IBM throws weight behind OpenOffice.org project
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(InfoWorld) - After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft’s Office software.
IBM has been using code from the project in its development of productivity applications it included in Lotus 8, the latest version of its collaboration suite, but until now had not been an official member of the community, said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for the Lotus division at IBM. The company now will contribute its own code to the project and be more visible about its work to integrate OpenOffice.org into Lotus, he said.
Heintzman acknowledged that the International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO’s) recent vote to reject Microsoft’s Open XML file format as a technology standard was one reason IBM decided to join the effort. OpenOffice.org uses ODF (Open Document Format), a rival file format to Open XML that is already an ISO technology standard. IBM is one of the companies pushing for the use of ODF in companies and government organizations that are creating mandates to only use technology based on open standards in their IT architectures.
“They are certainly related,” he said of the ISO vote and IBM’s decision to join OpenOffice.org. “We think that it’s now time to make sure there is a public code base that implements this spec so we can attract a critical mass to build these new value propositions.”
Sun founded OpenOffice.org and offers its own commercial implementation of the suite, called StarOffice. The company, a long-time IBM competitor in the hardware and software markets, also has been the primary contributor to the code, one of the reasons IBM balked for so long before joining the group.
“[The community] has had some challenges in recruiting an awful lot of big names to support the activity, but [now] we think there are some that can provide an example to us all to provide a vibrant place to add value,” Heintzman said. “We hope that our voice at the table will help us evolve the community.”
Intellectual-property attorney and well-known ODF supporter Andrew Updegrove noted that the ISO’s decision and recent interest in StarOffice by Google may have been enough to inspire IBM to set aside any competitive differences with Sun and work with them to promote OpenOffice.org as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Momentum from the ISO’s rejection of Open XML is a prime opportunity for OpenOffice.org to become a real alternative to Office, he said.
“Most likely, the setback for [Open XML] … and Google’s announcement a month ago that it would include StarOffice 8 in its free Google Pack download figure into IBM’s decision,” Updegrove wrote in an e-mail to the mailing list for his Standards Blog. “Those events help provide the type of public momentum that … offer the prospect for the type of greater rewards that help displace other considerations and historical impediments. Whatever the reasons may have been that have kept Sun and IBM from working together to support OpenOffice over the past four years more fully, the reality is that a chance to break an industry monopoly that generates $15 billion in revenues a year comes only once in a generation — when it comes at all.”
In a press statement, Sun welcomed IBM’s addition to the group, which claims it has had 100 million downloads of its software since it launched in 2000.
Web-hosted office suites are here to stay
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(InfoWorld) - Adison & Partners is a small yet emblematic part of a major shift in how office software is sold and used.
No, Adison & Partners isn’t a Web 2.0 Silicon Valley startup. It’s an eight-person executive recruitment company in New Jersey. Its founder and managing partner Jim DiPietropolo doesn’t know what a “wiki” is.
This he knows: choosing a Web-hosted suite of communication and collaboration applications has greatly benefitted his business.
Like Adison & Partners, thousands of organizations, large and small, are researching and implementing hosted office suites as alternatives to pricier, traditional options, like Microsoft Office, designed to live in PC hard drives.
Sure, IT buyers, whether chief information officers at large companies, small-business owners, or self-employed individuals, must study the options carefully and ask hard questions about these software-as-a-service (SaaS), on-demand suites.
But while “fools rush in” mistakes are bad, an even worse decision regarding the SaaS model is ignoring it. That’s particularly true for large organizations.
“Now is the time to definitely have advanced technology folks and strategy people, the ones who look a year or two ahead, to look at this stuff and stay abreast of it, even if the time isn’t yet right to purchase,” says Burton Group analyst Guy Creese. “A huge mistake would be to look at the offerings today, say they’re immature and then not pay any attention.”
The offerings are uneven, with some suites strong in webmail, while others focus on productivity applications like word processing and spreadsheets. Many key architecture, business, and technology questions await answers.
But the SaaS model for these office suites is here to stay. Many big vendors are either openly embracing or likely to enter this market.
