HP announced it has been positioned in the 'Leaders' quadrant in industry analyst firm Gartner Inc.'s Magic Quadrant reports.(1,2,3) Gartner positioned HP in the leaders quadrant in the IT Event Correlation and Analysis, the PC Life Cycle Configuration Management and the Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets Magic Quadrant reports.

You have perhaps heard - given the amount of ink spilled on the story - that Intel quit the One Laptop Per Child board last week rather than get thrown off for badmouthing and competing against the altruistic non-profit and its cute little kid-friendly, customer-shy, AMD Geode-based green-and-white widget, the thing that was supposed to cost $100 and currently costs $188. Intel only took the board seat and promised millions of dollars in financial aid last July after the head of OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte, complained about Intel's interference with his brainchild and its potential third-world buyers on television's '60 Minutes.'

Microsoft's latest Google corrective has it buying Norway's troubled publicly traded enterprise data search firm, Fast Search & Transfer ASA, for a lavish $1.2 billion in cash. The buyout price represents a 42% premium over Fast's stock price last Friday and 48 times estimated 2010 earnings. It will be one of Microsoft's pricier acquisitions, demanding upwards of 5% of the loot in its treasury or three weeks worth of free cash flow to complete.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

In a surprise move Thursday Red Hat named the former COO of Delta Airlines Jim Whitehurst president and CEO, replacing Matthew Szulik who remains chairman. Szulik said he was stepping down after almost 10 years with the company because of serious health issues with his family that he has to pay attention to, a noble thing to do considering he'd rather be CEO of Red Hat. Well, if nothing else, it'll give Dell vice-chairman and CFO Donald Carthy somebody to talk to. Cathy was president of American Airlines before being pluck from Dell's board amid its crisis and given his current job.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

See, IBM refuses to allow z/OS to run on PSI's Open Mainframes and so PSI is suing IBM for antitrust, hitting it with both barrels of the Sherman and Clinton Antitrust Acts in a plethora of monopoly charges that include tying the z/OS software to mainframe hardware, a serious antitrust no-no and something IBM is specifically forbidden to do under the lingering terms of its now dissolved 1956 consent decree with the Justice Department. It is also suing IBM for coming between it and its acquisition by HP and for threatening PSI customers with 'being drawn into the lawsuit,' PSI says. It claims damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the loss of its acquisition alone and is in 'dialogue' with the Justice Department.

Sure, Oracle has its award-winning Fusion Middleware SOA-driven tools to integrate these sources. And Oracle already has a roadmap that ultimately merges/migrates its acquired customers into the Oracle fold. But what does an organization do while its waiting for the Fusion-driven SOA effort to reach critical mass before users can get the answers they need? Just wait? And should we tell this same organization to wait for the ERP migration to be completed before it tries to launch new information-driven initiatives? Of course not. As the kissin' cousin of databases and applications and the next door neighbor of SOAs and portals, mashups are the nimble-and-quick complement to these larger efforts. Mash and publish, growth and innovation continues.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

In an unusual move, BEA says it's giving activist stockholder Carl Icahn confidential information that it can't give other people 'cause it's, well, confidential and is supposed to prove to him that the company is worth more than the $17 a share ($6.7 billion) that Oracle offered for it. They've signed an NDA and much could depend on his reaction. He could find the cupboard bare. BEA's board claims the company is worth $21 a share, some $8.2 billion. Icahn wants BEA sold. He also wanted more from Oracle but is still ticked that BEA blew off negotiations with Oracle. He currently owns 13.2% BEA, more than anybody else, and is threatening a proxy fight to overturn the board.

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

HP and Lenovo rushed out with the news that they're gonna be selling Intel's new 45nm Penryn chips in workstations a few days before Intel formally launches the chip this weekend. The press releases must have been burning a first-to-market hole in their pockets and may be a warning to AMD. Intel is supposed to line up and push out 16 of the little Penryn critters on Sunday aiming them at servers and high-end PCs. The 45nm process coupled with Intel's breakthrough Hafnium-based high-k metal gate (Hi-k) recipe will have it talking up how much smaller designs can be, how much more cost-effective and how much more energy-efficient.

The infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability/patent protection deal that FOSSers love to hate just passed its first birthday and, bragging that it's exceeded their original business targets, the pair has extended the arrangement. They're going to create a cross-platform accessibility model that links the existing Windows and Linux frameworks used to build assistive technology products that enable people with disabilities to interact with computers. At the same time they disclosed the names of 30 new customers, including Costco, Southwest Airlines, the City of Los Angeles and Zabka Polska, one of the largest retail chains in Poland, that will be getting Microsoft certificates for three-year priority support subscriptions for SUSE.