Oracle CEO Larry Ellison failed to preserve e-mails as well as interview materials related to a book called "Softwar" that should have been supplied in connection with a shareholder lawsuit filed in March 2001 against the company, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

The plaintiffs allege that Ellison and others made false statements about the company's financial results during fiscal 2001, how the economy was affecting business, and Oracle's 11i application suite, according to the decision filed in U.S. District Court-California Northern District.

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Oracle produced only 15 e-mails sent or received by Ellison from Ellison's own files, but pulled more than 1,600 Ellison e-mails from the systems of other company workers, according to Judge Susan Illston.

"Having established with certainty that numerous emails were not produced from Ellison's email files ... it is impossible to know whether additional unproduced emails were also deleted or not turned over," she wrote. "This uncertainty about the existence of other emails is precisely the reason all of Ellison's e-mails should have been preserved and produced."

The plaintiffs had also wanted material stemming from interviews Ellison gave between March 2001 and August 2002 to writer Matthew Symonds for the book "Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle."

But the materials never made it to the plaintiffs, because Symonds had disposed of the laptop containing them in late 2006 or January 2007, according to the filing.

Symonds told Oracle's attorney that Ellison had waived his rights to the materials several years ago, but that still meant Ellison could -- and should -- have preserved them at least until sometime in 2003, well after the suit was filed, according to Illston.

Illston ruled that the jury in the case, Nursing Home Pension Fund et al vs. Oracle Corp. et al, will be told they can infer the missing materials "would demonstrate Ellison's knowledge of, among other things, problems with Suite 11i, the effects of the economy on Oracle's business, and problems with defendants' forecasting model."

An Oracle spokeswoman said Wednesday the company would have no comment.

Google will dump a section of the licensing agreement for its new Chrome browser after some Internet users objected to its copyright implications.

Google said Wednesday it would dump one section of the end-user licensing agreement that gave the company "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through" the new browser.

[ Check out InfoWorld Test Center's verdict on the new browser wars in "Lab test: Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8." ]

Several Web users raised copyright and privacy concerns about portions of the licensing agreement shortly after Google launched Chrome Tuesday. Some critics suggested the language would allow Google to use any Web content displayed in Chrome without getting copyright permission.

Google said it borrowed language from other products, "in order to keep things simple for our users," when it inserted the copyright provision in the Chrome license.

"Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don't apply well to the use of that product," Rebecca Ward, senior product counsel for Chrome, said in a statement. "We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome."

In addition to the perpetual copyright granted to Google in section 11, the license allowed the company to "make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services."

That language comes from Google's universal terms of service, the company said.

The wording lead to a copyright debate on Slashdot.org, although one poster noted that Slashdot's parent company, SourceForge, uses similar language in some license agreements. Florida lawyer David Loschiavo dissected the Google licensing agreement in his own blog post.

"In other words, by posting anything (via Chrome) to your blog(s), any forum, video site, myspace, itunes, or any other site that might happen to be supporting you, Google can use your work without paying you a dime," Loschiavo wrote."It applies to everything you pass through Chrome. Google can take your submitted content and edit and reuse it all they want, as long as they do so in connection with Chrome."

The license agreement seemed to assume that Web users had ownership of all the content they produced and displayed through Chrome, he added. Employees of Web publishers or universities probably couldn't legally agree to the Chrome terms of service, "because these people most likely don't have the right to give a license to the intellectual property (IP) they produce," Loschiavo wrote. "Most likely your employee or student agreement requires that your employer/university exclusively owns all IP that you make during your time there."

Web content creators, such as news writers and musicians employed by a company, may have been in breach of their employment contracts had they agreed to the Google license, he said. "Further, you probably can't use your company or school email with Chrome, because your company probably exclusively owns your email, and you can't give away a license to something you don't own," Loschiavo wrote. "You also can't make representations to Google that you have the power to license this IP if you don't."

Other companies have attempted to use similar language in Web-based products, including Microsoft and AOL for their instant messaging products, Loschiavo said. Those attempts raised objections as well, he said.

CIOs and senior IT executives lack the "green" to go green, even though they overwhelmingly believe that a more energy-efficient datacenter will become mission-critical, according to a recent survey.

Seventy-six percent of executives queried do not have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent believe that greening their datacenters will be crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives in 2009, according to the survey conducted by Voltaire, a maker of server and storage switching and software products for grid computing.

[ Keep up on green IT trends with InfoWorld's Sustainable IT blog and Green Tech newsletter. ]

In addition, 57 percent said they believe going green will give their company a competitive advantage, the Voltaire study found.

Voltaire queried CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives who attended the 2008 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Voltaire says a Fortune 500 company with five datacenters worldwide and 3,000 servers per datacenter can save approximately $7.4 million per year.

The study also found that 43 percent of respondents will implement a green datacenter in the next two years, and that reducing power and cooling costs/requirements was ranked by 52 percent of the respondents as the most important benefit gained by going green in the datacenter.

The next most important benefit was helping the environment (37 percent), followed by increased utilization (32 percent), reducing real estate/space requirements (28 percent), and reducing/consolidating equipment needed (27 percent). Among the respondents who said that going green gives their companies a competitive advantage, 72 percent said it provides a more efficient and cost-effective infrastructure so that they can invest more in new technologies.

In response to the survey findings, Voltaire says it developed a "50-50-300 Pledge," which states that IT executives, working with the company to deploy a Voltaire InfiniBand-based unified fabric, can save 50 percent on power/cooling related to server interconnections and 50 percent on hardware allocation/usage, while delivering up to a 300 percent increase in application performance. Voltaire has also developed an efficiency calculator to help IT executives estimate their network energy and cost savings and justify the investment.

Unified fabrics provide networking services between InfiniBand, Fibre Channel storage-area networks, and Ethernet LANs over a single fabric with multiple virtual interfaces replacing actual physical adapters. By merging all three traffic types within a single switching chassis, IT executives can reduce power consumption by consolidating and virtualizing their datacenter interconnects, Voltaire says.

VMware said Wednesday that its product will run reliably with software from Microsoft.

VMware has certified its ESX hypervisor to work with Windows Server and other software from competitor Microsoft. The move also gives customers using ESX technical support from both companies to deploy VMware virtualization software on Microsoft infrastructure.

[ Keep up with the latest in virtualization news with David Marshall's Virtualization Report ]

ESX update 2 is the first hypervisor to be certified through the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program, introduced by Microsoft in November 2007, according to VMware.

The program enables vendors to test and validate virtualization software running on Windows Server 2008 and previous versions of the OS. It also enables Microsoft to offer cooperative technical support to customers running Windows Server on validated virtualization software other than Hyper-V, its own hypervisor.

VMware remains the leader in selling virtualization software, which allows multiple and different OSes to run on one piece of server hardware. According to IDC, VMware had 76.4 percent market share in 2007, followed by IBM with 9.8 percent.

However, competitors -- particularly Microsoft -- are hoping that won't be the case for long. Microsoft released Hyper-V earlier this year as a competitive offering to ESX and the hypervisor of choice for Windows Server. At the same time, Microsoft also realizes it must work with other virtualization vendors, which is why it introduced the validation program last year.

VMware has already been feeling the effects of competition from Microsoft and other vendors seeking to commoditize the technology on which VMware's business was built. In July, the company replaced its President and CEO Diane Greene with a former Microsoft executive, Paul Maritz. Her departure came as the company lowered its revenue forecast for fiscal 2007.

