IBM's Lotus Symphony Continues ODF Push, Nov 16, 2007

IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its free Lotus Symphony productivity applications suite and says a final version will ship next year designed to drive adoption of open file formats.

Two months after launching the first beta of Lotus Symphony, its free OpenOffice.org-based desktop office suite, IBM today unveiled the second beta of the suite with a raft of improvements and bug fixes.

SCO is hoping to sell its UnixWare line of business software and some of its mobile technology to investment group York Capital Management for $36 million.

IBM has added a mainframe gas gauge to more than 1,000 z9s deployed since May 11 to monitor energy usage and cooling statistics.

IBM is tackling Microsoft on several fronts, including office productivity, email clients and groupware.

IBM Corp.'s decision to offer a Linux-only mainframe -- at 90% less than the cost of its flagship box has had the intended effect, research now shows.

IBM added a delicious twist on its new commitment to help OpenOffice.org battle Microsoft Office by donating code that was originally derived in part from a Microsoft-developed technology.

Long-time rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems plan to cooperate on some server technologies, a move that could put pressure on Hewlett-Packard.

An interview with IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards about their Open Source Strategy, the recent pledge of its patents for more than 150 open software standards, his take on the ODF vs. XML issue, and much more in The LXer Interview of Bob Sutor.

Novell is going to push and support the freebie version of IBM's WebSphere Application Server, derived from IBM's acquisition of GlueCode in 2005, as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server under a new deal between the pair.

IBM today will announce it is consolidating nearly 4,000 small computer servers in six locations onto about 30 refrigerator-sized mainframes running Linux saving $250 million in the process.

IBM still operates the fastest supercomputer in the industry, but rival HP has more of them in operation, according to a closely watched global survey.

In an interview earlier this week, [Bob] Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, talked about ODF and Microsoft Corp.'s rival Office Open XML document standard.

Red Hat Inc. and IBM formed a partnership to develop, sell and support Red Hat's Linux software for IBM's mainframe computers, people familiar with the arrangement said on Tuesday.

Major information technology firms, including Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. and NEC Corp., will set up a consortium to sell servers and systems running the Linux operating system in Japan, a financial daily said on Thursday.

In a bid to help customers improve efficiency, IBM and Red Hat have declared that developers at the companies' Linux labs have joined forces to integrate new technologies in the Linux kernel.

IBM VP Scott Handy describes strategy and priority for Linux and open-source initiatives.

Australia's future economic prosperity will depend on it embracing the principles of community-driven technologies such as Linux and Second Life, according to Glen Boreham.

Initially targeted at the businesses in the life sciences, computer-aided engineering and finance sectors, IBM will offer preconfigured "snap-together" cluster systems for customers using the company's computers and storage devices.

IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle's recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said Friday.

IBM says the 1.6 million stand-alone Linux servers running in enterprise data centers is too many. It's not Linux IBM has a thing against; it's the physical server hardware running the operating system.

IBM has released its new Open Client Solution for business, a package of office software applications that supports several operating systems, including Linux and Windows. In particular, the Linux business desktop runs on both Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Workstation and Novell's SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop).

IBM is continuing its march towards heterogeneous software deployments across Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

... the new software makes it feasible for big businesses to offer their employees a choice of running Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh software on desktop PCs, using the same underlying software code.

IBM Corp. Monday introduced new services, dubbed Open Client, designed to make it easier for customers to run its Lotus collaboration software on a mixture of Windows and Linux desktop operating systems.

Fresh light on mainframe total cost of ownership reveals Big Blue's big iron is cheaper than a roomful of servers.

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