Google is committed with its Google Apps suite, as is Cisco Systems with the WebEx WebOffice product. Salesforce.com certainly could stake out a strong position quickly, applying its experience in the CRM (customer relationship management) SaaS market. Several smaller vendors have strong offerings, including Zoho and Zimbra.
Then there is Microsoft, whose inability or unwillingness to come out with a hosted suite comparable to Google Apps many find befuddling. Microsoft Office is the dominant productivity suite in the packaged software.
That may be the problem. Many wonder if Microsoft is struggling with how to develop a hosted version of Office without cannibalizing the suite’s packaged software business.
“A challenge for Microsoft is to figure out how to get people to buy the next version of Office if there is also an on-demand version,” says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research.
Another reason for Microsoft’s perceived deer-in-the-headlights reaction: “They’re not innovating the way they were 10 years ago,” Wettemann says.
However, it’s widely assumed Microsoft will respond at some point and have a significant effect on the market.
“I think Microsoft needs to worry about it now because it takes a while to get it right,” Creese says. “In hosted office suites, it’s going to take a while for companies to figure out how they want the thing to work.”
In its defense, Microsoft officials have said that Office has steadily gained hosted service components for years, and that combining core PC software with SAAS capabilities is the right approach.
With Office Live, Microsoft offers a set of hosted services for small businesses, like Web site creation and hosting, while Office Online offers Office online resources.
Last week, Microsoft announced a unified installer to help users download updates for its family of Windows Live hosted services. Yet, those who have been waiting for Microsoft to make a power move in the hosted office space found the announcement underwhelming and dismissed it as cosmetic.
While Microsoft mulls its move, rivals like Google continue boosting their offerings.
This week, Google and Capgemini announced that the large IT services provider has become a partner for the workplace version of Google Apps. Capgemini now provides training, support, integration, and other services to large organizations that implement Google Apps Premier.
“I’d expect more and more IT services companies will offer that kind of help desk and support around the Google Apps Premier environment,” Wettemann says.
While many organizations ponder SaaS productivity suites, thousands of others have already implemented them, lured by their benefits.
For Adison & Partners’s DiPietropolo, the discovery of a SaaS office suite followed a disaster.
Three months after launching his company, his laptop’s hard drive, loaded with critical documents, imploded. Recovering the data cost DiPietropolo dearly. He resolved to prevent a similar disaster.
He knew larger companies had server-based back-up systems managed by IT professionals. He assumed the cost of a modest set up would break his budget.
Then the entrepreneur found WebEx’s WebOffice, a Web-hosted office suite which, for a monthly fee he finds affordable, gave him what he was looking for.
“It was a revelation to me that a small business owner could afford something like this,” he says.
The six employees in New Jersey — two others work in Albany, New York — have been office-less and working from home for the past several months, because the completion of Adison & Partners’ new digs is delayed.
Having documents and calendars stored centrally in WebOffice servers “ties everyone together,” says DiPietropolo, who founded the company about two and a half years ago.
WebOffice also lets the staff nimbly respond to client requests from anywhere, by tapping remotely into databases and getting information on the fly.
“From a business development standpoint, this has been a differentiator for us,” he says. “This ability to instantaneously respond [to queries] really impresses clients.”
Because the suite is hosted by WebEx, he doesn’t have to worry about tuning its hardware and upgrading its software.
Like DiPietropolo, many IT buyers find that hosted suites let them save on hardware and software installation and maintenance, while making it easy for employees to share and collaborate on documents, for a fraction of the cost it would take to implement an in-house messaging and collaboration system such as Microsoft’s Exchange and Sharepoint or IBM’s Lotus Domino/Notes.
Disadvantages include security concerns over hosting sensitive data with a third party beyond the corporate firewall, as well as downtime incidents that leave the organization without access to the hosted applications.
Upon close inspection, existing SaaS suites reveal themselves as strong in certain areas and less so in others. In a recently published and widely discussed 55-page report, Creese took a microscope to Google Apps Premier, dissecting its pros and cons in detail.
For example, Creese found the suite lacking in archiving features, such as records management and electronic discovery, as well as in analytics capabilities, such as analysis of content creation patterns.