On Tuesday, VMware disclosed that its Executive Vice President of Research and Development Richard Sarwal was leaving for his previous employer, Oracle, after less than a year at VMware.

CIO.com has published several stories that examined the sometimes volatile, often misunderstood and never dull relationship between CIOs and application developers -- from "9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless" to "8 Reasons Why a Developer Would NEVER Want To Be a CIO" to "Getting Clueful: 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development."

Those articles were presented solely from the programmer's viewpoint, however. We wanted to give the bosses -- CIOs and IT leaders who perhaps were irked by the "clueless" label -- a chance to respond. Because, certainly, developers can be out-of-touch too -- just in different ways.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

CIO.com asked IT leaders what they wish developers knew so that the programmers don't appear clueless to the rest of the organization. The bosses' responses, gathered from eight CIOs and IT managers and which have been anonymously condensed, show that many developers need to gain the bigger-picture view of their organizations to appreciate the challenges of those "clueless" CIOs.

"It turns out that the concepts of business strategy bear repeating," observes one IT director. "Developers get so heads-down in the minutiae of coding that they forget about the 40,000-foot view of the business."

1. Developers Don't Think PracticallyDevelopers often look for an elegant or slick solution to a problem, but they don't always look for the practical one. "I've had developers that will go to any lengths to write something instead of buying it, even if their hours cost more initially, plus upgrades and testing each and every time the data base or interfaces change," notes one CIO. "I rid myself of one of those [developers] recently."

This CIO retells a story: "I had to fire a developer who never had an error when his program compiled; he desk-checked [the application] so many times to assure himself (and it was a source of his pride) there were no errors. The compilers had error checking routines to do much of the same thing. His programs were elegant, but he got fired for scarcity of output. Others who used the compiler testing were completing 300 percent of his output, but he just couldn't give up his opinion of the correct way to do it."

2. Developers Still Don't See the End-User PerspectiveSolving business problems is more complex than everyone imagines, says one CIO. But to IT management, the business unit and the development team, these problems often appear quite easy to solve. "Getting your development team to truly see the world from the end-user perspective is important and much harder than you would think," notes the CIO. "The developers need to learn to quickly empathize with the end users' needs and issues-and attack the solution from that perspective."

Adds an IT director: "Personally, it is surprising to me that most of the developers that I work with still have no sense of the user experience. A development team can create an application that does everything from balance your checkbook to burning your toast, but if the user interface sucks, no one will use it-period. No amount of training or re-training will make users sign on to an application with a difficult UI. That simple concept seems to be a struggle for developers to understand."

Another CIO adds: "As a developer, I want to add as much functionality as rapidly as possible to keep users happy," says the CIO. "As a CIO I want the users to still be happy five years from now, which takes a bit more upfront planning."

3. Developers Can't Get Away from the "Wow" FactorDevelopers love the "cool" or "wow" factor of applications. CIOs seek stability and standardization. "It's more efficient to be on one platform than to spread your resources thin over many because you bring in the best new tool without retiring the legacy," says a CIO.

Another CIO points to the dire need to build applications for reliability and scalability. "Many business owners have a short attention span and limited patience. We need to engineer applications for rapid performance under maximum load," the CIO says. "An application with fewer features that is completely stable and fast is better than a full-featured application that is unreliable and slow."

"I'm less concerned about cool technology or wow factor," the CIO adds, "and am more concerned that the finished application supports the required business processes."

4. Developers Don't Think About ROI, TCO, and Other Business PrioritiesA CIO has to balance a whole panoply of choices and pressures, says a CIO. "Often the best way to do something is to make it cost effective-not cool. CIOs have to weigh risks and costs and potential benefits. Remember the 80/20 rule, think of return on investment and total cost of ownership issues and business priorities. The developers have a limited number of tasks to do and can pretty much concentrate on one item. Many have spent their career focusing on the development of simple working units, not running a business."

Another CIO says that "the CIO is not only responsible for getting the right technical solutions to the company but also ensuring that a number of additional objectives are met including TCO, positive relationships with the business units, the strategic use of the IT function and more. Getting this done may make the CIO look aloof or clueless-but without this leadership, IT will fail in the organization."

The IT director says that developers also lack a sense of how their work impacts the business and therefore the bottom line; or a broad knowledge of the business strategy. "These are fundamentals that need to be included in any in-house developer's career development plan," the IT director adds.

5. Developers Don't Get the Underlying IT Value PropositionThe CIO is trying to show the overall value of the IT function to the organization, notes one CIO (unless it is a software company, which is a different model). The executives that CIOs have as customers are trying to get an answer, perform some function and get their jobs done.

"IT to them is like electricity: they need it, but they don't appreciate it," says the CIO. "Having the'prima donna' developers' attitude that the organization exists to provide them with some intellectual stimulation is not what the executives want to hear or feel!"

Instead, some developers think it's all about their code. They fail to understand the mission of the business and "that they don't drive it, they support it," notes the IT manager. "Their work is often not mission critical or urgent."

6. Developers Don't Have (or Want) Corporate SkillsetsMost developers do not have the skills to become a CIO, observes one CIO. "I think a survey would show that 80 percent of the CIOs that came up through IT to be a CIO came through the operations side," says the CIO.

The skills required of a IT leader, the CIO contends, are not those of a developer: CIOs have to deal with uncertainty-not hard and fast coded rules; CIOs have to manage the economics of IT-not the technical "coolness" factor; CIOs have to live in a world of compromise-not the "one true answer."

"I think it is like the Mars and Venus gender discussions," notes the CIO. "What they see depends on where they stand, and they stand in completely different environments."

7. Developers Aren't Into "Group Think""When you get a technical team together to discuss issues and ideas for improvement you will hear what sounds like a consensus set of issues and solutions," observes a CIO. You need to probe deeper, the CIO says, because "each technical person is different and when asked individually you will find that they do not all share the group opinion, thus solving for the group's suggestions won't bring about all of the desired results."

Along similar lines, another CIO points out that "the lone genius developer" is a risk to the organization since his departure can put entire applications at risk. "Every application needs to be developed by a team and have thorough documentation so that it does not depend on any one person," the CIO adds.

8. Developers Don't Understand StaffingOne CIO says that developers think that profitable companies shouldn't have layoffs, which the CIO feels is clueless. "That's like saying as long as the flowers are growing, you shouldn't prune," the CIO says. "Efficient companies need prune back in areas they grow out of to preserve the strength of the overall company."

In addition, the CIO says that many developers think offshoring is un-American. The Hudson Institute Center forecasts that by 2014 the U.S. economy will need 9 million more degree holders than will be available, offers the CIO. " Offshoring IT helps CIOs to manage this gap," the CIO says.

BONUS: What CIOs Admit They Do WrongSeveral CIOs who read "9 Reasons Why Application Developers Think Their CIO Is Clueless" article admitted some fault in communication and relationship breakdowns that can occur. Notes one CIO, on why each side can appear clueless: "Failure of the organization to provide transparency between business units to help everyone understand each other's role in supporting the vision and mission."

Another CIO says the problem is that "Most organizations are structured to build barriers between the user community and the development community. This is especially the case when development is outsourced," notes the CIO. "Organizations place liaisons (or business consultants) as interfaces to the business. Developers are therefore at quite a distance from the business and risk losing touch with what's really important to drive the business."

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Spammers are abusing free Web services to make their spam links look more legitimate, according to e-mail security vendor MessageLabs.

