Oracle introduced a new application grid that employs technology acquired through its purchase of BEA Systems.

Application grids eschew the traditional approach that dedicates a piece of hardware to serving a particular application. Instead, the grid format creates a pool of resources that can be provisioned dynamically at runtime.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

This can help IT shops respond to spikes in demand for a given application. For example, a bank may have certain hours of the day when its online banking application is heavily hit, and therefore needs more resources, whereas an account reconciliation program might need additional power at a different time of day, said Rick Schultz, vice president of product marketing, at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Oracle is talking about application grids now because of the recent BEA purchase, but also because many customers who have applied grid technology to their database tiers are thinking about implementing a similar model at the middleware level, according to Schultz.

Oracle WebLogic Application Grid components include Oracle Coherence, an in-memory data grid; JRockit Real-Time and JRockit Mission Control, the Java virtual machine and accompanying toolset Oracle gained from BEA; and Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, another BEA-developed product, for managing the service-level agreements of grid-enabled applications.

The stack is "application-server-agnostic," able to work with competing products such as WebSphere and JBoss as well as Oracle's own WebLogic Server, according to a FAQ sheet.

Speciality vendors like Gigaspaces and Appistry also sell application grid technology.

When Google announced the Open Handset Alliance (a group of wireless industry players looking to get their names associated with Google's Android open mobile platform project), true open-source smartphones were a great idea that seemed far from commercial realization. This will change on October 22, when the T-Mobile G1 ? the product of an exclusive partnership among T-Mobile, Google, and Asian handset manufacturer HTC -- becomes the first shipping mobile device based on the Android platform.

The Android platform is open source -- Google has committed to publishing the source code for the entire platform, not just an application-level SDK. In the words of one developer interviewed for the T-Mobile launch event, "There's nobody telling you 'you can't do that'."

In truth, T-Mobile is placing limits on T-Mobile G1 users and developers. While the device is open to international roaming within T-Mobile networks, and its baseband radio is compatible with standards used by other GSM and UMTS networks worldwide, the G1 will be locked to T-Mobile networks. T-Mobile has also decided to prohibit the device's use as a so-called "Internet modem," a service that the industry refers to as tethering. Some other handsets, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Nokia models, will tether to laptops and other Bluetooth and USB-equipped computers to a cellular data network. If Android is a truly open platform, a rookie programmer could work around the tethering restriction. To put teeth in the tethering ban, provisions in T-Mobile's data plans subject subscribers who transfer more than 1GB of data per month to dial-up speed limitations as well as possible suspension of their coverage. Some users will bristle at being subjected to any limit, but 1GB is extremely generous for a mobile device, and at least T-Mobile's limit is explicitly stated unlike some competitors'. With its built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, home and office networks, as well as airport and restaurant hot spots, will satisfy T-Mobile G1 users' appetite for downloadable media without eating into their monthly bit budget.

Carrier locking, T-Mobile's temporary Android exclusive, and prohibition of tethered use will generate controversy among open-source fans who will likely dominate the T-Mobile G1's initial market. Even so, these protections are needed. Without them, Android has grim commercial prospects because T-Mobile and Google, neither of which is a non-profit operation, have underwritten this effort for three years, and they need assured payback on their R & D. If gray market T-Mobile G1 (a.k.a. HTC Dream) handsets become available that are unlocked to operate on competing networks, T-Mobile and Google, along with all of the third parties that hope to charge for Android software and services offered through Google's Android Market, will end up in the red, and Android will flop. It behooves Android developers who want the device to succeed to further, not thwart, T-Mobile's and Google's efforts to make money with this and future devices.

T-Mobile and Google went out of their way to drain the potentially intimidating geek factor out of the G1. They want this to be a mainstream, slightly upscale consumer phone befitting its subsidized price of $179. T-Mobile was careful to demonstrate the handset's consumer-friendly driving experience using a video laden with jump-cuts, and in which a finger prominently obscured the display. T-Mobile hastened to qualify the video as a "just a teaser." It ushered attendees of the launch event to rooms downstairs where devices were available to touch and drive. I will find my own way to drive the G1 between now and the launch date. YouTube renderings of the experience will abound in the meantime. If they're not shot with T-Mobile's press conference table in the background, suspect it as a fake.

If you've already decided that you want a T-Mobile G1, as I said at the top of this story, the magic begins on October 22. I like that T-Mobile's existing customers, which ranks include myself (through T-Mobile's goodwill), will be able to pre-order the G1 on-line. Everybody else can queue up at T-Mobile stores and authorized retailers when the phone goes on sale. Don't expect any shortages, real or otherwise; T-Mobile G1 won't be a million-seller in its first weekend. Expect G1 to pick up steam as apps come on-line and early consumers start addressing usability. If Google keeps to its promise to open Android to all, the platform will evolve at a pace that thrills customers and shows T-Mobile and Google that their bets were well placed.

Even though three companies hosted the launch event and the software is backed by a consortium, the introduction of the first Android phone made it very clear that Android is about one company: Google.

Android is Google's attempt to dominate the mobile advertising market, just as it has dominated the online PC advertising market, said Craig Wigginton, industry leader for Deloitte's telecommunications practice. "Their number-one driver for pushing this is the advertising model," he said.

[ Special report: All about Google's Android mobile OS ]

But in order to grab a major share of the mobile advertising market, Google will have to convince a large number of people -- including business users -- to buy Android phones. That's a significant challenge in the increasingly crowded mobile phone market.