Google responded with a statement saying that the suite gives organizations “a new set of choices, many of which will complement and extend the power of the desktop, enhance group productivity and improve collaboration.”
Most analysts, users and vendors generally agree that hosted suites and packaged software suites, each with its advantages, work best in tandem, complementing each other.
“We’ll see more and more organizations that look to a tiered strategy for the way they deliver desktop applications. So rather than have a standard desktop, I may give Office to the folks in finance who really need Excel, while the folks in marketing may be fine within the Google environment,” Wettemann says.
At SF Bay Pediatrics in San Francisco, employees use Microsoft Office in conjunction with the Google Apps word processor and spreadsheet applications, says CIO Andrew Johnson.
Meanwhile the Gmail Webmail component of Google Apps has proven a major improvement over the previous situation in which individual employees used a variety of personal accounts, Johnson says. The option of bringing in an Exchange server for e-mail would have been too expensive, he says.
Peter Gilbert, an independent IT consultant in New York whose one-man company is called PG Systems, swears by Zimbra’s suite. Previously for e-mail he used a shared hosted Exchange server. But the hosted Zimbra suite gives him much more, like a hosted document repository and a centralized contacts manager.
“I see Zimbra’s collaboration suite as a solid backbone for my business,” he says.
AT&T expands services in Middle East
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(InfoWorld) - AT&T is pumping up its services in the Middle East by expanding its network in the region and building up its local presence there, the company announced Monday.
In addition, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson has selected AT&T to provide an advanced VPN (virtual private network) across the Middle East, AT&T said.
An AT&T network node being deployed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in cooperation with Saudi Telecommunications and NavLink is expected to be operational by the end of the year, AT&T said. AT&T owns a minority stake of NavLink.
Data infrastructure from AT&T will allow AT&T and NavLink customers to directly connect to Saudi Telecommunications’ nationwide MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) network, which is the largest in the Middle East.
AT&T will also deploy a new global network node in Kuwait, with cooperation from QualityNet, a local provider of data networking services. The companies will work with NavLink to activate MPLS node during 2008, AT&T said.
QualityNet will host the global network node and allow AT&T to offer VPN services to Kuwaiti customers seeking global connectivity and to AT&T’s existing multinational customers seeking to expand in the Middle East.
AT&T currently has network facilities operating in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. These expansion are part of AT&T’s $750 million global investment program announced earlier this year.
In the coming months, AT&T plans to hire more sales and support employees in Dubai, it said.
In the Ericsson deal, worth $6 million, AT&T will provide VPN services to support Ericsson’s growing business activities in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. The agreement builds on a relationship between the two companies in which AT&T provides network services to Ericsson’s business in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.
The key requirements for the deal included a reliable network, a comprehensive service level agreement and speedy implementation, Carl-Magnus Månsson, chief information officer of Ericsson, said in a statement.
Intel increases revenue outlook on rising chip demand
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(InfoWorld) - Citing surprisingly high demand for its processors, Intel on Monday upgraded its third-quarter revenue forecast to a range of $9.4 billion to $9.8 billion from the company’s previous estimate of $9 billion to $9.6 billion.
Both ranges are far above Intel’s results in the third quarter of 2006, when the company collected $8.7 billion in revenue, a 12 percent drop from the same quarter the previous year. Intel’s sagging performance in 2006 led to a corporate restructuring plan including thousands of layoffs and the sale of several divisions.
The company has posted much stronger results in 2007, despite a lingering price war with rival Advanced Micro Devices. In July, Intel beat Wall Street estimates with second-quarter revenue of $8.7 billion, with profit up 44 percent over the same period of last year.
Intel’s financials forecast upgrade came the same day that AMD launched its Barcelona quad-core Opteron server chip, which is expected to be a strong competitor to Intel’s current server chips.
However, Intel said its new forecast is generated by demand throughout its business units, including notebook and desktop chips as well as server processors.
“We’re seeing strength in revenue across the board,” said Intel spokesman Tom Beermann. The company will give more detailed results when it reports its third-quarter earnings on Oct. 16.
