Dell buys family-owned MessageOne for SaaS
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Part of Dell Computer's transition strategy is to no longer focus all its interests on one side of the technology market exclusively. That was made clearer today with another acquisition of a service-oriented software provider.
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The decision by Google to purchase the messaging security firm Postini for $625 million suggests an acknowledgment by the Mountain View-based Web giant that, before it can fully compete with Microsoft in the office suite market, it needs to beef up its security technology.
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With partnerships like this, who needs competition? Analysis On Monday, Dell said it will acquire iSCSI storage vendor EqualLogic for $1.4bn. That's no small chunk of change even for a company with Dell's deep pockets. And the price is even more significant when you consider Dell's historic aversions to meaty acquisitions.â¦
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This year has been a time of realignment and redefinition as Apple launched its second zeitgeist-defining product of the new century, Dell and Intel battled to regain their former dominance, the software sector consolidated, Google rallied industry heavyweights around a common mobile device platform, and major vendors scrambled to embrace social networking. These, not necessarily in order of importance, are the IDG News Service picks for the top 10 stories of the year:Software consolidation: The big fish get biggerWhile globalization has fueled IT mergers and acquisitions for several years, consolidation in 2007 fundamentally reshaped the software industry. Facing saturated markets and nimble, innovative rivals, SAP, IBM and Oracle have snapped up competitors and partners in order to expand customer lists and acquire expertise and technology in hot areas like business intelligence and software as a service. Some of the bigger deals this year included:&#160;SAP&#39;s $6.8 billion acquisition of Business Objects,&#160;IBM&#39;s $5 billion deal for Cognos, and&#160;Oracle&#39;s $3 billion buyout of Hyperion. As usual,&#160;Oracle provided the most drama with a $6.7 billion offer for BEA, which was successfully rebuffed -- at least, for now. While innovative entrepreneurs are bound to continue bringing startups to market, it&#39;s getting harder for medium-size vendors to refuse deals with the giants.Dell reinvents itselfFor years, Dell remained the world&#39;s number-one vendor in the cutthroat PC business by exercising unmatched control over logistics and sticking to its direct-sales model. But by 2006,&#160;HP unseated Dell as global PC leader. Dell seemed to lose its way as rivals adopted better supply-chain management techniques, and inquiries into accounting practices forced the company to delay earnings reports. In January, founder&#160;Michael Dell took back the CEO reins&#160;and the company expanded offerings for the enterprise, increased services for medium-size businesses, and departed from its traditional business model to start selling products in stores. Dell also plans to expand in growth markets globally. Early results are promising: Dell had record revenue growth for the third quarter, fueled by an increase in worldwide notebook sales.The iPhone: Apple redefines a market, againSome companies reinvent themselves. Apple, under the guidance of the mercurial Steve Jobs, reinvents markets. After redefining IT in the 1970s with the Apple II and then pushing the envelope in personal computing with the Mac in the 1980s, Apple stalled when its business model ended up giving the company a loyal -- but tiny -- user base. But the company started to ride high in 2001 after launching the iPod, and in 2006 breathed new life into the Mac by moving to Intel-architecture chips. Before&#160;the iPhone, there were many multifunction phones. But amid a June launch that had people lined up at stores from Tokyo to San Francisco, Apple proved its design mojo still works. The iPhone combination of cool design, phone functions, Internet connectivity, and multimedia features has raised the bar for any manufacturer of connected handheld devices. Apple&#39;s revenue and share price have never looked better.The rise of the botnets: Software as a service ... for criminalsWhat do U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul, the &quot;Storm Worm,&quot; e-card invitations, and the country of Estonia have in common? They&#39;ve all been associated with botnets -- groups of compromised computers, often numbering thousands or tens of thousands, that are remotely controlled by criminals. The scammers use the so-called &quot;zombie machines&quot; to pitch hot stocks or male-enhancement products, or simply to do damage, as when&#160;Estonian government Web sites were crippled in April. Botnets are now getting so sophisticated that they&#39;re being offered as SaaS (software as a service) products to scammers. That&#39;s what happened in November, when&#160;nearly 200 million spam messages supporting Paul for president were sent without permission from the campaign.OLPC and the era of cheap laptopsThe grand -- some might say grandiose -- plan of former MIT Media Lab chief Nick Negroponte to sell as many as 150 million $100 laptops by 2009, getting them to poor children around the world, this year looked more like a pipe dream. Production