The G1, the first Android phone introduced by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC on Tuesday, comes loaded with Google applications, including Gmail, Gtalk, Maps, and YouTube. The home screen includes just one item: a Google search bar. Each of those applications is an opportunity for Google to deliver advertisements to users.

"Google is moving into the mobile devices market not to become yet another mobile phone manufacturer, but to enable a large addressable market for its services and applications," agreed Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner.

Around the world, there are 3.5 billion mobile-phone users. Just a fraction as many have computers. "Google has been very successful in the PC marketplace from an advertising perspective, so I think this can be a phenomenal source of revenue for them," Wigginton said.

Mobile advertising so far is a small market, but some analysts have high hopes for growth in the future. M:Metrics found that mobile display advertising was an approximately $200 million industry last year, a figure analysts there expect to at least double this year. Analysts at Heavy Reading predict that the mobile advertising industry will exceed $10 billion in annual revenue in 2013.

But Google faces a major challenge in trying to get the phones into hands of users as it is up against some strong competitors, including the iPhone. Researchers at Strategy Analytics predict that 400,000 people will buy the G1 by the end of the year. That compares to 1 million people who recently bought the 3G iPhone on its opening weekend.

Google and T-Mobile appear to be mainly hoping that mass-market consumers will buy the phone, even though smartphones have traditionally appealed most to business users. The G1 lacks some features that business users might want. For example, it doesn't support Exchange mail, although it could if a developer builds the application.

J. Gold Associates recently conducted a study of large and small businesses regarding their expectations for which mobile platform they expect to use within the next three years. The study of North American companies found that Android comes in last place, with 4.8 percent of businesses in the study saying that the platform will be important to them within the next three years.

Microsoft doesn't see Android as a competitor to Windows Mobile. "It's not even supporting Exchange, so I really doubt this is going to be going after the market that we do," said Scott Rockfeld, group product manager at Microsoft's Windows Mobile group. Microsoft has recently tweaked its marketing message from pitching Windows Mobile as exclusively a business tool to portraying the device as a single phone that appeals to people while they're working and playing.

Still, because Android is an open platform, developers can build applications that might interest enterprise users. "With the open sourcing, we should see as many enterprise apps as we would see consumer apps," said Wigginton.

Google's success in the market could benefit all mobile users, be they consumers or business users, in the form of lower prices. Onlookers have speculated that Google could help subsidize Android phones using revenue earned from advertising to the devices. "I don't know if Google is subsidizing it or not, but it's not out of the realm of possibilities," said Wigginton. The G1 will cost $179 when it becomes available in late October in the U.S.

Some analysts say they don't expect Android to be an overnight success, but given time it could challenge its competitors. "The G1 represents a promising start, and Google has pockets deep enough to outspend and compete with its competitors," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight.

Once other Android phones start appearing, the platform could gain momentum. "There will be more to come in 2009 when manufacturers such as Samsung and LG will deliver their devices. Android has the potential to become the de facto operating system for Linux, and we expect sales to reach around 10 percent of the smartphone market in 2011," said Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza.

It's unclear yet which operator will launch the next Android phone. T-Mobile appears to have gotten a head start on its competitors. During the launch event on Tuesday, Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer for T-Mobile USA, mentioned that the operator had been working with Google and HTC as far back as three years ago. Their partnership then predates the introduction of Android and the alliance of companies that back it in November 2007. Sprint, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, and other operators around the globe are also members of the consortium.

Oracle is mapping out two upgrades to the enterprise portal software package acquired when the company bought BEA Systems.

Highlighted at the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 conference in San Francisco on Monday evening, plans call for new releases of Oracle WebCenter Interaction, formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction, later this year and in 2009.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

The product offers many uses, said Ajay Gandhi, senior director of product management for Enterprise 2.0 and portal products at Oracle. Among these uses are social networking and serving as a front end to a composite application in an SOA stack. Gandhi came over to Oracle from BEA, which Oracle acquired earlier this year.

WebCenter Interaction has become part of Oracle's WebCenter Suite. The upcoming fall release, WebCenter Interaction 10g R3, serves as the first Oracle-branded version of the product, Gandhi said.

"The big thing is it's designed to work with Oracle's Web 2.0-based WebCenter Services and Oracle's Universal Content Management [platform]," Gandhi said during a follow-up interview. WebCenter Services features Web 2.0 services like wikis and blogs;

Also featured in the 10g R3 product are improvements to adaptive layouts and the UI. "It's really a release designed to come out with Oracle branding, [the] Oracle look and feel," Gandhi said.

The fall release also supports Java Development Kit 1.6, enabling developers writing portlets to use the current Java standard, said Gandhi.

The second half of 2009 will see the Neo release of WebCenter Interaction, featuring support for deployment on Windows Server 2008. The official name of the release is Oracle WebCenter Interaction 11g.

Another key capability is microblogging, which leverages small messages tracked on a user's profile page. Activity streams, for tracking activities relevant to work, are leveraged as part of the overarching WebCenter Services suite.

A "People Connections" capability in 11g is a Web 2.0 service offering such functionality as content recommendations. Version 11g also bridges with Microsoft SharePoint Web Part portlets.

Also featured in 11g is WebCenter Collaboration, a renaming of the AquaLogic Collaboration module that is used to create community- and project-based workspaces. The UI will be more dynamic, featuring tagging capabilities and RSS subscriptions. It also will be integrated with Microsoft Office 2007.

