Also: Microsoft execs step up calls for patent reform; Lexis Nexis suffers security breach; IBM offers super computer on demand; Novell says SuSE Linux Professional 9.3, Open Enterprise Server are now available
BT Group inked its largest outsourcing contract last week, signing up Reuters with a deal worth about $3 billion over the next eight and a half years. The contract includes managing secure-data networks for Reuters around the world. BT says that this pact is three times larger than its next-biggest outsourcing agreement with Unilever. The contract may be viewed as an extension of BT and Reuters’ existing relationship. In October, the companies announced BT’s plans to acquire Reuters’ financial services extranet provider Radianz for $175 million. BT says it will maintain Radianz’s business of providing services to the financial markets and Reuters. BT has been busy expanding its global network presence in the last 12 months with the network service acquisitions of Italian service provider Albacom and multinational service provider Infonet.
Microsoft executives last week stepped up their calls for reform of the U.S. patent process, saying the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) too often focuses on quantity instead of quality. Microsoft also called for a patent system that is more accessible to small investors, and executives recommended that Congress end patent-filing fees for small companies, nonprofit groups, universities and individual inventors. Microsoft and other high-technology companies have pushed Congress to end the diversion of patent fees from the USPTO to the government general budget, saying the office needs more funding to evaluate the growing number of patent applications. The USPTO receives more than 350,000 patent applications per year, triple the number it received 20 years ago. Beyond Microsoft, many technology companies and trade groups have called for patent reform over the years. And let’s not forget Microsoft, which holds about 4,500 patents worldwide and has another 10,000 pending, is currently battling a couple of patent lawsuits.
London-based publisher Reed Elsevier, the parent company of online content provider Lexis Nexis, last week acknowledged that personal records of about 32,000 people were fraudulently accessed by hackers, although the parent company declined to disclose the exact date of the discovery. The information included names, addresses, and Social Security and driver’s license numbers, but not credit history, medical records or financial information, said Reed Elsevier, which intends to notify those affected by the security breach to watch for signs of identity theft. The disclosure follows that of rival ChoicePoint, which last month said thieves grabbed Social Security numbers and other consumer data (see above). Also, DSW shoe stores said last week that a hacker stole credit card and other data of customers at 103 of its 175 stores in the past three months.
IBM is making its Blue Gene supercomputer, ranked the fastest in the world, available on demand so that high-performance computing customers can get the processing power they need when they need it without having to worry about high upfront costs or management headaches. IBM has been offering supercomputing on demand for nearly two years, but on traditional hardware based on Xeon, Opteron and Power processors. End users can tap into Blue Gene to run Linux-based workloads via a dedicated VPN into a new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center in Rochester, Minn., where Blue Gene was developed. Blue Gene is made up of specially designed Power-based nodes that include only a processor and a small amount of memory. The key feature of Blue Gene is that it is extremely dense: A single rack includes 1,024 dual-processor nodes that can reach peak performance of 5.7 teraflops.
Novell announced last week that both SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 and Open Enterprise Server are now available. SuSE Linux Professional includes a Linux operating system that uses the 2.6.11 kernel, more than 3,000 open source applications and packages, network capability and personal productivity applications such as e-mail, a Web browser and an office suite. The package is expected to be available in mid-April.