One of the services, a photo-hosting site called ImageShack, lets people upload different types of photo formats, including Flash files, said Paul Wood, a senior analyst with MessageLabs.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Flash files, which have the extension ".swf", can be used for animated graphics and can also be used to automatically redirect people to other Web sites. That feature can be abused.

The attack involving ImageShack works like this: Spammers upload a Flash file then copy the link for that file -- which comes from ImageShack's domain -- in a spam message. If the link is followed, the Flash file redirects the victim to a spam site, Wood said.

The technique offers an advantage for spammers. Antispam software will often scan links in e-mail and block those e-mails with suspicious-looking ones. But ImageShack's domain is considered to have a good reputation, so messages won't be blocked.

"If you start blocking on domain name only, you can incur a lot of collateral damage," Wood said.

Another more dangerous variation on this theme is a spam e-mail promoting a video. If the link is clicked, a Flash file redirects the victim to a site where a pop-up window immediately implores the user to download a codec supposedly needed to play the video file. Invariably, the file isn't a codec but some piece of malicious software.

Even if the spam link in the e-mail appears to be OK, there are many other ways to tell if a message is spam.

The header -- or batch of information that shows where an e-mail came from and the path it followed -- can be used to tell if it came from a domain that has been prone to abuse and subsequently blocked, Wood said.

Google's Picasa photo service and Yahoo's Flickr don't allow Flash files. But that hasn't exempted Picasa from abuse. Spammers use Picasa to host images, which are then incorporated into spam messages, Wood said.

Again, spammers are piggy backing on Google's good reputation. Images that are hosted on less reputable services or domains have a greater chance of being automatically blocked by security programs.

MessageLabs has also seen a similar type of abuse of Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive, which is an online file storage service, Wood said.

The scenario is almost the same: The link is connected with a file on SkyDrive, but then the link performs an HTML redirect to a dodgy site. SkyDrive also allows Flash files to be uploaded, offering another possible way to attack.

Microsoft is boosting integration of functional programming with its Visual Studio 2008 software development platform.

Improved integration is featured in a September Community Technology Preview of the F# language for the .Net platform. F# has been positioned as a language based on concepts of functional programming, in which computation is treated as the evaluation of mathematical functions. It also supports object-oriented programming.

"This release marks an important step along the path we laid out in October to integrate the F# language into Visual Studio and to continue innovating and evolving F#," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog entry this week.

?Functional programming has been viewed as valuable in domains such as the financial and scientific realms as well as technical computing. Microsoft has described F# as combining type safety, performance and scripting with advantages of running on a modern runtime, with intentions to make the language a "first-class citizen" on .Net.

Accessible here, the CTP features improvements to the F# language and libraries to make them simpler and more regular, Somasegar said. "Broadly improved" Visual Studio 2008 integration allows F# users to scale from scripting and explorative development to large-scale component and application design from within Visual Studio.

Also, Microsoft with the CTP is introducing a language feature called "Units of Measure," which extends F# inference and strong typing to floating point data.

Another Microsoft blogger, Don Syme, who has spearheaded development of F# in the Microsoft Research group, stressed added support for scripting in the language, compiler, and Visual Studio via the CTP. An improved project system, meanwhile, enables large-scale, tool-based software development with F#.

"One of the key things about F# is that it spans the spectrum from interactive, explorative scripting to component and large-scale software development," Syme said.

The new F# Language Services provides more reliable intellisense typing tips.

"Programming with F# can be enormously?fun and rewarding, as well as just plain productive. This is now more true than ever, and we hope you enjoy using F# as much as we do," Syme said.

Additionally, Microsoft has launched an F# Development Center on MSDN, providing resources for developers and links to F# user communities. F# has been a joint project of Microsoft's Developer Division and Microsoft Research.

A new study of more than 1,400 U.S. CIOs found that 11 percent plan to hire additional staff in the fourth quarter of this year, while 3 percent expect cuts.

The net 8 percent result fell short of the 10 percent projected last quarter, according to IT staffing firm Robert Half Technology, which has commissioned the studies on a quarterly basis since 1995.

[ Read the related feature, Where the hot IT jobs are going to be, and get sag advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

Help-desk and tech-support jobs are expected to grow the most. The top skill in demand is network administration, which was cited by 70 percent of respondents. Windows Server 2000 and 2003 administration and desktop support came next, both with 69 percent.

In a related finding, the need for additional customer support was the top driver behind hiring plans, cited by 25 percent of respondents. It edged out business growth, which garnered 23 percent. Installing or creating new applications drew 21 percent.

The results show that companies are focused on providing core services as weak economic conditions persist, Robert Half's executive director, Katherine Spencer Lee, said in a statement.

On a regional basis, the hiring picture is strongest in the Mid-Atlantic region, where 16 percent of respondents plan to add jobs and only 1 percent intend to make cuts.

In terms of verticals, CIOs in the transportation sector were the most bullish, with 17 percent reporting they will add jobs and 1 percent looking to reduce head count.

Networking company Buffalo Technology has finally launched its external SSD drives at prices that promise to steal a share of the portable market from old-world 2.5-inch hard drives.

The capacities of the new MicroStation drives are modest by the standards of a spinning drive -- 32GB, 64GB, and 100GB -- but there are other features to tempt buyers beyond the gigabytes.

[ Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

The first is perhaps size. Weighing around 60 grams, the aptly named drives are not much bigger than a credit card at 57 x 14 x 89 millimeter, a form factor that looks tiny next to the supplied wrap-around USB 2.0 connector and cable used to attach it to a PC.

The other advantages are ones inherent to the SSD (solid-state drive) concept, that of shock resistance and power consumption. As to performance, Buffalo claims up to 35GBps transfer rates if used with the company's proprietary TurboUSB drivers though it is likely that under real-world loads the actual rates achieved will be somewhat lower.

Street prices are quoted as being £98.25 ($172), excluding VAT, for the 32GB model, £195.31 for the 64GB model, and £292.38 for the top-end 100GB version, a premium compared to today's portable drives, but perhaps worth it for what is on offer. The drives also come with an encryption suite for added security.

The company has bided its time over this product, having trailed it many months ago in its home market of Japan. The new drives are identical to those on offer at that time, albeit with the new "Micro" drive branding.

Storage server vendor 3PAR has built a key function for storage efficiency into a specialized chip, offloading that job from the main processors in a pair of server models it introduced on Tuesday.

The company's storage servers, originally introduced in 2002, are purpose-built for datacenters using virtualization and designed to reduce the amount of effort required to manage storage in those environments. This includes allocation of storage capacity for particular applications, said Craig Nunes, vice president of marketing at 3PAR.

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

3PAR's storage servers are designed to save both storage space and IT managers' time by automatically allocating capacity across a disk array. They can either set aside a certain amount of storage for each application, as defined by the administrator, or allocate just the amount of space the application really needs.

The 3PAR Gen3 ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) can handle either task, as well as the migration between them. The chip is built into the company's new InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers and is the first chip that can make that shift, according to 3PAR. Previously, the company's gear has done so with software. Handling such tasks in hardware typically makes them run faster.

However, customers will have to wait until the next version of the 3PAR InForm Operating System to tap into the ASIC's new capability, Nunes said. He declined to say when the new software would be available.