The Neo release will boost standards support around content integration and portlets consumption; the company still is ironing out which specific standards will be backed, Gandhi said.

A user of the portal software, who first deployed it when it was a Plumtree product, said he has been satisfied with Oracle's acquisition. But the change has meant another round of transition, said the user, Geoff Garcia, producer for enterprise portal at March of Dimes.

"Going from Plumtree to BEA, we were still going through that transition," Garcia said. "Now, we've got a whole [new] transition with another name change."

March of Dimes has been scheduled to redo its support contract but that has been put on hold indefinitely since the merger, said Garcia.

BEA acquired Plumtree in 2005.

Mobile navigation and software vendor TeleNav took a page from Research In Motion's book with a server that can mediate between TeleNav's software and existing enterprise applications.

The company's TeleNav Track platform includes tools for managing employees who work out of the office as well as for sending information from the field. It's based on TeleNav's navigation software for mobile phones, which can keep supervisors apprised of workers' locations via GPS as well as provide maps and turn-by-turn directions. TeleNav is available for a variety of Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry devices as well as on other types of phones through Brew and J2ME (Java 2, Micro Edition).

[ Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Easy-to-use forms for cell phone screens are a key attribute of TeleNav Track. They can be adapted to particular types of reports required for individual enterprises, said Keith Halasy, TeleNav's senior marketing manager for business-to-business products. Data from TeleNav can be adapted to go into existing data-entry and database systems, including the homegrown applications commonly used in small businesses, he said. But so far, that has required ad-hoc development for each enterprise system, and it's been hard to handle more than one, according to Halasy.

The TeleNav Enterprise Server (TES), available starting Tuesday with the newly introduced TeleNav Track 4.1, is designed to consolidate all types of data conversions in one platform and make it easier to write software for each of those processes. With relative ease, enterprises can set up conversions to multiple formats, Halasy said. TeleNav can also do this work as an added service.

New York's Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT) program uses TeleNav Track for reporting potholes, sinkholes and other conditions to various city agencies for repair. About 15 employees ride scooters around the city, covering roughly every street within a month, and send in a report via a BlackBerry handset for each problem they find. The program was launched last year on short notice, and the city scrambled to put together software that could adapt TeleNav Track data to each agency's preferred format, said Girish Chhugani, executive director of citywide technology initiatives.

Setting up the system for entering street-condition reports was relatively easy and only took about two months, Chhugani said.

"We didn't even really have to develop anything. All we had to do was create forms," Chhugani said. "If we sat down and did all that ... it would have been another ten months."

However, there was some back-end work required to send the data from those forms into all the systems that needed it, including a Siebel system for the city's 311 information service and a mainframe at the Department of Transportation, he said. The city used Visual Basic and .Net to create applications for those needs.

With the TES, Chhugani hopes to further automate that process, allowing the back-end databases to be automatically populated. Like RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the TES sits behind an enterprise firewall and acts as a broker between the mobile infrastructure and enterprise back-end systems. A single server, rather than an array of different scripts, will be easier to maintain in the long run, Chhugani said.

In addition to field reporting, TeleNav allows the SCOUT program to track employees to see whether they are covering their territories and lets employees clock in and out from the field. The city is working with TeleNav to give them GPS-controlled automated directions around their routes. The biggest problem the city has encountered has been the sometimes poor GPS coverage in areas with many tall buildings, Chhugani said.

Other new features in TeleNav Track 4.1 include Team Timecard, which lets supervisors clock entire crews in and out from a mobile device; controls to prevent users from clocking excessive overtime; and a Hot Key Alert, which lets a worker send an alert message to a supervisor quickly and discreetly with just a few keystrokes.

The TES is priced starting at $3,000 for between 25 and 50 users, with a $500 annual maintenance fee. It is also available as a managed server. TeleNav Track 4.1 starts at $12.95 per user per month and is sold through mobile operators.

The new T-Mobile G1 wireless phone, announced Tuesday by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC, generated attention for its use of the open Android platform, but it will be locked to the T-Mobile USA network and it doesn't appear to be heavily focused on business users.

"It appears they have provided an Android phone that is only half open," said Jack Gold , an analyst at J. Gold Associates in Northboro, Mass.

[ Special report: Google Android: Invader from beyond ]

Moreover, the absence of support for Microsoft Exchange e-mail or another robust business-focused e-mail system will limit the G1's usefulness to all but the smallest businesses, Gold added. "You can't use Gmail in the enterprise."

Even T-Mobile conceded the device will be more focused on consumers. "This device will have mass appeal and something for everybody," said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer at T-Mobile USA in a webcast announcement of the $179 device. Still he quickly added: "We expect it to be more [for the] consumer, not necessarily enterprise, but a lot of enterprise workers will come ... and use it as well."

Brodman defended the locking of the device to T-Mobile's GSM and 3G HSPA networks, noting that a faster 3G network will give G1 applications the "best experience." The phone will function on 2G networks, he said, adding there will be a "good experience on 2G, but the best on Wi-Fi and 3G."

About 16 cities have HSPA service from T-Mobile Tuesday, and 22 cities will be on that 3G network by the time of the U.S. launch of the G1 on Oct. 22. About 27 markets will have HSPA service in mid-November, representing 80 percent of T-Mobile USA's 31 million customers, Brodman said.