Also on Monday, Intel trimmed another business division, agreeing to sell certain assets of its modular communications platforms business, which makes telecommunications boards, to RadiSys for $31.75 million. The parts of the division being sold to RadiSys make ATCA computing and packet processing blades, ATCA chassis, AMC modules, and cPCI blades and chassis.
The deal with RadiSys did not contribute to Intel’s revised revenue forecast today, Beermann said. Intel expects “a significant number” of employees to accept new job offers and move to RadiSys, but has not estimated the number. They will include workers in the engineering, product testing/validation, operations and marketing departments. RadiSys makes ATCA platforms and other products for telecommunication equipment manufacturers. The deal is expected to close in September.
Vodafone’s new handset lineup to include iPhone rival
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(InfoWorld) - Vodafone Group plans to launch several phones for holiday shoppers in Europe, including a high-end, touch-screen rival to Apple’s iPhone.
The British mobile phone operator has an exclusive agreement to offer the F700 smartphone from Samsung Electronics, said Jens Schulte-Bokum, head of the global terminal division at Vodafone.
The F700 is based on proprietary technology developed by Samsung. The phone, which Vodafone plans to customize and co-brand, has been referred to by industry pundits as an “iPhone killer.”
The F700 has touch-screen capabilities and plays audio and video files. But unlike the iPhone, the device has a pull-down QWERTY keyboard and support for 3G (third-generation) and HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which has speeds theoretically as high as 7.2Mbps.
Schulte-Bokum declined to comment on whether Vodafone has plans to offer the iPhone, which Apple expects to launch in Europe in the coming weeks, although he did comment on its lack of 3G capability. “We like the iPhone. We think it’s a unique user experience and we applaud Apple for what they’re doing in the industry as a new starter,” he said. “But we regret that the iPhone, initially, won’t support 3G, which we believe is necessary to deliver a compelling music and Internet experience.”
Of the more than 25 new handsets, including the F700, that Vodafone will launch ahead of the important holiday shopping season, 13 will support HSDPA. All of the planned new handsets will be 3G-enabled.
No pricing information was available. Phones will be available beginning later this month, but a schedule of exactly which phones will be released and when was not provided.
Vodafone will introduce two handsets using the Windows Mobile operating system: the Vodafone-branded 920, which is manufactured by Taiwan’s High Tech Computer (HTC); and the co-branded i620v from Samsung.
In addition to Windows Mobile phones, the South Korean manufacturer will also deliver two new handsets based on the Series 60 platform from Nokia.
The Vodafone manager also declined to comment on whether Vodafone, which had an exclusive agreement to launch Palm’s Treo smartphone in Europe, would offer a new version of the phone, to be announced on Wednesday.
“We are still in discussions with Palm to refresh that lineup,” Schulte-Bokum said.
Palm also declined to comment.
Also missing from the pre-holiday product launch are handsets based on the Linux operating system. “We expect to offer Linux-based phones, but not until spring or early summer of 2008,” Schulte-Bokum said, adding that the company is a founding member of the LiMo initiative, which aims to push the standardization and adoption of the open-source operating system on mobile phones.
In addition to the new handsets, Vodafone also plans to offer MusicStation, the music download service provided by Omnifone Ltd. Initially available only in the U.K., MusicStation will offer customers unlimited music downloads of more than 1 million titles directly to the internal memory or storage cards on their handsets for £1.99 ($4.03 ) per week, said Tim Yates, chief marketing officer of Vodafone UK.
To keep prices low, Vodafone has chosen to limit service and not allow users to copy downloaded tunes to other devices, such as PCs, according to Al Russel, head of content services at Vodafone UK. Vodafone plans a premium service that, for an additional fee, will allow users to synchronize the content on their handsets with their PCs, he said.
Researchers build ‘desktop supercomputer’
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(InfoWorld) - What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program?
That’s not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a “desktop supercomputer” that can do just that.
The new computer is at least three years from reaching commercial markets, but it could have a big effect in industries that process large loads of data. They include the pharmaceutical, aerospace, military and entertainment industries, for applications such as drug modeling, computer-aided design, and digital content creation.
The Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer combines the decades-old philosophy of using parallel computing algorithms with the huge number of transistors in modern processors.
The machine uses three field-programmable gate array chips from Xilinx to represent a network of 64 ARM processors that control dozens of threads of simultaneous computation, says Uzi Vishkin, a professor at the A. James Clark School of Engineering who built the machine with his graduate students.
The team is now trying to shrink the prototype, a license-plate-size board running at 75 MHz, down to a fingernail-size version running between 1GHz and 2GHz.
Team members took the first step toward that goal this summer by commissioning IBM to manufacture a CMOS silicon application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with an on-chip data interconnect network. The venture is funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Vishkin says.
A kid could do it
Even if they succeed in building a smaller version of the prototype, the researchers will face the challenge of teaching programmers how to write software for a multithreaded system.
Many commercial software companies are already puzzling over a similar problem today as they try to adapt to the latest dual- and quad-core processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
However, Vishkin says his system will be easier to program than applications for commercial multicore chips because the XMT algorithms appear to the operating system to be a single thread. “If you build it in a way that people cannot program it, it remains in the ivory tower of theory,” he says.
To prove his point, before the end of this year, Vishkin is planning to teach a class of high school students how to program the XMT using a version of the C programming language. He will teach college students to program the prototype in the first quarter of 2008.
User wish list
A desktop supercomputer would be a godsend for students and artists who rely on computers to process huge amounts of data in the creation of high-resolution digital pictures and movies, says Jon Stiles, director of campus technology at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver.
“That would absolutely revolutionize our animation department,” Stiles says, adding that currently, students at the college often have to wait for nine or 10 hours while their PCs process the data in a new design.
“We’re constantly looking for ways to eliminate bottlenecks in production,” he says.
Stiles warns, however, that a parallel supercomputer would have to meet three conditions before the college could use it. It would have to offer vast data storage, be capable of running standard commercial software such as Adobe Systems’ Creative Suite 3 and consume the same amount of energy as current computers.
If those conditions were met, Stiles says, “my campus IT support manager would do back flips.”
Energy use shouldn’t be a problem, says Vishkin. “Based on back-of-the-envelope calculations, we believe that each cluster we have will consume not much more power than a standard core,” he says. “So we will be competitive on power draw with the same generation of multicore chips.”
Skype warns users of Windows worm
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(InfoWorld) - Skype users are under attack from a new worm that spreads through the peer-to-peer Internet phone application’s chat feature.
The attack begins when a user receives an instant message containing a link from someone in their contact list or an unknown Skype user, said Villu Arak, a Skype spokesman based in Tallinn, Estonia.
There are several versions of the chat messages, which are “cleverly written” to fool users, Arak wrote on the Skype heartbeat blog. The link appears to contain a JPEG photo file, but if clicked causes the Windows run/save dialog box to appear, which asks whether the user wants to save or run a “.scr” file.
The file is malicious software that can then access a user’s PC via Skype’s API (application programming interface). The malicious file has been named W32/Ramex.A.
“Users whose computers are infected with this virus will send a chat message to other Skype users asking them to click on a web link that can infect” their computers, Arak wrote.
To avoid trouble, users should not download the file. At least two security vendors, F-Secure and Kaspersky Lab, have updated their software to detect the worm, Arak wrote.
Instant message programs are another way hackers can try to gain control over PCs. Access to one person’s instant messenger or e-mail account can mean contact details for many others, allowing hackers to use malicious e-mails or instant messages to lure victims into downloading malicious software.
Security researcher intercepts embassy passwords from Tor
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(InfoWorld) - A security researcher who collected thousands of sensitive e-mails and passwords from the embassies of countries such as Russia and India blamed systems administrators on Monday for not using encryption to shield their traffic from snooping.
Dan Egerstad, a 21-year-old security researcher, revealed on Monday he was able to capture the information by setting up his own node in a peer-to-peer network used by the embassies to make their Internet traffic anonymous.
