Clint Boulton

The SEC has suspended securities trading of 35 companies as part of a new crackdown on market manipulation via spam. The SEC said in a statement that more than 100 million e-mails hyping small company stocks as “Ready to Explode,” “Ride the Bull,” and “Fast Money” were sent to addressees each week, which led to […]

Never underestimate the ability of a human to assume fellow humans’ identity under false pretenses. New research from Gartner shows that some 15 million Americans fell prey to some form of identity-theft fraud over a one-year period ending in mid-2006. That’s more than a 50 percent increase from the 9.9 million victims who were duped […]

After Oracle made its $3.3 billion offer for Hyperion last week, I wondered just how disruptive the news would be to the business intelligence sector. Taking out one of the market leaders in a multi-billion-dollar vertical is nothing to sneeze at. Or is it? I spoke to Keith Gile, who Business Objects hired last year […]

Opsware agreed to buy partner iConclude today for $54 million in cash and stock to fortify its datacenter automation software portfolio. Privately held iConclude makes IT process automation software called OpsForce, which choreographs everyday tasks necessary to run datacenters. Automating such mundane processes, also called run-book automation, and applying the correct resources to changes that […]

Several reports talk about how the explosion of digital information is creating new challenges for companies trying to rein in IT costs. Others tell us how to cope with these challenges. But none tells us just how big the information glut will be in the next few years. Until now. Researcher IDC today released a […]

EMC  subsidiary VMware, Inc. said it has upgraded its software for disseminating virtual machine desktops to PCs and laptops, a valuable tool for corporate employees who can’t conduct their work tied down to a desk. VMware ACE 2 Enterprise Edition lets an IT administrator provision a Windows or Linux PC environment, including operating system, data […]

IBM  said today it is creating a computer system for New York City’s Department of Education to help teachers and parents gauge the performance of students. IBM will install and manage the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS) computer system as part of a five-year, $80 million contract with the city. The system, one of […]

After years of dominating the network-attached storage (NAS) market, Network Appliance  understands that in order to keep up with EMC, HP and others, it needs to offer customers a comprehensive storage area network (SAN) product line. NetApp today introduced the NetApp FAS3040 and NetApp V3040 series, new weapons in its SAN  storage array arsenal, to […]

Analysis: Oracle’s  $3.3 billion bid for Hyperion Solutions  is another sign of how hot the market for business intelligence software has become. Should Oracle seal the deal, the enterprise software giant will be poised to grab an excellent market position and compete more aggressively with BI providers Business Objects and Cognos. Plus, Oracle could be […]

Sun Microsystems  has updated its Java Enterprise System, a software suite the company offers to prop up customers’ Web services , composite applications and collaboration tools. Java Enterprise System is Sun’s answer to IBM’s  WebSphere and BEA’s  WebLogic infrastructure software suites. The three rivals try to lure customers with building blocks for service-oriented architectures (SOA) […]

Oracle today agreed to buy Hyperion Solutions for $52 a share in cash. The $3.3 billion deal will make Oracle a leader in the lucrative business intelligence (BI) software space. The deal, a 21 percent premium over Wednesday’s closing price of Hyperion’s shares of $42.84, will thrust Oracle deeper into competition with long-time BI market […]

VMware isn’t taking Microsoft’s  entrance into its bread-and-butter virtualization market in stride. The EMC  subsidiary presented the case that Microsoft’s virtualization licensing and distribution schemes restrict customer and vendor choice to the point of being anti-competitive. In a white paper issued last Friday, VMware said Microsoft is trying to impinge customers’ freedom to “choose virtualization […]