The bigger market advantage will be in Europe, where 100 million T-Mobile International customers will have the phone in the first quarter of next year, starting with users in the U.K. in early November, said Christopher Schlaffer, innovation officer at Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile.

Inevitably, users will compare the G1 to Apple's iPhone 3G , which garnered more credibility among business users than its predecessor thanks to new features such as a robust e-mail connection with Microsoft Exchange. But Google's senior director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, said that while the G1 will allow users to read Microsoft Word documents and PDFs, it won't support for Exchange.

"It's a good opportunity for third parties" to provide an Exchange application, he noted, adding that the G1 supports Gmail from Google. "Gmail is pretty robust, and you can search e-mail pretty fast with it."

Brodman also said that the G1 does not yet support Skype and will not support iTunes, although it supports the iTunes code and could support it if Apple unlocked the digital rights.

Gold's research includes a recent survey of 290 businesses in North America, which showed that T-Mobile has been a small player with business users, with about 8 percent those surveyed reporting that they use the carrier. AT&T leads that group, followed by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, Gold said.

Having the phone locked to T-Mobile "is a problem, absolutely," especially for potential business users, Gold added. Even as iPhone 3G has received criticism for being locked to AT&T in the U.S., Apple has reached out to a larger business community with its latest release.

A major factor for many businesses that might hear from users who want to use the G1 is whether it will have basic security, such as native encryption or robust user log-on passwords, Gold said. Security was not a focus of the announcement and "remains an unanswered question," he said.

Even if the G1 should most interest consumers, some analysts gave the new device a tepid review. Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said the G1 will appeal to a "somewhat advanced user" who already uses a phone to access the Internet. Still, he said the G1 is not a compelling offer for voice-centric mobile users. "Those will come later."

Even the LiMo Foundation questioned the G1's commitment to openness, noting that it has provided an open Linux platform already used by 23 handsets.

In a statement, Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation asked, "Which services will be made available to mobile consumers on Google Android handsets but not on other open mobile handsets; will G1 users have an open and free choice about whether or not they subscribe to Google's services; why has Google elected to build its own handset platform rather than working collaboratively with the mobile industry on the available alternatives?"

Kevin Burden, an analyst at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y., said T-Mobile and Google have made it "pretty clear" that the G1 is "not really for the business user." But Burden said future Android phones could easily be provided to carriers other than T-Mobile and with capabilities such as Exchange support.

"Google's goal with Android has been to loosen the grip of the carriers and handset makers on the cell phone market, and I think they've partially succeeded with reaching that goal today," Burden said.

Users curious, but don't see Android in the enterpriseBrant Castellow, regional sales executive at Correlagen Diagnostics Inc. in Waltham, Mass., said his initial impression of the G1 is that "it looks a little quirky from the photos I've seen and not that sophisticated." He said that with Google's involvement, he expects it will work well, but he questioned with so many Google applications integrated into the device, "won't they have a tough time capturing the business user like me?"

Castellow uses an iPhone 3G for a variety of business functions, but said he hopes to check out the G1 when it becomes available.

Jorge Mata, the CIO at the Los Angeles Community College District, said the G1 will give Google a "strong first salvo" in the "Clash of the Titans" scenario that is building between Apple, Google, and others. "The openness is a great thing," Mata said.

Mata said Apple's approach, especially tying the iPhone to AT&T, could eventually backfire for Apple. Exchange support and enterprise deployment tools are needed before there will be corporate adoption of G1 or Android phones, he added.

Still, Mata said the college district plans to support the G1 as soon as it is available, and said the Qwerty keyboard and access to Google Apps will make it a useful device for online discussions that are popular with students. "Think unified communications on this phone with productivity in the cloud," he said.

"This [G1] phone is not as sexy as the iPhone, and it does have a certain geek charm, but you should expect this to change in the near term," Mata said. He predicted the G1 will erode sales of Windows Mobile devices and BlackBerries before it starts to erode iPhone sales.

This story was updated on September 23, 2008

Mobile telephone service providers are trying to block a plan to create a free, nationwide wireless broadband network by insisting on protections from interference that would make it impossible to deliver wireless broadband, according to the company proposing the network.

Mobile carriers, led by T-Mobile, are insisting on interference protections for their existing spectrum that goes beyond any current protections and would disqualify several widely used products that currently emit low levels of energy in the radio spectrum, including microwave ovens and Wi-Fi equipment, said officials with M2Z Networks, a startup that proposed building a free wireless network on unused spectrum.

[ Your source for the latest in government IT news and issues: Subscribe to InfoWorld's Government IT newsletter. ]

The two sides are now arguing about the interference questions before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which has released its own proposal to auction spectrum for a free, nationwide network. Mobile carriers don't want a free broadband network that would compete with their own services, John Muleta, M2Z's CEO, said at a Monday press briefing previewing an M2Z filing to the FCC.

Some of the devices that would essentially be prohibited under the interference rules that T-Mobile and other mobile carriers want are devices the carriers themselves sell, Muleta said. If a T-Mobile handset operates at -105 dBm (the ratio of power in decibels to one milliwatt) signal strength, then Wi-Fi equipment and Bluetooth headsets sold by the carriers themselves would interfere, Muleta said. But that's the level of protection T-Mobile wants.

"If you do -105 [dBm], then all these devices are going to start interfering," said Muleta, a former chief of the FCC's wireless telecommunications bureau. "How does that make sense? It doesn't."

