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NewsVac: News from around the Web

• SCO's revenue goes down, down, down 1 year, 11 months ago
  
  sjvn writes "SCO continues to say it will win in its Linux and IBM lawsuits some day, but for today it continues to bleed red ink."
• Oracle Linux? 2 years, 1 month ago
  
  sjvn writes "Larry Ellison, CEO and God-king of Oracle, may not be willing to pay a few billion for Red Hat, but he has thought about buying Novell, and he hasn't closed the door on buying a major Linux distributor."
• CEO Jack Messman talks about Novell 2 years, 1 month ago
  
  sjvn writes "Novell has its ups -- the promise of its new desktop -- and its downs -- its last quarter's results -- but Jack Messman, the company's CEO is determined to see the open-source course his way."
• ITMJ Journal Entry: Joe Keller, VP-Java Web Services/Tools, Sun Microsystems 2 years, 10 months ago
  
  Joe Keller is responsible for helping to define, set and drive Sun Microsystems' product direction in the Java, Web services & tools business. He was previously vice president and general manager of the Sun ONE Business Integration group within the iPlanet division. He spoke to ITMJ Monday at JavaOne in San Francisco.

  ITMJ: It's obvious that all software development is moving quickly toward the open source model. Why is Sun taking so long to open source Java -- its most important IP?

• ITMJ Q&A: Doug Levin, CEO, Black Duck Software 2 years, 10 months ago
  
  Company Overview: Black Duck Software Inc.

  Black Duck offers software compliance management software and services that help companies govern how software assets are created, managed, and licensed. The company was formed in late 2002 to apply advanced technology to this challenge -- one addressed today by manual, expensive, and error-prone approaches. Black Duck is a privately held company funded by Fidelity Ventures, Flagship Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Intel Capital, Red Hat, and SAP Ventures.

  Doug Levin is founder, president and CEO of Black Duck Software, in Waltham, Mass. Prior to founding Black Duck, Levin served as the CEO of MessageMachines (acquired by NMS Communications in 2002) and X-Collaboration Software Corporation (acquired by Progress Software in 2000). From 1995 to 1999, he worked as an interim executive or consultant to CMGI Direct, IBM/Lotus Development Corporation, Oracle Software Corp., Solbright Software, Mosaic Telecommunications, Bright Tiger Technologies, Best!Software and several other software companies. From 1987 to 1995, Doug held various senior management positions with Microsoft Corp., including heading up worldwide licensing for corporate purchases of non-OEM Microsoft software products.

• How corporate IT can come up to speed in delivering more functionality 2 years, 10 months ago
  
  Let's start with a simple premise: Corporate IT is not up to speed in delivering new business functionality. Argue it if you want, but most business executives would agree.

  Where is the evidence? Just listen to the IT people themselves. They are in break-fix mode. They are spending on support and security, not functionality. Typically 80 percent of their budgets go to maintaining current systems. For them, Gartner offers a dark prognosis, saying: "As caretakers of inflexible infrastructure, the IT department is doomed."

  Software-as-a-service is booming because any non-core competency that can escape the grip of the corporate IT department, will escape, as IT fails to respond to needs of the business line managers. A corporate business unit or small enterprise can run many processes online using subscription services. Even open source is a form of "self-help" for avoiding the politics and bureaucracy of corporate IT, sometimes seeded from within IT itself.

• GroundWork releases open source configuration tool for Nagios 2 years, 11 months ago
  
  A large number of companies have found that they need to keep more exacting watch over their networks and are using Nagios -- the host, service, and network monitoring tool hosted on SourceForge -- to do it. In fact, Nagios has been downloaded more than 660,000 times since 2001.

  But Nagios isn't very easy to configure; in fact, it's designed for software engineers who use command line interface (CLI) development only. As new developers come into the business, more and more of them prefer to use graphical interface tools instead -- thus, mouse is rapidly gaining favor over the keyboard.

  It is for this reason that Emeryville, Calif.-based GroundWork Open Source Solutions, Inc., which makes open source IT management software, announced its latest product today: GroundWork Monitor Architect (Monarch). This is a free, open source configuration tool that simplifies the deployment of Nagios and GroundWork Monitor, GroundWork's IT management solution based on Nagios.

• IT Journal Entry: John Roberts, Co-founder/CEO, SugarCRM 2 years, 11 months ago
  
  John Roberts, 38, has an enterprise CRM applications track record spanning 11 years. Prior to co-founding SugarCRM, he held product management and sales engineering positions at E.piphany, BroadVision, Baan/Aurum Software, and IBM. SugarCRM started in spring 2004 and has been a disruptive force in the customer relationship management software market ever since, competing with such entrenched companies as Siebel Systems, SAP, and Salesforce.com. Roberts spoke Tuesday in a panel discussion at the Enterprise Ventures conference in Redwood City, Calif.

  ITMJ: Why has SugarCRM grown so quickly into an open source household name in barely one year?