Like 3PAR's last ASIC, the new chip also includes 3PAR Fast RAID 5, a system for distributing data across multiple drives so it remains available in case of a failure. RAID 5 requires less overall space than RAID 1, which uses two complete copies of the data, but it runs more slowly. 3PAR's Fast RAID 5 speeds that up by putting it in hardware, Nunes said.

The T400 and T800 servers each are made up of several controllers, or blades, that communicate via a backplane in the server. The T400 can have between two and four controllers and the T800 can have as many as eight, Nunes said. In addition to the servers, 3PAR sells the disk arrays that go with them. The company builds its systems mostly from third-party components but designed the ASIC itself over the course of two or three years, he said.

3PAR's servers and storage arrays have helped Memphis financial services company Morgan Keegan make more efficient use of its storage capacity, according to Parker Mabry, vice president and manager of network systems engineering. His company uses two S400 servers, an earlier 3PAR product. With Morgan Keegan's previous storage systems, dividing up one array to serve two major applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server would have been difficult and made the drives work too hard, Mabry said. The S400s divide every drive in the array into units of 250MB that can be pooled and virtualized, which provides much more flexibility, he said.

Alibris, an online store for books and other media, changed its storage system to 3PAR in 2006, said CTO Michael Shaffer. The company has an IT staff of just four and was able to shift one member to new tasks from what was almost a full-time job managing storage, he said. Shaffer's team still assigns a certain amount of storage to each application, and 3PAR storage servers automatically distribute it across multiple disks, which allows for fast reading and writing of data, he said. Shaffer doesn't let the storage servers set the amount of capacity yet, but with the new chip, he probably could do so quickly and easily, he said. Then he could switch back if he didn't like it.

"Having the ability to change one's mind is a rare ability," Shaffer said.

The InServ T800 Storage server is priced starting at $175,000 for a base configuration with two controllers and 16 146GB drives. The T400 is priced from $130,000.

The first beta of Chrome, Google's long-in-development Internet browser, became available Tuesday afternoon for Windows Vista and XP users, with Mac and Linux editions soon to follow. There's ample reason to be excited about the release, and just as much reason to be wary. Check out these screen shots, weigh the pros and cons, and then decide for yourself.

For further PCWorld.com coverage of Chrome, see assistant editor Nick Mediati's product review ("Google Chrome Web Browser") and contributing editor Harry McCracken's analysis of how Google's entry into the browser market affects the other major players ("Chrome vs. the World").

[ Also check out Tom Yager's Ahead of the Curve blog: Developers should skip Google's Chrome, and jump straight to WebKit. ]

Seven Reasons Chrome Could Be Cool

1. It won't crash.Perhaps Chrome's biggest draw is its multiprocess architecture, which, in a nutshell, protects you from having a bad Web page or application take your browser down. Every tab, window, and plug-in runs in its own environment -- so one faulty site won't affect anything else that you have open. This approach also adds another layer of security by isolating each site and application within a limited environment.

2. It's really fast.Again because of the multiprocess foundation, one slow site won't drag down the rest of your browsing. Instead, you can effortlessly click to another tab or window. With plug-ins, the arrangement works similarly: If you open a site that has a slow-loading Java ad, for example, the Java itself will be isolated and the rest of the page won't be affected. The program itself opens within seconds of when you click the icon, too -- a distinct advantage over some slower-loading alternatives.

3. You barely notice it's there.Calling the design of Chrome's interface streamlined is an understatement. The program barely looks like a program, and the vast majority of your screen space is devoted to the site you're visiting -- with no buttons or logos hogging space. Chrome's designers say that they wanted people to forget they were even using a browser, and it comes pretty close to achieving that goal.

4. It makes searching simpler.One of Chrome's signature features is its Omnibox, an integrated all-purpose bar at the top of the browser. You can type in a URL or a search term -- or both -- and Chrome takes you to the right place without asking any questions. Omnibox can learn what you like, too -- a talent that goes beyond the obvious automatic completion function. Say that you want to use the PCWorld.com search function, for example. Once you've visited the site once, Chrome will remember that PCWorld.com has its own search box and will give you the option of using it right from Omnibox. The function thus automates keyword searches.

5. It gives you more control over tabs.Chrome gives the idea of tabbed browsing new power. You can grab a tab and drag it out into its own individual window. Or you can drag and drop tabs into existing windows to combine them. Chrome also gives you the option of starting up in any tab configuration you want -- whether a custom setup or the set of tabs you had open in your previous session. Other browsers require third-party add-ons to provide this capability.

6. It opens new doors on your home page.Chrome comes with a default dynamic home page. As you use it, the program remembers the sites that you visit most often. The top nine of those appear in snapshots on your home page, along with your most commonly used search engines and bookmarks. There's no force-feeding here, though: You can override the dynamic home page with any home page you want, just as you can set the default search engine to any service you prefer.

7. It lets you stay incognito.Like Internet Explorer 8's recent beta release, Chrome offers a private browsing option -- one it calls Incognito. You can open a special type of new window and rest easy knowing nothing you do in it will be logged or saved on your computer. And unlike Internet Explorer's, Chrome's Incognito window is isolated from the rest of your browsing experience, so you can have your private window open alongside your regular windows, and each will operate independently.

Seven Chrome-Related Concerns

1. It's only in its first beta.This is Chrome's first test release, so problems are bound to crop up over the coming months. If like most people you rely heavily on Web browsing, you run a risk by putting your online life into the hands of an unproven product. Visits to some plug-in-oriented sites such as logmein.com have generated errors ("This application has failed to start because xpcom.dll was not found..."). Do you want to deal with that kind of uncertainty daily?

2. You won't have any add-ons.Add-ons are a huge draw for Firefox fans, and none of these are available in Chrome yet. Google does intend to create an API for such extensions, but for now you'll have to make do without your AdBlocks, Better Gmails, and BugMeNots -- or you'll have to switch between browsers to use the add-ons you want when you want them.

3. You can't synchronize.One big plus of Firefox is its ability to synchronize across multiple computers using Mozilla's Weave option. This arrangement allows you to keep your home browser, your laptop browser, and your work browser looking identical at all times -- and once you get used to that level of synchronization, it's hard to give up. Chrome doesn't yet have that capability.

4. You may draw the short stick on standards.Standards get a little less standard as this new player enters the equation. It's based on WebKit, the same open-source system that drives Apple's Safari; but when you look at pages in Chrome compared to pages in Firefox or IE, you'll notice a difference in text formatting. And since most sites give coding priority to the market leader, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment with Chrome.

5. You're giving advertisers extra ammo.Have you seen all the hype about Google's privacy practices and how much of your data it shares with advertisers? Imagine the potential ammo you're giving it by using this browser. Google will now have total control over your experience from the time you open Chrome to the time you shut down. In some sense, you might just as well invite DoubleClick to watch over your shoulder while you surf.

6. The dropdown bar is dropped.The idea of the URL dropdown bar is dropped in Chrome. To compensate, the browser offers "intelligent" features in its Omnibox; but if you like being able to see your recent URLs at the click of a button, you'll miss the dropdown bar.

7. You lose some history power.Chrome's History functions are less versatile than the powerhouse ones built by Firefox. Chrome offers only a simple screen showing your day-by-day history. The ability to sort everything by date, site, or most visited appear to have joined the distaff and spindle on the ash heap.

So there you have it: the good, the bad, and the ambiguous of Google's first foray into browsing. You've heard the hype; now, the decision is yours. Whose campaign will you be joining?

PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Sony Ericsson wants Windows Mobile developers to start working on applications for its Xperia X1 and on Wednesday it announced a tailor-made SDK (software development kit) for the upcoming smartphone.

A beta version of the Sony Ericsson SDK for Windows Mobile 6.1 is available for download from the company Web page. It has already been used in-house and by some partners to develop panels for the user interface, according to Merran Wrigley, spokeswoman at Sony Ericsson.

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Sony Ericsson isn't trying to build a new developer community; instead it wants to take advantage of what's already there, according to Wrigley. The SDK is based on Visual Studio, with extensions for the Xperia panel interface. "It will feel very familiar to existing Windows Mobile developers," said Wrigley.

Using the SDK developers can adapt existing Windows Mobile applications, and start working on new ones. It currently supports HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), C and C++, according to Wrigley, who didn't want to announce when a finished version will become available.

The Xperia X1 was announced at Mobile World Congress in February. It is a slider phone, with a 3-inch display and touch navigation. For surfing the Web it supports Wi-Fi and HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), for both downstream and upstream traffic. Just like most other high-end phones it also supports navigation using A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning System).

Lately, there have been some reports stating that the phone has been delayed, but the official Sony Ericsson line is still that the phone will ship during the fourth quarter, according to Wrigley. As the fourth quarter starts it will announce more details about when and where the phone will ship, so far selected markets is all the company wants to divulge.

Google's famed co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came out to support Chrome, saying that browser technology is fundamental to the company's success, so Google decided to get more involved in this area.

"Everything we do is running on the Web platform. It's very important to us that works well," Page said during a press conference Tuesday that was webcast from Google's headquarters.

"People are doing a lot more online, and the Web has evolved pretty dramatically & but the underlying browser architecture is still very similar to the original Netscape browser," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management.

Brin concurred, saying that the ultimate goal of Chrome isn't to be a Web operating system of sorts, but rather a better browser vehicle for the next generation of Web applications, a core business for Google.

"I wouldn't call Chrome the OS of Web apps. It's a very basic, fast engine to run Web apps. We'll see more and more Web apps of greater and greater sophistication, of the kinds of things that today are pretty challenging to do on the Web because of browser performance," Brin said.

Google is releasing Chrome as open source in the hopes that it will be improved by external developers, and simultaneously help improve other products, including the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE (Internet Explorer).

In other words, Chrome is meant to be a catalyst for faster innovation in browser technology. "Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly, so any improvement to any set of browsers as a consequence of Chrome is good for Google," Brin said.

Brin, Page and Pichai all went to great lengths to praise Mozilla's work with Firefox, crediting it with jump-starting innovation in browser development at a time when the only game in town was IE. "Without what [Mozilla] has done, this probably wouldn't be possible," Page said.

Chrome, in the works for about two years, highlights the importance for Google of its increasingly sophisticated Web applications, such as its ambitious Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication office-productivity suite. Apps, built around the Web-hosted "cloud computing" model for delivering applications via the Internet, is considered a major threat to Microsoft's Office/Exchange platform.

Thus, it's easy to understand why Google wouldn't want to look from the sidelines as Microsoft takes IE in the direction it so chooses. The browser is the key software for accessing Web applications, so it's no surprise to see Google finally jump feet-first into the development of browser technology.

Among the enhancements Google is promoting on Chrome are a more stable and secure environment in which a tab can crash without freezing the entire browser, as well as improved speed and performance with a new JavaScript engine called V8.

The Google cofounders' presence at the press conference underscores the importance of the Chrome initiative, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.

"This isn't one of those projects that started as a 20 percent time thing," Valdes said, referring to Google's policy of letting employees spend part of their time on projects they come up with. "This is definitely a strategic initiative that has been two years in the making and involves dozens of engineers."

Indeed, Google officials acknowledged at the press conference that the company has invested significant resources on Chrome.

But framing it as Google's attempt to win the browser wars is a mistake, Valdes said. "It's about the Web apps battle. It's about having a platform that will support the next generation of Web apps," he said.

Web applications in general, and Google's in particular, are pushing the limits of current browsers, including IE, Safari and Firefox. "Google is pushing the envelope and Chrome gives it a bigger envelope for Web apps," Valdes said.

"More importantly, Chrome is the platform Google will control," he added. "That makes it a strategic element in their technology portfolio."

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney agreed that investing in developing its own browser makes strategic sense for Google. "Given that search has become such a fundamental part of Internet usage, anything that impacts overall Internet usage is important for Google," he wrote in a research note Tuesday. "Also, while browser developments have to date had no material impact on Googles advertising base, a hedge against future browser developments makes sense."

However, he noted, it remains to be seen whether users will consider Chrome faster, simpler and safer enough than current browsers to justify switching to it.

Chrome is now available as a free download.

This story was updated on September 2, 2008

Novell Tuesday is launching its Compliance Management Platform, a combination of existing identity management and security-event management products with additional reporting and analysis tools.

The goal behind integrating the two existing server-based products is to make sure provisioning and access control is a monitored activity kept in conformance with business security policy. It will give IT managers a source for real-time monitoring of all identity repositories and allow for compliance report generation on the fly, according to Novell.

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"It can send an alert or even block an action," says Jim Ebzery, a Novell senior vice president and general manager. He says the platform will better enable customers to notice incongruent and suspicious events, such as if someone were logged in on an office LAN but at the same time that individual's electronic-badge credentials were being used to gain access to a corporate building in a different location.

Specifically, the Compliance Management Platform includes Identity Manager 3.6 (compare Identity Management products) integrated with Novell's SEM product, Sentinel 6.1 (compare Security Information Management products).

The Compliance Management Platform comes with several predefined policy templates to aid in setting it and includes Sentinel's software connectors for centralizing security-event information from hundreds of sources.

The offering costs $99 per user.

Oracle plans to buy ClearApp, maker of software for managing the performance of composite applications in SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments, the company announced Tuesday.

The deal is expected to close later this year. Terms were not disclosed.

SOA sees applications pulled together from multiple, sometimes shared components, theoretically giving IT departments flexibility and the opportunity for reuse.

But SOA environments also introduce a level of complexity that can make it hard to nail down the source of performance problems or pinpoint the effect of changes made to a given component, Oracle said.

ClearApp's software automatically discovers application components and their dependencies at runtime and monitors performance, according to Oracle. It will work alongside Oracle's Enterprise Manager platform.

ClearApp, based in Mountain View, California, also supports competing platforms such as IBM's WebSphere.

An Oracle FAQ on the pending sale did not specify how those relationships would continue, except to say that existing features in ClearApp's software would be supported.

ClearApp's technology provides "deep visibility into the components underlying SOA-based composite applications," but the acquisition also raises questions, as it follows related purchases of companies like Auptyma and Moniforce, said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg in an e-mail Tuesday.

"Just how many management vendors does Oracle need to acquire before they have a coherent SOA management story that's not just more of their Frankenstein strategy? (That is, put together a lot of parts and hope for lightning)," Bloomberg wrote.

"Oracle does have quite a bit of experience in assimilating acquired technologies, and they're also known for taking care of the customers that come along as a result, but every such acquisition sets the bar of success higher for them," he added.

IT departments must establish a "green baseline" for their operations, according to new advice from Forrester Research.

Without a well-defined environmental baseline, IT leaders will not be able to respond effectively to demands to "go green" and will not be able to invest effectively.

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The fact that many IT departments still do not pay for their own energy should not deter technology leaders from taking the initiative on the carbon footprint of their organization.