The interference protections T-Mobile and other carriers have proposed go beyond the operating capabilities of T-Mobile's mobile phones, added Paul Kolodzy, senior tech advisor to M2Z and a former senior spectrum policy advisor at the FCC. At a -100 dBm signal strength, a T-Mobile handset would drop calls, he said.

A representative of T-Mobile, which provides mobile service in the nearby spectrum, called M2Z's conclusions inaccurate. Microwave ovens and Bluetooth receivers operate on spectrum 100MHz to 200MHz away from T-Mobile's spectrum, while the proposed broadband network would operate in adjacent spectrum, said Patrick Welsh, senior corporate counsel for regulatory affairs at T-Mobile.

"It's complete apples to oranges," he said. "It demonstrates a complete lack of technical knowledge and expertise in this."

In addition, more than five percent of T-Mobile's traffic operates at or below a -105 dBm signal strength, Welsh said. And a T-Mobile proposal to the FCC that would pair the so-called AWS-3 spectrum in the FCC's proposal with another block of spectrum would allow the winning bidder to offer broadband service, he said.

Test results in Seattle earlier this month "clearly showed that there would be significant harmful interference ... under the FCC's proposed rules," Welsh added. "M2Z's wildly inaccurate conclusions can only reflect that either they do not understand the test results or they are being disingenuous."

M2Z's reading of the Seattle tests is that they showed no technical or interference problems, said Kolodzy, who observed the tests. T-Mobile's service and the proposed free network "can coexist ... using the technical rules similar to those that M2Z has been advocating for over two years," he said.

The wrangling over interference goes back to May 2006, when M2Z proposed building a nationwide wireless network, with service available for free, on 20MHz of unused wireless spectrum referred to as AWS-3 spectrum. The FCC sat on the proposal until a year ago, when it proposed to auction about 20MHz of spectrum in the 2155MHz band, with the winner required to use part of it for a free nationwide network.

T-Mobile operates a network that uses nearby AWS-1 spectrum, for which it paid about $4 billion in a 2006 auction.

In June, the FCC asked for comments on a specific proposal that would require the auction winner to use 25 percent of the spectrum's capacity to provide a free broadband network with downstream speeds of at least 768Kbps The FCC also proposed that the operator of the free network filter out pornography and other material that might harm children.

The network filtering proposal has drawn criticism from some civil rights and tech trade groups, who say the filtering mandate is "extraordinarily" broad and would amount to government censorship.

In addition to the other criticisms of T-Mobile, Kolodzy and Muleta noted that T-Mobile handsets are dual-mode, meaning they are able to receive both AWS-1 and PCS (Personal Communications Service). If there was interference with AWS-1 spectrum, a handset would switch to PCS, they said.

Welsh said dual-mode phones can receive both signals, but it's difficult to make the switch in the middle of a call. A phone experiencing interference from a AWS-3 device would likely drop the call instead of switching on the fly from an AWS-1 to PCS signal, he said.

"M2Z wants us to have a network that works sometimes in some places," Welsh said. "T-Mobile wants to design a network that works all the time in all places."

IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair.

IBM published a new set of guidelines it plans to follow, which include encouraging standards bodies to have rules to protect their decisions from "undue influence," a clear reference to competitor Microsoft.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

IBM would like to see loopholes that allow dominant companies to abuse standards processes closed, said Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards. Leaving a standards organization for a lack of reforms would be a "last resort," he said.

"We see this very much as a positive, constructive policy for how we hope to engage," Sutor said.

IBM was one of the most vocal opponents of a file format created by Microsoft and approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as an international standard earlier this year.

Part of the specification, called Office Open XML, is used in Microsoft's latest Office 2007 productivity suite but has yet to be fully implemented by either Microsoft or other software vendors. OOXML is a rival to OpenDocument Format (ODF), also an international standard used in office suites such as OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.

Microsoft submitted OOXML to the ISO under a so-called Fast Track process, which some opponents believed was too rushed and resulted in a poor-quality standard. Many countries and technical experts questioned the need for another standard document format.

A draft standard OOXML was approved by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) in a vote that closed March 29. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela filed appeals over its approval, but the appeals were dismissed in July. The appeals centered in part on alleged irregularities in the ISO's voting process.

In August, the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved the publication of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the official name for the OOXML specification.

IBM's new guidelines for how it will participate in standards organizations was born out of the company's frustration with OOXML, said Andrew Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston who studies standards and intellectual-property issues.

IBM's guidelines were formulated from recommendations from a six-week, Web-based consultation held in May and June. It involved more than 70 experts who discussed how the creation of standards could be improved. Updegrove also participated.

IBM's guidelines are based on its belief that open standards increase the range of software products that are interchangeable. Standards prevent one software vendor from capturing a large part of a market by locking users into a proprietary format and limiting their ability to easily switch to another product.

Microsoft has long been accused of dominating the market for office productivity programs due to its use of closed file formats. Microsoft changed course, however, and submitted its OOXML format to become an international standard, which means other vendors could implement OOXML in their products.

But OOXML was criticized for being unnecessarily complex. Also, Microsoft was accused of pressuring countries to support the standard, which left companies such as IBM fuming. IBM is a longtime backer of ODF.

IBM's new guidelines are intended to pressure organizations such as the ISO and ECMA, an industry-led standards organization, into rethinking their procedures.