of the laptops, under the aegis of the One Laptop Per Child project, was delayed, promised government deals fell through, and the price of the XO &quot;hundred-dollar laptops&quot; turned out to be closer to $200. Current plans call for production of only about 300,000 laptops this year. But Negroponte&#39;s dream may not be permanently deferred, just co-opted by commercial vendors, which simultaneously face a slowdown in growth in mature markets and increasing pressure to cut prices and power consumption. For example, Intel has sold $200 Classmate laptops in Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Libya, and in November,&#160;Everex announced it would sell Linux-based PCs with x86 processors for less than $300.Google&#39;s &quot;Gphone&quot; morphs into AndroidGoogle&#39;s anticipated &quot;Gphone&quot; announcement in November was both less, and more, than what had been long expected. For almost a year, rumors circulated that the online search giant was going to offer an actual phone. Google and its partners ended up unveiling not a device but&#160;a Linux-based open software platform, called Android, upon which mobile phones can be built. The idea is that a common platform will allow developers to build applications that can run on devices from many manufacturers on many networks, reducing complexity for both developers and consumers alike. Skeptics were quick to point out that Android might instead add complexity as developers will have to build applications for it as well as existing platforms. Android-based phones, due out in mid-2008, will face entrenched platforms such as Symbian and Windows Mobile.Viacom vs. Google: User-generated content hits speed bumpWhen media giant&#160;Viacom sued Google in March for $1 billion, citing unauthorized uploading of TV and movie clips to Google&#39;s YouTube site, it underscored a fundamental problem for user-generated content on the Web: How do sites ensure that submissions meet certain standards or are, in fact, legal? The dilemma is a problem of scale: Viacom charged that as of March, YouTube users uploaded nearly 160,000 video clips for which it owned copyrights and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. One answer to the problem may be systems like&#160;Video Identification, which Google unveiled in October. It matches user-uploaded clips with a repository of legitimate videos, allowing the company to flag and remove, if necessary, copyright-infringing material. With the cost of legal wrangling and monitoring systems growing, it is clear that user-generated content is not truly &quot;free&quot; after all.Facebook controversy: Social networking hits prime timeFacebook&#39;s decision in October to sell a $240 million minority stake to Microsoft, which had been battling Google for the prize, solidified social networking&#39;s central place in technology. The stake values Facebook at $15 billion total even before it has truly figured out how to monetize its traffic. While social networking has been a growing trend for years, Facebook offers interactive features and a development platform that has Google, the social networking site MySpace, and others playing catch-up. But the problem of monetization has been compounded by privacy issues. The ability of&#160;Facebook&#39;s Beacon ad system to track user actions&#160;has whipped up a controversy that won&#39;t go away soon.Barcelona: AMD&#39;s Waterloo?AMD was hoping that the launch of its Barcelona quad-core chips would press a perceived technology advantage it had built up against archrival Intel beginning in 2003, the year the smaller company launched Opteron chips for 64-bit applications. As Intel stumbled, AMD gained market share. But Intel cut prices and&#160;launched new 64-bit and quad-core processors.&#160;The release of Barcelona, delayed until September, may end up being a counterpunch that was too little, too late. Dragged down by shrinking margins and costs from last year&#39;s acquisition of ATI, AMD in October announced its fourth-straight quarter of losses and this month said&#160;it has delayed volume shipments of Barcelona to fine-tune the chip.Vista hoopla fizzles: Death of the big-bang upgrade?Microsoft launched the consumer version of Vista in January&#160;after making it available to businesses last November. Microsoft officials hyped it as the biggest launch in the company&#39;s history and now say adoption is on a normal trajectory for new operating systems. In November it said that&#160;88 million copies have been sold. But a range of market-analysis reports show that users, especially corporate professionals, have concerns about stability and compatibility and hesitate to upgrade. Though Bill Gates has said that big marketing events will always accompany major product releases, Vista may yet prove to be the last of the old-school upgrades in a world where users, on their own timetable, download incremental updates.
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Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) is giving its corporate customers a break, announcing price cuts on hardware ranging from enterprise servers and workstations, to desktops and notebooks for large business and institutional customers.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will acquire a Chicago-based provider of enterprise group chat software to bolster the messaging capabilities of its Office Communications Server and Office Communicator products.