"If you don't pay for the energy-related costs of IT, but believe green IT can positively impact the bottom line, talk to the business," advises Forrester analyst Doug Washburn, in a report, Is Green IT Your Emperor with No Clothes?

"Even if the financial benefits of your greening effort accrue to the facilities group, the company overall is profiting and aligning IT operations with the business."

Washburn also suggests IT leaders can use green as a way of developing staff skills.

"Inspire and develop staff by forming a green team," he urges. "Green IT is a complex topic requiring holistic thinking and creative solutions, exactly the skills the IT organization of the future needs to embrace.

Forming a green team will foster these skills within IT and help senior management identify staff members looking to go beyond their regular call of duty. Given that the second most popular driver (measured in an earlier Forrester analysis of IT departments) for pursuing green IT is to "do the right thing for the environment," the effort is likely to be well received by your staff.

The team should include facilities management staff and strategic allies such as VPs from your lines of business, marketing, and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) office -- who can drive buy-in, promotion, and even funding, Forrester suggests.

Get this right and IT can lead the business on environmental issues, claims Washburn.

"While the rampant growth in IT's energy use needs to be addressed, it pales in significance when compared with that consumed by office buildings and industrial facilities.

"As improved energy measurement and management technologies proliferate, IT can play a major role to reduce companywide energy consumption as the energy czar -- a term coined by the Uptime Institute and McKinsey & Company.

Since reduced energy use offers tangible environmental and financial savings -- unlike more discrete IT projects -- the energy czar is a role that IT ops executives will proactively begin to take ownership of."

Computerworld UK is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Nearly 100 domains related to Hurricane Gustav have been registered in the past 48 hours, security experts said Sunday, some of which may be used by bogus charity and relief scams after the storm strikes the U.S. Gulf Coast.

According to television station KTAL in Shreveport, La., the office of Louisiana's Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has warned residents of Gustav phishing attacks already in progress.

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On Saturday, Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC), noted that numerous domains containing the word "gustav," "charity," "hurricane," and "relief" had been recently registered.

"On the day [Hurricane] Katrina hit New Orleans [in 2005] hundreds of donation sites appeared online, many if not most were scam sites," said Sachs in a post yesterday to the ISC research blog. "Well this time around it looks like the people who like to register domain names in anticipation of a storm's arrival have already started registering them for Gustav."

By Sunday, Sachs had listed almost 100 Gustav sites culled from the DomainTools' Web site. "Most of these sites are parked domains and many of them are for sale," he said. "They will be worth monitoring, particularly if'donate here' messages appear."

Several of the domains, in fact, do appear to be parked, or registered but not fleshed out with content. Others, including helpgustavictims.com and helpgustavvictions.net, were for sale on eBay as of mid-day Sunday.

A few, however, led to legitimate charities. The domain gustavcharity.com, for example, redirected users to the Web site of the evangelical Christian organization "Samaritan's Purse," while contributegustav.org took users to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation's site.

Another security expert, Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, also posted a list of parked domains that may be used for scamming purposes. "Anytime we've seen a natural disaster, we've been on the lookup for domains which might be abused for fraud," said Warner Sunday on his blog. "It was only natural then that I retuned my settings at DomainTools yesterday to alert on Gustav domains."

Warner also pointed out a handful of domains that led to legitimate content.

Three years ago, before and after Hurricanes Katrina slammed into New Orleans, security researchers noted a similar run-up of domain registrations. Enough were used for phony relief scams, often by identity thieves hoping to trick consumers into divulging personal information, that the U.S. Department of Justice set up a Katrina anti-fraud task force.

More than a year later, two brothers were convicted on federal charges for running a fake Salvation Army site that solicited money, supposedly for Katrina relief efforts. The pair, Steven and Bartholomew Stephens, were sentenced to more than 100 months in prison for the scam last December.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google's surprise announcement of a new browser, Chrome, via a Web comic book could prove to be another game-changing development for the Internet in the coming years.

The browser presents a serious challenge to companies such as Microsoft and Apple, which hope their Web browsers will be the predominant ones used on the Internet and a gateway to more of their products.

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With Chrome, Google is promising people faster browsing, better security, and compatibility across multiple operating systems. Google ultimately sees Chrome as the doorway for broader use of its Web-based applications, which threaten the desktop-based software that has traditionally been Microsoft's domain.

Google published a 38-page comic book describing Chrome's features, a comprehensive view of what Google thinks people will want from a browser. Google's announcement of Chrome "reads almost like an operating system release, not a browser release," said David Mitchell, senior vice president for IT research at Ovum.

The company has also taken a new approach to dealing with JavaScript, the coding language used to create more interactive Web pages and Web services. Google has created its own virtual machine for processing JavaScript faster. It means Web services such as Gmail will, in theory, work faster.

But JavaScript can also be buggy on some Web pages and cause a browser to crash. Google says Chrome can manage that problem better, too. Tabs -- a common feature in browsers -- allow multiple Web pages to be opened. But if one of those tabs encounters bad JavaScript, the whole browser will crash. Google said that Chrome isolates those tabs so if one crashes, it doesn't crash the whole application.

Google has also incorporated its Gears toolkit into Chrome. Gears lets developers create applications that can be used offline, synching data with Web services when Internet access is available again. It's a key part of Google's strategy to embellish its Web-based applications with the convenience of desktop applications.

Chrome also takes a new approach to security. Pop-ups -- annoying boxes triggered by JavaScript -- will be isolated to an individual tab. Chrome can also block malicious programs on the Web from installing themselves on a PC's hard drive, using a technique known as sandboxing.

Google will make the code for Chrome open source. "It's in our interest to make the Internet better, and without competition, we have stagnation," said the comic book character representing Chris DiBona, Google's open source programs manager.

The introduction of Chrome raises concern that Google could use its browser -- much as Microsoft did with Internet Explorer -- to lock users in by offering features that are difficult for other browser makers to replicate.

However, it's not likely Google would risk incurring the backlash from people who advocate that Web-browser makers should conform to agreed-upon standards to make Web pages work for everyone, regardless of the browser they're using, Mitchell said.

Another question is how Chrome will impact Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser project and Opera Software's Opera browser. Google isn't unhappy with Firefox, as the two companies have a harmonious relationship, said Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe.

At the end of August, Microsoft's share of the browser market was 72.15 percent and falling, with Firefox holding 19.73 percent and Safari 6.37 percent, according to Hitslink, a service of Net Applications.

Google's Chrome project likely sprouted after worries over how Internet Explorer (IE) handles Google's applications since Explorer's development is controlled by one of its chief competitors, Nitot said. More than 70 percent of Internet surfers use IE, primarily because it ships with the all-dominant Windows operating system.

"Right now Google is delivering their services mostly through IE, which is an uncomfortable situation considering that IE is not very good in terms of performance," Nitot said.

Microsoft, which recently released the second beta version of IE 8, said people will pick its browser for its privacy and data control features. "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose IE 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips," according to Dean Hachamovitch, Explorer's general manager.

But where does that leave Mozilla's Firefox? Mitchell said Chrome will likely just help fuel confidence open-source software development, where code is not kept secret as it is in companies such as Microsoft and is open to peer review.

"It's a huge mistake to view this as a head-to-head battle of Firefox versus Chrome," Mitchell said. "There's plenty of space for more consumer choice. If it [Chrome] gains market share, it will take it from all around."