That change is not likely to come soon, since IT standards are just a small part of what ISO does, Updegrove said. It sets standards ranging from specifications for fertilizers to clothing sizes to pharmaceuticals.

But IBM is a big player and participates in more national standards bodies and organizations that perhaps any other tech company, Updegrove said.

Even if IBM made good on its threat, withdrawing from a standards body wouldn't cause one to fall apart, Updegrove said. IBM would also suffer, he said.

"If they decided to drop out of ECMA, that kicks away from them that ability to push its favored standard through the system," Updegrove said.

Representatives from the ISO and ECMA could not immediately be reached for comment.

This may seem like a weird time to go to Wall Street to announce a new operating system, but that's what Microsoft did Monday. At a technology conference in New York, the software vendor formally detailed its Windows HPC Server 2008 software, a high-performance computing version of Windows offering some features that may appeal to bailout-seeking financial services firms.

First, the new release -- the successor to Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 technology -- will do far less damage to corporate bottom lines than bad subprime mortgages have inflicted. HPC Server 2008, which can scale from two to 2,000 or more server nodes, costs $475 per node, with each consisting of between one and four processor sockets.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Second, HPC Server 2008 includes new management and diagnostics functionality designed to improve the ability of systems administrators to identify performance issues, such as system latency and its root causes. The software also is integrated with desktop applications; for instance, a user working in Excel can send a processing job to an HPC cluster with just one mouse click, similar to what it takes to launch a printing task.

And third, Microsoft said that HPC Server 2008 will enable users to run complex algorithms, such as those used to determine the amount of risk in investment portfolios, in a parallel environment on multiple server cores without having to rewrite their application code.

Financial services firms are increasingly adopting HPC technologies, something Microsoft pointed out in its announcement that HPC Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing.

Among the people quoted in Microsoft's press release was Jay Dweck, global head of strategies and technology for the institutional securities group at Morgan Stanley, an investment banking firm that late Sunday received permission from the Federal Reserve to become a more regulated bank holding company. "We are closely evaluating Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008 to provide Morgan Stanley with the ability to maintain our competitive edge," Dweck said in a statement.

The ability to run some existing application code without rewriting it to support the Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication protocol may be the most important feature in HPC Server 2008 for financial services firms.

MPI support is needed for parallel applications in which pieces of computing processes running on different servers must communicate with each other. But it isn't required for so-called embarrassingly parallel workloads, in which computations can run independently of each other -- an approach that is often used in financial services workloads, said Kyril Faenov, general manager of high-performance computing at Microsoft.

Making it possible for users to run applications in parallel without having to rewrite them is a move toward broadening the use of HPC technologies, Faenov said in an interview. That capability is a "first step in the much longer path for us to make parallelism easier," he said.

Microsoft has made improving parallelism one of its key HPC goals. For instance, the company is working to enable F#, a functional-programming language that eventually will be integrated into Visual Studio 2008, to be used for parallel development.

Microsoft, which issued a "feature-complete" beta version of HPC Server 2008 in June, said today that evaluation copies of the new software can be downloaded from its Web site. Last week, hardware vendor Cray said it was teaming up with Microsoft and Intel to offer a desktop supercomputer that runs HPC Server 2008 and starts at $25,000.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Software AG's new CentraSite ActiveSOA software will finally merge the company's CentraSite metadata management tool for SOA (service-oriented architecture) with the SOA governance tool Infravio that it acquired through its purchase of webMethods last year.

The company currently offers two products branded CentraSite: the Enterprise edition focused on metadata management, and the Governance edition, a rebranded version of Infravio with a user interface resembling that of CentraSite, said Ivo Totev, the company's chief marketing officer.

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

The new CentraSite ActiveSOA retains the existing CentraSite Enterprise metadata repository, but incorporates the Infravio governance engine and around 50 other new features, he said.

Those features include standards-based integration with other runtime governance tools and a more usable search engine: "You don't have to go through heavy taxonomies" to find things now, said Totev.

There are also change management tools to make it easier to calculate the cost of making changes to services, and an audit trail to ensure changes have all the necessary approvals, he said.

The new version is already available to some customers through a restricted beta testing program, and will be generally available by the end of the year, Totev said.

For users of CentraSite Enterprise edition, "It's a simple upgrade: the metamodels are the same, and you get new governance tools," he said.

Users of the Infravio-based CentraSite Governance edition aren't forgotten, but will have to wait a little longer for Software AG to smooth the upgrade: "We are developing tools to put the metadata in the new repository," said Totev. Once those upgrade automation tools are ready, around the second quarter of next year, it will take a day or so's work to migrate a system with 1,000 assets and 200 policies, he said.

At around $50,000 or ¬50,000 per processor, pricing for CentraSite ActiveSOA will be about the same as for CentraSite Enterprise and around 10 percent to 15 percent less than for the corresponding Infravio product, said Totev.

Fears about the fragile state of the economy aren't translating to IT investment shifts among Oracle OpenWorld 2008 conference attendees this week -- at least not yet. Interviews with a sampling of attendees at the San Francisco conference Monday revealed little anxiety about the economy, with attendees mostly set to stay the course at the moment.

"For our particular company, it's not having a huge effect mainly because we work primarily in the federal, civilian, and DoD [Department of Defense] spaces," said Marty Pressey, senior project manager at InfoReliance, which builds defense-related applications. "Obviously, the federal government and DoD are continuing to spend money to support their ongoing operations." He said the upcoming election could impact spending more than the economy.