• IT Journal Entry: K.B. Chandrasekhar, Founder/CEO, Jamcracker 2 years, 11 months ago
  
  K.B. Chandrasekha is co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Jamcracker Inc., a provider of on-demand delivery and management software. He is also the co-founder and chairman of e4e Inc., a global technology holding company, and chairman of Aztec Software and Technology Services Ltd., a publicly traded company on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

  ITMJ: What key differences do you see in software as a service (SAAS) as compared with the older ASP (application service provider) model?

  Chandrasekhar: SAAS and ASP are basically just different acronyms that mean the same thing. The main difference is we have now had over six years to become wiser about what works and what doesn't. The most common misconception is that placing a Web application in a data center equals SAAS. The reality is that an array of business processes need to be automated in order to make the SAAS delivery model work. Contrary to the late '90s, SAAS companies today are now thinking through the issues of multi-tenancy, SLAs, security, user management, provisioning, and integration with existing systems during the design phase, versus waiting until they reach substantial customer adoption, which is too late.

• Scalix founder is a female trailblazer 2 years, 12 months ago
  
  There are 19.2 million reasons Julie Hanna Farris is a trailblazer, according to the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives. Last year, Farris was honored for a second year in a row with the FWE Trailblazer Award for bringing in more than $1 million in venture capital in a year -- Farris garnered close to $6 million -- bringing the total she's raised as founder of San Mateo, Calif.-based Scalix Corp. to almost $20 million.

  Scalix builds open standards-compliant email applications that run on Linux and use open source and proprietary components. The software's main claim to fame is its interoperability with both proprietary and open systems, allowing Scalix's clients to choose their own email clients -- even (gak!) Microsoft Outlook. Though Scalix serves large clients in business, government and education, its main drive recently has been to provide software and services to the growing hosted mail market.

  "My vision when starting Scalix was that mail was in great need of innovation and of a new-generation architecture," says Farris. "We're really stressing it and breaking the back of the infrastructure because of overuse."

• IT Journal Entry: John Chambers, President/CEO, Cisco Systems 2 years, 12 months ago
  
  John Chambers has led Cisco Systems since January 1995, growing the company from $1.2 billion to approximately $23.8 billion in annual revenues. Chambers has also been named “The Most Influential CEO” in telecommunications and “The Most Influential Person in Communications” by several industry publications.

  Q: So what's the Next Big Thing, the next big product thrust, for Cisco, following your move into storage several years ago?

• Ten steps toward more effective collaboration 3 years, 1 month ago
  
  In today's world, nearly all important projects -- from term projects at school to open source projects and more -- require us to work together with others. This compels us to constantly and effectively collaborate with different people to achieve a set goal. But the manner in which we collaborate directly influences the outcome of the project. Therefore there is need to recognize some simple and general ways of becoming good team players.
• Mastering the Enterprise Volume Management System 3 years, 1 month ago
  
  The Enterprise Volume Management System, or EVMS, is a disk, partition, and file system manager for Linux that claims to be a comprehensive tool for all disk management tasks. I ran across EVMS and found the idea appealing, so I decided to try it out. I've been working with it for a couple of weeks now, and this article describes what I found.
• Thought leadership in action: How Jeff Bezos does it 3 years, 1 month ago
  
  PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos rode through Silicon Valley recently, making stops to address the Churchill Club and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Bezos is an inspiring teacher and extraordinary thinker. There are few CEOs that can go from founding a company to leading the same billion dollar company 10 years later. The skills needed to accomplish what Bezos has done include a learned or inherent talent for taking action, building and improving. His strategy is methodical without being deliberate. Bezos doesn't hesitate to make decisions, using large servings of rational thought, and side orders of learning-by-doing.

  For example, at the Churchill Club, Bezos explained that he often gets the question: "What will be different 10 years from now?" In Bezos' reflective fashion, he answers, "I think the more helpful question is what will be the same 10 years from now?" His logic? You can build a lasting company on things that will stay the same. It's harder to build a durable company based on predictions of things that may change. And he goes on to deliver the answer: "In the case of Amazon, in 10 years our customers will still want the same three fundamental things: convenience, selection, and low prices."

• In search of mediocrity: Why HP needs to return to the 'HP Way' 3 years, 1 month ago
  
  So Hewlett-Packard Co. finally announced its new CEO this week: Mark Hurd, the CEO of NCR. A number of names had been bandied around in the media: Vyomesh Joshi, head of HPs printing and imaging business, Quantum CEO Rick

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  Melanie Hollands

  Belluzzo, MCIC boss (and former Compaq CEO) Mike Capellas, and Motorola's Ed Zander.

  Hurd is a competent manager with solid execution skills -- something HP sorely needs to improve, particularly in its enterprise business. He also has relevant management experience, since HP, like NCR, is a diversified "multi-product" global technology company.

  However, Hewlett-Packard needs to do a lot, both strategically and tactically, to move from being a mediocre company to an industry leader. (Recall Chairman Patricia Dunn's comments at the time Carly Fiorina was fired, which implied HPs challenges were more about execution than strategy.) The company is spread too thin -- trying to be all things to all people -- and competing in too many diverse segments without effectively leveraging potential synergies.

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