CIOs will probably be open to letting users install Chrome as enterprise applications become less dependent on a specific browser to run, Mitchell said. "The category of applications that are only supporting IE are declining anyway," he said.

Opera spokesman Tor Odland said Google the introduction of Chrome is fine as long as it adheres to Web standards. Apple declined to comment.

(Mikael Ricknas in Stockholm and Peter Sayer in Paris contributed to this report.)

With an upgrade to its software development framework for PHP scheduled for release today, Zend Technologies is mixing in client-side AJAX capabilities with server-side PHP functionality.

Zend Framework 1.6, the company's open-source framework, integrates with the Dojo Toolkit for AJAX. Developers thus gain front-end rich Internet application capabilities via Dojo (version 1.1.1 of Dojo will ship with Zend's framework); integration between Zend and Dojo is accomplished via a piece of software called Zend_Dojo.

In this approach, developers would use Zend Framework to build JavaScript-enabled Web applications that Zend Framework renders, said Wil Sinclair, the Zend project lead for Zend Framework.

Although Zend worked with the Dojo Foundation on the Dojo integration, the Zend Framework still can be used with other AJAX technologies.

Also added in version 1.6 is full support for SOAP Web services. With that support, developers could build integration with an application based on Microsoft's .Net Framework. Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester Research analyst, lauded the SOAP backing in version 1.6. "SOAP support is something many enterprise IT shops will find interesting. Many have made significant investments in SOAP-based SOA strategies but would still like to take advantage of lighter weight Web-based frameworks that use dynamic languages like PHP or Ruby. The updated version of Zend Framework should help them significantly," Hammond said.

Another capability highlighted in Model/View/Controller-enabled (MVC) Zend Framework 1.6 is unit testing for controllers on top of the existing object-level unit testing. This benefits agile and test-driven development, Zend's Sinclair said. Unit tests on controllers allow developers to test realistic user scenarios, such as log-ins or balance transfers, he said. The MVC support allows developers to separate applications into presentation and business logic, he added.

Version 1.6 features a preview implementation of the Zend_Tool project, for creating projects and project assets and managing them. This capability is important for rapid application development, Sinclair said. Zend Framework also features a "use at will" architecture, enabling developers to use separate components such as a forms creation component.

Intel has snapped up British Linux house Opened Hand in another sign of the growing interest in the use of the operating system on mobile devices.

Last month, research from ABI Research said that Linux was set to take the lion's share of the market for the so-called mobile internet devices, those bigger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop.

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Intel had already invested in this area by setting up Linux project Moblin for the development of these devices.

In a statement posted on Opened Hand's Web site, the company said that it was looking forward to working with the chip giant. "The OpenedHand team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Centre and will focus on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, the optimised software stack for Intel Atom processors."

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca said that the move was a demonstration of the interest in Linux as a mobile platform. "We saw it earlier this year with Nokia buying Trolltech, it's a sign that the mobile space is not as clear cut as the something like the PC one. There you have a market dominated by PCs with Macs for some specialist users, but mobiles are not like that -- there's a diverse range of products, and, if anything, it's becoming more diverse," he said.

He said that he thought that Intel's purchase was a way for the chip giant to keep its own options open. "We don't know how this market is going to shape up and it's important to have that diverse range of platforms.

OpenedHand employees will continue their existing projects. The statement said that Intel will continue supporting open source projects currently led by OpenedHand staff, such as the Clutter and Matchbox projects, and in most cases, will accelerate these projects as they become an integral part of Moblin.

Bamforth said that the problem with multiplicity of mobile devices was that it made it more awkward for IT directors looking to incorporate mobile products within a corporate comms network. "The IT manager will need to look for more powerful tools to manage these devices, otherwise it's like herding cats. The other option is outsourcing that management and I expect to see a few more companies adopt that approach."

Intel was approached for comment but had not responded by the time we'd gone to press.

Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google has added a video sharing component to its Apps Premier suite of hosted communication and collaboration software, betting that companies will find it useful for a variety of workplace uses.

The Google Video service was due to debut in Apps Premier on Tuesday, allowing end-users to upload clips and share them with co-workers using an interface very similar to Google's YouTube, the most popular video sharing service in the consumer market.

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Apps Premier is the fee-based version of the suite, which also has free editions like Standard and Education. Google is adding the video application without raising the price of Apps Premier, which costs $50 per user per year.

As online video has gone mainstream among consumers, Google believes that organizations of all sizes will benefit from extending their communication with employees via clips for purposes like training, company announcements and broadcasting company events.

Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise, said Apps Premier's video application will change how people collaborate at work. Like the rest of Apps Premier, it is designed to be simple enough for all employees to use it.

Each clip can be up to 300MB in size, and Apps Premier subscribers get 3GB of video storage per user account. Administrators will have a variety of controls over the service, such as being able to edit or remove clips, generate usage reports and create tag taxonomies.

The Apps Education edition will also gain video capabilities as a free trial between Sept. 8 and March 9 next year. Afterward, it will cost $10 per user per year.

Google is confident that the video application will give Apps Premier a significant differentiator in the market, since the cost of implementing and running a video-upload and -sharing system puts it beyond the means of most businesses.

The Apps Premier video service will run off the same infrastructure as YouTube and use that service's technology for flagging copyright and inappropriate content, Glotzbach said.

The Apps suite also includes Gmail; Talk; Calendar; Sites; the Docs word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations software; and other applications.

With Apps, Google is championing the popular SaaS (software as a service) model, in which vendors host applications in their datacenters and deliver them via the Internet. The SaaS approach is seen by its backers as the future of software, which has traditionally been installed by customers on their own facilities and hardware.

Delivering applications from the Internet "cloud" reduces the effort and cost customers have to invest in installing and maintaining software. In addition, these Web-hosted applications are designed to promote and simplify how co-workers share and collaborate, since documents reside on a central server and not on individual PCs.

However, concerns exist about the security of hosting software and data in a vendor datacenter and the loss of control over application performance and availability when vendor servers crash. Another issue with hosted applications is accessing them without an Internet connection, something Google is addressing with its Gears browser plug-in.

2nd Wind Exercise Equipment adopted Google Apps in February for its roughly 330 employees when it faced a Microsoft Exchange upgrade that also involved buying new hardware and would have cost around $225,000.

After researching Apps Premier, the Minneapolis retailer concluded that the Google suite met its requirements at a fraction of the cost of the Exchange upgrade, said Tom Kelly, 2nd Wind's chief financial officer and CIO. The company has also cut down significantly on its Microsoft Office licenses.

The company is pleased with Apps Premier, and more so now with the video service, which it had a chance to test in recent months. It is using it for training and corporate communications, and was also able to move its TV commercials from its former video storage provider to the Google suite, eliminating a $12,000-per-year expense, Kelly said.

The quality of the video streaming has been very good. "It's very quick, very smooth. We've had no buffering issues at all," he said.

Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann said the video service is "a potentially very powerful business tool, particularly from the training perspective."

It will be in Google's best interest to evangelize among Apps Premier administrators the various scenarios and uses in which creating and uploading a video can be useful, Wettemann said.

"There are many cases in the business environment where, if I could shoot a quick little video to show people something, I could get my point across much more effectively than with e-mail or a phone conversation," she said.

Social-networking site provider Socialcast announced a "self-service" pricing model on Tuesday that allows smaller customers to get up and running without the need for a formal sales process.