[ Even if the economic crisis doesn't hurt IT spending at your firm, three policy trends could create high-tech headaches.? And for more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Rob Walker, group manager for commercial systems at diagnostics equipment manufacturer Beckman Coulter, said the economy had not affected purchasing at his firm, but did note that "it's in the realm of possibility" that it might do so in the future. Likewise, at Ventana Medical Systems, the economy has yet to impact IT buying decisions, said Andrew Elmer, an Oracle database administrator. "It could possibly happen, but it's hard to say," he said.

Another attendee, who requested anonymity, said the economy could impact IT purchases if there is a business slowdown and margins were lower. But the company, an SAP shop, still is spending plenty of money, the attendee said.

Although most attendees interviewed had few concerns on IT spending due to the economic crisis, one attendee was seeing lower tech investments: "Budgets are lower for next year," said Anil Jain, IS manager and applications architect at conferencing services provider InterCall. "There will be lots of crunch in terms of resources and in terms of the tools [that] we can purchase. ... For 2009, we have made so many budget proposals, I'm not sure whether all of them will be approved or not," he said.

Oracle has filled the schedule of its OpenWorld conference with sessions hyping the various features in its 11g database, which was launched in July 2007. But the company doesn't plan to deliver new details of the anticipated 11g Release 2 (R2), or a ship date for 11g Express Edition (XE), the free version popular among developers.

The vendor is doing some recruiting this week for the 11g R2 beta test, but otherwise has no plans to make any announcements, said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of server technologies, said in an interview following a keynote address Monday.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

"We're going to do an 11g XE, but it will be sometime after the 11g R2 time frame," added Mendelsohn, who oversees the development of Oracle's database. He declined to provide firm dates for either release.

Instead, Oracle seems ready to make news at OpenWorld around complementary technologies that add performance to the core database. Particular attention and speculation is on CEO Larry Ellison's keynote address scheduled for Wednesday, which is titled "Extreme. Performance."

Mendelsohn urged showgoers to watch the speech during his talk Monday.

As for Mendelsohn's remarks, they seemed geared more toward getting customers to adopt the initial release of 11g, focusing on topics such as its new features and the possible upgrade paths.

Oracle has not released hard adoption numbers for 11g -- which according to some estimates is seeing slow uptake -- but has said the software has been downloaded more than 450,000 times, and that adoption is "on pace" with 10g.

In addition, on Monday the company issued a press release stating that customers from "across all industries" have upgraded. Named customers in the release include Ely Lilly and Novartis.

Meanwhile, 11g R2 does appear to be moving toward completion.

Ian Abramson, a Toronto-based data warehousing consultant and president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, said his organization is scheduled to be briefed on the 11g R2 beta program under a nondisclosure agreement Tuesday.

"I think we'll understand their timelines a lot better [after the briefing]," Abramson said. "We already have a number of great volunteers who are ready to [join the beta program]."

Adobe's newest set of print, video, and Web creation applications, Creative Suite 4, focuses on workflow and Flash integration capabilities for both designers and developers. Adobe announced several versions of its CS4 application collections on Tuesday.

Adobe continues to centralize workflow functions in its Bridge application, which handles workgroup management of files across a project using the Version Cue capability. Bridge also lets you apply consistent metadata, even as you switch among different CS4 tools such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and InDesign to work on different aspects of a project.

Adobe has created XML-based versions of its CS4 file formats so that other applications can work directly with CS4 files, such as for database publishing and composite Web apps. And it has introduced rudimentary Flash file creation support in its print-oriented design tool InDesign, so layouts can be the starting point for Flash projects. Adobe has also included its Adobe AIR (integrated runtime) capability for creating rich Internet applications into the CS4 collections.

In addition, Adobe has enhanced several CS4 tools to support design workflows within the individual applications. For example, InDesign CS4 now checks layouts as they are built against user-specified production parameters, highlighting violations live. A content-aware scaling tool in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended recomposes an image as it is revised, preserving vital areas as the image adapts to new dimensions. An expanded version of Dynamic Link in the CS4 Production Premium collection lets users move content among various CS4 tools.

For mobile developers, Adobe has increased the number of mobile device profiles (to 450) in its Device Central CS4 tool for testing Java, Flash, graphics, and Web content on mobile devices.

The various Adobe CS4 collections are scheduled to ship in October, with estimated prices starting at $1,699 for full versions. Upgrades will also be available. Individual tools be sold separately as well; these include Acrobat Professional, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Professional, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Photoshop Extended, and Premiere. The Version Cue project management tool and the Device Central tool are available only as part of CS4 collections.

While offering no major bombshells, Oracle announced a series of updates across its product lines on Monday, including the first patch update to its flagship 11g database.

Oracle 11g 11.1.0.7 is now available, said Chuck Rozwat, executive vice president of product development, during a keynote speech at the company's OpenWorld conference. Rozwat did not provide many details about the patch's new functionality, but Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of server technologies, may elaborate in a database keynote Monday evening.

The update is a precursor to the more hotly anticipated 11g R2 release, which observers have said is not expected until next year. OpenWorld is instead expected to be a showcase for technologies that extend the core 11g database; a set of sessions on Thursday focuses on a new "database accelerator," for example.

