Sean Michael Kerner

Broadband connectivity vendor Covad Communications Group is getting out of the stock market rat race and joining the ranks of the privately held. In an all-cash deal valued at $304 million, private equity firm Platinum Equity will acquire Covad’s outstanding publicly traded common stock for $1.02 per share. The deal represents a 59 percent premium […]

Open source networking vendor Vyatta is rolling out the latest community edition of its routing software, continuing efforts to target Cisco users in a battle for a slice of the multi-billion-dollar router market. But while Vyatta Community Edition 3 (VC3) adds new features, users of Vyatta’s subscription-based edition may not notice much change. VC3 includes […]

Both the Web 2.0 and the SaaS paradigms are almost always dependent on one common denominator: the Web browser. It is from the browser that Web-based applications are accessed and run. Yet the browser model, with its forward, back and other navigational toolbars, often add bloat and confuse Web-based applications. Mozilla thinks it may have […]

Thirty years ago this week, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) released VMS v1.0 with support for the DEC VAX hardware platform. DEC has long since faded from the computer landscape, first going to Compaq in 1998 then to HP in May 2002 when it bought Compaq. But OpenVMS lives on. As part of its anniversary celebrations, […]

Reporter’s Notebook: Sometimes an Interop show will herald a new technology that represents the entire event. Or sometimes someone will deliver a revolutionary keynote announcing an equally revolutionary approach that will achieve the same effect. Not this time. This time, the gem came in a panel. Contrast this with past shows. In May 2006, Cisco […]

In the latest twist in the SCO saga, the embattled Unix vendor is putting its core business up for sale. In a filing with the SEC, SCO said it had filed a motion in bankruptcy court to sell off its Unix assets. “The company entered into an agreement whereby a purchaser intends to acquire substantially […]

NEW YORK — With a constantly evolving threat landscape attacking IT infrastructures, the impulse for many enterprises is just to throw more technology at the problem. According to Forrester Research Analyst Paul Stamp, that may not necessarily be the right approach. Speaking on a panel at the Interop conference, Stamp said IT needs to address […]

NEW YORK — At a conference called Interop, it only makes sense to have a keynote on interoperability. That call went to Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft, who spoke of the topic this morning at the show in New York. Robertson argued throughout his talk that Microsoft is open to […]

NEW YORK — Companies’ approach to information technology needs to become more flexible if they’re to survive changing business models. That’s the thinking behind this morning’s keynotes here at Interop New York, where executives from XenSource and Google advocated that companies embrace greater flexibility in IT strategies. Doing so, they said, can help IT admins […]

NEW YORK — Enterprise IT shops are facing a multi-year trend toward having more employees in remote offices while trying to consolidate their datacenters. The goal is to connect all those disparate users with their applications as fast as possible. Attendees at the Interop show here hope to learn how to meet that goal. Some […]

How much money can you make from a freely available open source product? If you’re Mozilla, the answer is a lot. Mozilla Corp. President Mitchell Baker said in an official blog post that Mozilla’s fiscal year 2006 revenues reached $66.8 million. The company’s haul represents a 26 percent increase over its 2005 reported revenue of […]

Though perhaps not as terrifying as Godzilla, Microsoft has managed to persuade a major Japanese vendor of Linux into buying patent protection. Tokyo, Japan-based Turbolinux joined Microsoft in announcing a deal pledging that Microsoft will not sue Turbolinux users for any alleged infringement in open source code shipped as part of the Linux distribution. At […]