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(InfoWorld) - Dell reached for a larger share of the small business market Tuesday, launching the "Vostro" brand of notebook and desktop PCs designed to simplify tech support, an area that has attracted complaints and lawsuits for Dell in recent months. To make Vostro PCs easier to use, Dell will ship them without any "trialware," Dell's term for the unwanted software applications that many PC manufacturers load on new computers in the factory in exchange for payments from the software vendors. In June,Â Dell agreed to let customers opt out of those programs after customers complained about that "bloatware" on a company blog. In another step intended to make Vostro PCs easier to use, Dell streamlined the setup process. A customer without any IT experience can get a Vostro PC up and running in six minutes and can connect it to the company network in only six steps, CEO Michael Dell said at a press conference in New York. And to make tech support easier for companies with fewer than 25 employees, Dell will offer support services, such as dedicating 6,500 of its customer service workers to Vostro products, offering 24-hour access to online tech support, and providing 10GB of online data storage for a year. The new computers include the Vostro 200 desktop with Intel Core 2 Duo processors and a choice between Microsoft's Windows XP or Vista operating systems. Vostro notebooks include the Vostro 1000 with dual-core AMD chips and Vostro 1400, 1500, and 1700, offering screen sizes of 14.1 inches, 15.4 inches, or 17 inches respectively. Dell is selling the models starting at $449 for the notebooks and starting at $319 for the desktop. The company also plans to add a high-performance desktop model to the family in late August. Although Dell has lost much of its market share to Hewlett-Packard in recent quarters, the company is playing to its strength by focusing on small business users, said one analyst who attended the press conference. "They still have a lot of brand equity in the small business market, and they're extending that with this offer," said Merle Sandler, senior research analyst at IDC. "With the services, they become a trusted advisor, and hopefully down the road they can turn that into a revenue stream." Michael Dell acknowledged that point in remarks to reporters, saying, "Small business is a rapidly growing market. It's also a place where there is enormous demand and need for technology." At the same time, he said, "Our customers all tell us, 'Make it simple'." Still, the company faces a challenge in repairing its reputation relative to customer service. In May, New York state's attorney generalÂ filed a lawsuit charging that Dell had used fraud and false advertisingÂ to increase profits on PC sales, applying high credit rates to computer purchases despite a promise of cheap financing. Indeed, Michael Dell stumbled over several of the questions posed by a crowd of small business owners at the press conference. He smiled at one user's story about experiencing Dell customer service problems after experimenting with competing PCs from Sony and Toshiba, and he winced at another customer's plea for Dell to keep offering Windows XP because of the "horror stories" she had heard about Vista. He also grew defensive after a customer asked whether Dell would offer a hundred-dollar laptop such as the XO computer designed for developing countries by a team at MIT led by Nicholas Negroponte. Dell pointed out that MIT had recently raised its price to $170 and that a better way to get cheap PCs in the hands of schoolchildren would be to re-use the 125 million PCs discarded each year by users in western nations. "We've sold more PCs in the U.S. than anyone else ... but that doesn't mean we're going to walk away from our responsibility. Our team has made big investments not only on the product side but in service and support," Dell said.
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Dell has signed a deal with a U.K. mobile phone retailer to distribute free laptops with the purchase of a broadband Internet access subscription.
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Networking leader buys Protego Networks, which makes a line of security-monitoring and threat-management appliances. By Paul Travis.
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Dell has won a $700 million hardware and services contract with Philips Electronics. The deal will include the sale of Dell OptiPlex desktop computers, Precision workstations and Latitude
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By Crayton Harrison, The Dallas Morning News  Sep. 12--To troubleshoot their glitchy computer company, Dell Inc. executives are installing an upgrade.
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Veritas Software Corp. (VRTS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , the largest independent US storage software provider, will buy e-mail backup company KVault Software Ltd.
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Dell (Quote, Chart) officials announced Wednesday an agreement with Linux distributor Novell (Quote, Chart) to distribute and support SUSE Enterprise Server 9 on its single- and dual-processor line of servers.
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The US computer giant Dell announced a deal Monday to sell its products through Gome, China&#39;s largest consumer electronics retailer.
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Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) today introduced two new ways for customers to share  ideas and experiences directly with their peers and the company.
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Parlano sells MindAlign, a group chat application that allows groups of people in an enterprise to maintain a discussion over instant-messaging that persists over time.
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Google Inc. has agreed to buy messaging security company Postini Inc. for US$625 million in a move to increase the appeal of Google's hosted applications among big businesses, the companies announced on Monday.