The embassies relied on a volunteer network of servers using software called Tor (The Onion Router) to hide their Internet traffic and make it anonymous. Traffic sent through a Tor node is transmitted through a randomly selected series of other Tor nodes before exiting the network for its intended destination, so as to disguise the source and destination of the traffic.
But although traffic between nodes in a Tor network is encrypted by default, traffic entering and exiting the system is not, so anyone wanting to hide not only who are they are communicating with, but what they are saying, must apply an extra layer of encryption themselves. Embassies and companies neglected to do this, which left their information open for Egerstad to collect.
Anyone can run a Tor server and add it to the network. Egerstad, who runs his own consulting company in Malmo, Sweden, did just that as part of his security research, and monitored the traffic exiting the Tor network through it.
To his surprise, he found that more than 99 percent of the traffic — including requests for Web sites, instant messaging traffic, and e-mails — were transmitted unencrypted.
“By accident, I saw one really sensitive e-mail,” Egerstad said in a telephone interview. “I thought ‘What is that doing there?”"
Using specially designed software to search that traffic for keywords, Egerstad was soon collecting usernames, passwords, and e-mail sent by embassies around the world, as well as large companies.
Late last month, Egerstad published the usernames and passwords for around 100 embassies.
Egerstad said the process of snooping on the traffic is trivial. The problem is not with Tor, which still works as intended, but with users’ expectations: the Tor system is designed to merely anonymize Internet traffic and does not perform end-to-end encryption.
“If they are using encryption — no problem, it doesn’t matter,” Egerstad said.
Organizations running other Tor nodes could also be snooping on traffic exiting the network there, Egerstad warned.
For example, several Tor nodes in the Washington, D.C., area can handle up to 10TB of data a month, a flow of data that would cost at least $5,000 a month to run, and is likely way out the range of volunteers who run a node on their own money, Egerstad said.
“Who would pay for that?” Egerstad said.
Egerstad said he read a lot of the e-mail he collected but has since wiped the hard drives and deleted the information. After he posted the usernames and passwords to his Web site, he said he received an e-mail from the U.S. company hosting the site informing him that it would be shut down. He has since created a new site.
Egerstad said what he did is not illegal, as the e-mail and passwords he collected were contained on his own computer. He said he did not use the usernames and passwords to log into any accounts, although one journalist in India did.
The point of his work is to raise awareness of security concerns, he said: “Go ahead and use Tor, but you better be sure you have good encryption.”
Apple attempts to block free iPhone ringtones with iTunes update
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(InfoWorld) - Apple has released an update to iTunes that blocks users from creating free custom ringtones and then syncing them to an iPhone. Despite Apple’s best efforts to thwart users, a workaround has already been found and posted to the Internet.
A method of using iTunes to create ringtones for the iPhone using songs not purchased from the iTunes Store was first posted by Macrumors.com on Friday. Users confirmed after installing iTunes 7.4.1 last night that the method no longer worked.
However, an Engadget post on Saturday details a workaround for the update, again allowing the free ringtones to be synced to the iPhone.
When Apple first announced the ability for users to create custom ringtones earlier this week, it was only meant for songs purchased from the iTunes Store. Users would have to pay an additional 99 cents for the ringtone.
Third-party applications like Ambrosia Software’s iToner have been updated to work with iTunes 7.4.1 and is available from the company’s Web site.
Playlist is an InfoWorld affiliate.
Intel breaks ground on $2.5 billion chip plant in China
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(InfoWorld) - Intel broke ground on a new $2.5 billion chip plant in the northeast China city of Dalian on Saturday, with production expected to begin in 2010.
The chip plant, called Fab 68, will make chipsets, not microprocessors, when it begins production. It will use 90-nanometer process technology, not the more advanced 45nm or 65nm processes used elsewhere.
Intel’s investment in Dalian, a port city that hosted the latest session of the World Economic Forum last week, is one of the largest by a foreign corporation in northeastern China, an area that has been hit particularly hard by a transition away from heavy industry in China’s economy.
Dalian itself has fared somewhat better than neighboring inland cities. The city is a technology hub, hosting some of the country’s top software outsourcing firms.