAN and WLAN security and mobility.

IT budgets will increase by 4.6% in 2005 and by 5.3% in 2006, according to an SG Cowen Technology Research Team study released last week. The firm reports the 2005 projection is up from 3.7% in its December survey. "While the overall pace of growth remains modest, several of the key metrics we track, including IT budget growth, IT capacity demand and IT project priorities, edged back up from the softer results in our December survey," the firm said in a statement. February's survey of more than 215 North American IT users shows 70% of respondents expect their business to improve over the next 12 months. Researchers credit Sarbanes-Oxley regulatory requirements with increasing budgets in the first half of 2005, saying it's "more of a boost than a hindrance to spending." Spending priorities also remained high for security, disaster recovery and internal development, and improved most for storage-area networks, storage consolidation and CRM. Lastly, the group found the PC upgrade cycle eased a bit in favor of servers and storage.

BMC Software last week continued its identity management quest by announcing it would buy OpenNetwork Technologies, a maker of Web access management and single sign-on technology, for $18 million. The acquisition of privately held OpenNetwork will add technology for securely managing federated user identities and Web-based applications to BMC's identity management product suite. The news comes just two months after BMC said it would purchase Calendra and its identity management technology.

IBM has reached a settlement with software developer Compuware, which sued IBM in 2002 for a litany of alleged violations, including copyright infringement, anti-trust law abuses and unfair competitive acts. Under the deal's terms, IBM will spend $400 million during the next four years on Compuware software and services, the two companies announced last week. IBM and Compuware also entered a patent cross-licensing agreement and will exchange technical information to ensure interoperability of their products. Compuware's product portfolio includes management software for IBM's mainframes. Meanwhile, Quest Software has agreed to pay $16 million plus additional royalties to Computer Associates to settle a lawsuit CA filed in 2002 accusing Quest of illegally using CA source code. Last week's deal also resolves Quest counterclaims that challenge the validity of some CA copyrights. Under the settlement's terms, neither Quest nor CA admitted wrongdoing.

There is new hope for those waiting for the domain name suffix ".eu" to be brought to life, in what already has been a seven-and-a-half-year process. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the body that oversees technical matters related to the Internet, last week approved the application from the European registry of Internet Domain names to take the new Top Level Domain into ICANN's root files. EURid was chosen by the European Union's executive body, the European Commission, to manage the .eu TLD. The nonprofit group has long contended that the creation of the .eu TLD is an important step in promoting e-commerce in Europe and the European identity, and for creating higher visibility of the internal market.