Plus: Qualcomm to buy Flarion; Scottish police replace StarOffice with Microsoft Office; Overland Storage buys Zetta; Red Hat shows off directory, certificat management plans; Weblog visitors a bunch of rich kids.
The last sentence in the WorldCom fraud case was handed down late last week. Scott Sullivan, former CFO, received a five-year sentence for his role in orchestrating the fraud that brought down the once high-flying telecom company. Sullivan pleaded guilty, as did four other former WorldCom employees who were sentenced in the past two weeks. Former CEO Bernard Ebbers was convicted last month and ordered to serve a 25-year sentence.
The judge considered the fact that Sullivan testified against Ebbers, which was critical in the prosecution’s case. Earlier last week, former WorldCom controller David Myers and Buford Yates, director of general accounting, were each sentenced to one year in prison. Earlier this month Betty Vinson, an accounting department manager, was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of house arrest.
Qualcomm has agreed to buy Flarion Technologies, a developer of wireless broadband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex Access technology. Flarion, a spin-off of Lucent, has been testing the wireless IP technology in the U.S. since 2003. In addition to OFDMA, Flarion pioneered Flash (fast low-latency access with seamless hand-off) OFDMA for mobile IP-based broadband services. Flash OFDMA is a proprietary cellular broadband technology that network operators can deploy to link notebook computers of mobile users or to serve as a fixed wireless access system, bridging the “last mile” to connect computers in homes and small offices.
The Central Scotland Police IT department is removing Sun’s StarOffice productivity software from about 400 PCs and switching to Microsoft’s Office System, citing lower maintenance costs and the need to interoperate more smoothly with other departments running Windows. It is the latest anecdote in a wider tussle for business between Microsoft and open source software in Europe. Several organizations, particularly public bodies, have been adopting or experimenting with Linux and other open source products, but the move by the Scottish police shows the migrations are not all one-way. “It’s not really based on any ideological argument about open source software, it’s based on pure business needs,” David Stirling, head of IT for Central Scotland Police, says of the decision to switch. The agency adopted StarOffice in 2000 when it was short of cash after paying for a new crime reporting application, Stirling says.
Overland Storage last week announced that it has acquired Zetta Systems for $9 million. Overland will add Zetta’s appliance-based virtualization software to its Protection OS portfolio of data protection products. Overland has disk-based and tape products. The capabilities of Zetta Server IR and Zetta NAS – snapshots, thin provisioning and replication – will be added to Protection OS. The company plans to ship an appliance in October that incorporates these features.
Red Hat shed a little more light last week on how it intends to develop the directory and certificate management software it bought from AOL’s Netscape division. But the company remains undecided as to whether it will commercialize other assets it acquired in the deal, including messaging and collaboration software that analysts say could form the basis of an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange Server. Red Hat purchased the Netscape assets, including the Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System, at the end of 2004. Red Hat also picked up a number of other server products that could form the basis of a competitor to Microsoft’s Exchange messaging server, analysts say. This software includes the Netscape Messaging Server, as well as Web, calendar and collaboration servers.
A Red Hat executive last week called Messaging Server “a viable technology” and added that the company is trying to determine whether there is a market for it.
Good news for Weblog publishers with aspirations of making money off their sites – compared with the average Internet user, visitors to Weblogs tend to be younger and to belong to wealthier households, a study finds. Blog visitors also are more likely to shop online and to connect to the Internet using a broadband connection, according to the study “Behaviors of the Blogosphere” conducted by comScore Networks.
Not surprisingly, blog visitors visit almost twice as many Web pages as the average Internet user. Blog visitors are 11% more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of $75,000 or more, and are 30% more likely to live in households headed by someone between the ages of 18 and 34. About 30% of all U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005, up 45% over 2004’s first quarter, the study says.