"Our [sales] pipeline is filled with smaller organizations," said CEO Tim Young. "We thought you'd have to have at least 400, 500 employees to have the gravitational pull for [a social network] but we found there is benefit even for small teams."

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

Smaller companies also face deployment challenges, given their general lack of on-site IT staff and money for outsourcing, Young added.

Beginning Monday, customers with fewer than 1,000 users can sign up for Socialcast's hosted service on a month-to-month basis for $5 per user per month, using a credit card.

Socialcast is making the announcement as part of its 3.0 release, which also features an improved user interface and additional commenting and search capabilities.

The company is one of many "white label" social-networking vendors, which in general, enable users to customize the site to their preferred needs. Socialcast backs up and archives material created by customer networks, and an array of data classification measures helps make the information more searchable. It can also integrate with e-mail and incorporate third-party feeds from services like Twitter, YouTube, and Google Talk.

While data is stored on the vendor's servers, Socialcast networks can be also connected with customers' LDAP and Active Directory systems for authentication.

Socialcast is built with the Web application framework Ruby on Rails, a platform that has seen its scalability questioned due to high-profile crashes of sites like Twitter.

"Ruby has done a lot in the last year to address scaling issues. It can be done, and very well -- it's how much experience your company has scaling Ruby," Young said.

The vendor's larger customers include the Hot Topic clothing chain and Guitar Center, Young said.

Use-case scenarios for social networks abound in retail, according to Young. For example, if a Guitar Center customer brings in a vintage guitar for repair but the local store workers don't know how to fix it, they could search network profiles for an employee who does, he said.

However, both companies like Socialcast and would-be social-networking users face a similar challenge -- dealing with the roughly 100 similar vendors in the market.

Those numbers show there is no real innovation left in the space, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang: "The technology is commodity."

Instead, customers should focus on factors besides features and functions, according to Owyang.

Social-networking vendors should meet the usual criteria for enterprises making software purchases, such as ongoing revenue streams, capital on hand and an ongoing list of large clients, he said.

But more importantly, a vendor must be able to deliver the needed services, from integration services to education and change management.

And before buying anything, companies should determine whether their employees are "joiners," the type of people who are interested in social networking to begin with.

"Do the research first," he said. "Just because you build it doesn't mean anyone is going to come."

The University of California-Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business appears to be taking this cautious approach. The school is about to begin a pilot program through which 20 to 30 students use Socialcast, said Jon Masciana, director of admissions recruiting.

While impressed by Socialcast's knowledge management and archiving functions, Masciana said the new pricing option would help the school determine who is the best target for the software as it moves forward.

"If we did a whole agreement with all of our students, it's unclear how many would be active contributors," he said.

Mobile phone OS developer Symbian's growth continues to slow down, the company reported on Wednesday.

The number of phones shipped with the OS inside in the second quarter increased by just 5 percent year on year. In the first quarter, the annual growth rate was 16.5 percent, and last year it grew even faster.

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Yet the smartphone market as a whole continued to grow at 16 percent year on year during the second quarter, according to Gartner.

A total of 19.6 million Symbian based phones shipped between April and June, compared to 18.7 million units during the second quarter last year and 18.5 million during the first three months of 2008, according to Symbian.

The marked slowdown is alarming, according to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. He sees a couple of explanations for it. Since most Symbian devices are high-end phones, the company is dependent on more mature markets where phone sales have slowed. But the main reason is that Nokia has been quiet on the Symbian front, and Symbian sales are dominated by the Finnish phone giant, according to Blaber.

Sales of Symbian-based devices are expected to pick up in the second half, though, as Nokia launches phones like the N96. The platform will also get a boost from other devices, such as Samsung's Innov8, which has an 8-megapixel camera and HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) at 7.2M bps, according to Blaber.

The smartphone market is about to go through some major changes. Competition is heating up, with Apple's iPhone going global and the first Google Android phones also on the way.

While other players enter the market, or expand their position, those counting on Symbian are concentrating their efforts and pulling together. At the end of June, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo announced their intent to unite Symbian OS and other software that build on it, including S60, UIQ and MOAP(S), to create one open mobile software platform.

The first version of the unified platform will become available during the first half of 2010, but that is not fast enough for Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. To keep up with the competition she thinks it has be brought forward to some time next year.

Microsoft is preparing to launch in the next few months a Web site called Skymarket to sell Windows Mobile OS applications, a job advertisement suggests.

The clue to the launch is a job advertisement spotted by blogger Long Zheng. Microsoft is looking for a senior product manager who would oversee the marketing and development for the service, intended to complement the eventual release of the next mobile OS, Windows Mobile 7.

Third-party developers have built more than 15,000 applications for Windows Mobile, but the applications are sold through a multitude of vendors on different Web sites.

The advertisement would suggest that Microsoft is aiming for something closer to Apple's one-stop shop approach with its iTunes Store, which also sells applications for the iPhone. Those applications, which now number more than 1,000, are vetted by Apple and are not sold elsewhere.

One of the goals listed in Microsoft's ad for the position is making "the Windows Mobile marketplace 'the place to be' for developers wishing to distribute and monetize their Windows Mobile applications."

Microsoft has already taken a shot at loosely roping its applications under one online roof with its Windows Mobile Catalog.

But the site is a facade, with links leading to vendors such as Pocketland, Handango, and MobiHand that handle the transaction and downloads. By contrast, Apple's applications can be purchased and downloaded on its iPhone wirelessly.

Google is launching a beta version of its own Web browser on Tuesday in more than 100 countries, the company announced Monday in a blog posting.

The open-source browser, called Chrome, first appeared on an unofficial Google blog in the form of a comic book. "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," the company said in the official announcement that appeared late Monday afternoon after the Internet began buzzing about the comic-book site. The blog posting was by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director.

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The browser window is "streamlined and simple," they said, describing in words what can be seen visually at the unofficial blog, Google Blogoscoped. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the Web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go," the blog posting said.

Chrome will run Web applications "much better," they wrote, with tabs kept in an isolated "sandbox," which will prevent "one tab from crashing into another and provide improved protection from rogue sites." Better speed and responsiveness are also part of Chrome, which features "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers."

Components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox are part of the open-source Chrome, they said.

Updated information about the browser and its availability Tuesday will be provided at the company blog, they said.

Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) requires more than double the system memory of its main rival, Mozilla's Firefox, and spawns nearly six times the number of processor threads, a performance researcher said today.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 2 also consumes 52 percent more memory than its predecessor, IE7, and uses almost three times as many threads, said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based maker of PC performance testing software.

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"IE8 is epically porcine," said Barth. "Microsoft has gone to epic levels of bloat."

Barth tested IE8 Beta 2, IE7, and Firefox 3.0.1 in a 10-site scenario that involved media-rich domains such as boston.com, channel9.com, cnet.com, infoworld.com, nytimes.com, and others. Each site was opened by each browser in a separate tab, then links on those sites were opened in new tabs. Both Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight were installed as plug-ins for each browser.

By test end, IE8 Beta 2 had grabbed 380MB of memory on the 2GB-equipped system running Windows Vista, while IE7 accounted for 250GB and Firefox 3.0.1, the most-recent version of the open source browser, had taken 159MB. When the same tests were run under Windows XP, each browser consumed slightly less memory than in Vista; IE8 Beta 2, however, continued to lead the competition by wide margins.

"When Windows XP starts, the entire OS takes 130 to 150MB," said Barth. "Suddenly you're l