The federal judge who’s been minding Novell’s billion-dollar WordPerfect antitrust suit threw out its remaining claims Monday theoretically bringing the generation-old dispute dating to Windows 95 and the reign of Bill Gates to an end.
Novell however says it’s going to appeal the bench ruling granting Microsoft’s motion to dismiss as a matter of law.
An eight-week trial in December ended in a hung jury of 11 to one in favor of Novell.
Judge Frederick Motz said in his decision that “Although Novell presented evidence from which a jury could have found that Microsoft engaged in aggressive conduct, perhaps to monopolize or attempt to monopolize the applications market, it did not present evidence sufficient for a jury to find that Microsoft committed any acts that violated Section 2 [of the Sherman Antitrust Act] in maintaining its monopoly in the operating systems market.”
Microsoft Posts Its Very First Losing Quarter
Microsoft has never reported a loss in its 26 years as a public company until Thursday when a gargantuan $6.19 billion write-down on aQuantative, the online ad agency it acquired in 2007 for $6.3 billion to compete against Google, plus $540 million in deferred revenue on Windows 8 nominally caused it to lose money.
It lost $492 million or six cents a share on revenues up 4% to $18.06 billion. It made $5.87 billion, or 69 cents a share last year. Excluding the adjustment Microsoft would have made 73 cents a share.
Broadcom Corporation Named “Gold Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Broadcom Corporation, a global innovation leader in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA
Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM), a FORTUNE 500® company, is a global leader and innovator in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom® products seamlessly deliver voice, video, data and multimedia connectivity in the home, office and mobile environments. With the industry’s broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art system-on-a-chip and embedded software solutions, Broadcom is changing the world by connecting everything®.
Cloud Computing: Aryaka Closes $25 Million C Round
Aryaka, the cloud-based WAN Optimization-as-a-Service start-up, has secured a $25 million C round.
The financing was led by InterWest Partners with Sumitomo and Presidio Ventures kicking in along with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures.
It makes $54 million altogether.
The new money is earmarked for market penetration and global reach.
Aryaka figures it’s redefining the multibillion-dollar global WAN optimization market and changing the way enterprise consumes the technology. The company claims 500 customer sites on six continents and a billion connections for a hundred thousand business users including Aruba and Radware.
Cloud Computing: Workday Reportedly Files IPO Papers on the QT
Workday, the promising cloud-based HR and financial management start-up founded by the founder and former chief strategist of PeopleSoft David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, has reportedly filed its S-1 paper to go public under a new law that will let it keep its financials under wraps until 21 days before its investor-fanning roadshow.
It’s IPO has been highly anticipated and could be glorious. Reuters, which broke the story, figures it could be the “largest market debut” since Facebook’s botched IPO in May.
Workday, which is subscription-based, is a lot more stable than Facebook.
The law it’s reportedly using is the so-called JOBS Act, short for the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, intended to help companies with less than a billion dollars in revenues get out.
How Important is English to Global IT?
The Philippines is the world’s most highly rated user of business English, surpassing even the UK, North America, and ANZAC, according to a report from a company called Global English. The firm’s Business English Index (BEI), recently updated for 2012, rates the competence of business English within more than 70 countries worldwide. Norway finished in second place.
How important is the English language in international business? How much stuff is really lost in translation? To what degree is highly competent English a bonus to a country that is touting its skills in computer languages such as Java, the C’s, The Three P’s, etc.?
My experience has been that good English communication keeps things moving. Less good communication – and I freely admit that my Mandarin, Hindi, and everything else but English is terrible – slows things down. It’s not a matter of getting things wrong when communications are difficult, it’s a matter of wasting time.
Armed with this new database, I integrated some of the BEI’s numbers into my ongoing research about ICT dynamism on a nation-by-nation basis.
I’ve integrated a number of factors – broadband quality and access, cost of labor, income disparity, corruption, overall economic development – to create an amalgamation that highlights countries the most dynamic countries, ie, the ones doing with the most that they have.
For now, I’m focusing on a custom report for Asia, and have integrated the BEI into the amalgam. In doing so, the Philippines’ capability vaults it over all other countries in the region, including China, India, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
This occurs over a broad range of weighting algorithms, but even weighting the BEI lightly pushes the Philippines to the top of the heap. China’s strong performance in other categories, combined with its middling English skills, puts it in second place in this research. Australia finished third.
The BEI must be stirring some dust up in native-English countries; how can the Philippines do better than Australia, for example? I attribute it to a sensibility in the Philippines, in which English is not taken for granted but studied seriously by those who wish to get and maintain good jobs.
In the Philippines, if you’re without good English, your potential pathways to success are very, very limited. Perhaps this is less true in Australia, the US, and other presumed English-first countries these days.
Tweet me if you want to know more about what I’m doing. It’s fascinating stuff.
Cloud Computing Strategies to Fast Track Revenue Generation
Today’s information technology era is driven by software providers of all shapes and sizes. On the one hand we have big or very big providers who have established themselves through very sophisticated business models and ecosystem channels they have invested in for a long time. Tried and tested business processes enable them to stay ahead of the curve when responding to new customer demands – either through large investments in new innovations or because of the market reach they have established over time.
On the other hand, there are several small and medium independent software vendors (ISV) who are focusing on solving very specific problems or addressing niche segments differently. While these small and medium ISVs have created their own space, they are constantly challenged to keep building newer products or adding new features to stay in the game. Another challenge they face is to maintain their market position with changing tastes and a perpetually evolving genre of customers. Customer ‘stickiness’ is never guaranteed and this poses a great threat to an ISV’s revenue cycles in spite of good engineering capabilities.
Database in the Cloud
“We have launched our Postgres Plus Cloud Database, which is a Database as a Service, fully featured, elastic, highly available, auto scaling, and you can choose your database,” said Karen Padir, EVP of Products & Engineering at EnterpriseDB, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Expo: Reaching China with Your Website & Cloud Application
Reaching customers and employees with cloud applications when they are located in emerging markets (such as Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and China) poses a major challenge. This is especially true for China, which has not only the largest Internet user base (twice that of the US and growing fast) but a lack of modern Internet infrastructure as well as licensing and regulatory hurdles, including the “Great Firewall.”
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jerry Miller, Vice President of Technology at CDNetworks, will discuss the various challenges to serving this market and how a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can help you not only deliver a fast download of your website and web applications even in China, but can also help you manage content and regulatory issues. You will hear how a major European-based financial trading platform saved millions of dollars a day in lost revenue by eliminating dropped trades caused by latency in China. You will also hear how a major UK-based luxury retail platform is now reaching China’s growing luxury market with fast page loads and ecommerce transactions. In addition, hear how Silicon Valley based SEMI is serving 26 websites in China and other emerging markets with 100% uptime and superfast load times. This session will be full of benchmarks, case studies, examples, and charts.
Dell to Fund Storage Start-Ups
Dell has set up a $60 million Fluid Data Storage Fund to back early-stage storage start-ups, a combination of build and buy. Jim Lussier, managing director of Dell’s venture capital business, says it is looking for mid-level widgetry hoping to find the “next big thing.” Apparently that means cloud storage, memory-based storage and next-generation-storage architectures.
It figures to put a modest $3 million-$5 million per round in five to 10 promising start-ups in exchange for equity and access to the IP.
Of course they’d have to play to Dell architecture.
Dell says it’s “looking to change the economics of the storage industry by doing two things – bringing high-end enterprise features to the broad mid-market and solving enterprise problems at a midrange price point.”