Rozwat and Oracle President Charles Phillips spent more time in their speech discussing Oracle's acquisition strategy and focusing on other product announcements, including Oracle JDeveloper 11g and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) 11g. The tools have tight integration with Oracle WebLogic Server, which is now the company's "strategic" application server following its purchase of BEA Systems.

The executives also previewed E-Business Suite R12.1, an upcoming version of the ERP product.

"With release 12.1 we really focused on rewriting the financial applications," Rozwat said. "We wanted to be more global with financials." The update, for which Oracle provided no release date, also includes improved capabilities for supply chain, manufacturing and human resources, according to Rozwat.

Also announced Monday:

-- Oracle Beehive, an enterprise collaboration platform that joins the existing Oracle Collaboration Suite. Rozwat and Phillips emphasized the Beehive platform's open nature, which gives more flexibility in the choice of end-user clients and support for multiple development toolsets. Licenses are priced at $120 per user.-- Oracle VM 2.1.2, Oracle's server virtualization software, which includes certification for the vendor's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology.

Even before Red Hat bought the virtualization company Qumranet, with its Linux KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform, Red Hat had made it clear that it was moving into virtualization in a big way. At its annual Red Hat Summit in June, the Linux powerhouse announced that it would be deploying its Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt, which is based on KVM in its server line. This lightweight, embeddable hypervisor currently enables users to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows VMs on Linux.

Now that Red Hat owns Qumranet, Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's VP of the Platform Business Unit, explains that Red Hat made the move for three reasons. First, to "accelerate time to market for a broad virtualization solution;" then to "keep KVM open source and further the investment in it." And, finally to "extend our virtualization product line into the VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) market."

[ Stay up to date on the latest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog and newsletter. ]

Crenshaw then explains in more detail that "KVM will form the basis of Red Hat's embedded hypervisor product, which is slated for release early next year. We have strong interest from customers and OEMs to bring the advantages of this Linux bare metal hypervisor to the market."

"If and when," continues Crenshaw, "KVM gets deployed into Red Hat Enterprise Linux is still being determined. We designed into RHEL virtualization the industry's first open-source, open-standards interface allowing new hypervisors and management tools to be deployed with plug-and-play ease. So managing any transition will be seamless for customers."

Crenshaw also made it clear that Red Hat is thinking about taking virtualization into the desktop market. Recently, Red Hat declined to enter the traditional Linux desktop market .

Now, with its newly acquired "SolidICE VDI solution. We will build on the excellent momentum Qumranet has generated. This is a game-changing product for the VDI market, and we expect customers to accelerate their already rapid deployment now that a company of Red Hat's stature is backing it."

SolidICE is a virtual desktop that uses SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) to run Windows or Linux desktops from a virtual machine on a server. Thus, it has more in common with Citrix's XenDesktop and before that its MetaFrame product line than it does conventional desktops.

That's what Red Hat intends, but do these moves make sense? According to Jay Lyman , an open-source analyst for The 451 Group , they certainly do. Lyman says, "This acquisition makes perfect technical sense since Red Hat was already moving to incorporate KVM more into its distribution. Of course, it will continue to support Xen which has been a big part of its virtualization technology and strategy thus far, but I think internally the company will, wisely, move aggressively to the KVM technology that is being driven by Linux kernel developers."

Lyman adds, "Red Hat felt it had to make this acquisition to be a bigger player in virtualization, to continue extending and building from its OS and before somebody else did. By acquiring Qumranet, Red Hat adds the people and products it needs to do that integration and polish work on KVM, but it will take some time to integrate into RHEL."

Dan Kusnetzky , principal analyst for the Kusnetzky Group looks at Red Hat's history. "Virtualization has appeared to be a secondary concern for Red Hat for quite some time.

Although the company included both Xen and KVM in their product since both are standard parts of the Linux kernel at this point, the focus of their efforts seemed on other levels of the software stack.

As virtualized environments become increasingly important, the company needed to do something to 1) improve Red Hat's position in the market, 2) acquire useful, workable technology and 3) acquire talent in their area of virtual machine software and 4) move into an area that offered a rich source of other talent."

"The acquisition of Qumranet appears to have touched on all of those points," Kuznetzky concludes. "Red Hat's move was covered broadly and demonstrated their interest in virtualization. Qumranet's SolidICE and management technology offers Red Hat a toe hold in the desktop virtualization market and offers room to reach into the server virtualization arena. Qumranet's staff includes many of the key developers of KVM, developers who also have deep levels of expertise in other virtualization technology as well. Red Hat now has access to a wealth of [virtualization] expertise."

So, from the experts' viewpoint it certainly appears that Red Hat is making the right moves to become a player in the virtualization market. Now, the question is: "Will the market agree?"

You've heard about datacenters in shipping containers. But how about a datacenter in a tent? And in rainy Seattle?

Enterprises are pushing the operating parameters that server vendors recommend for factors like air temperature and humidity and finding that servers are often far hardier than they expect. The difference can mean significant datacenter operations savings.

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

Microsoft recently found that a little rain, uncontrolled temperature, and even leaves sucked into server fans had absolutely no negative affect on servers.

In a small experiment, two Microsoft employees put five servers in a large metal frame tent outside. Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect, and Sean James, facility program manager, ran the previously used but spare HP DL585 servers in the tent from November 2007 through June 2008 and had zero failures.

"While I am not suggesting that this is what the data center of the future should look like... I think this experiment illustrates the opportunities that a less conservative approach to environmental standards might generate," Belady wrote in a blog post.

Enterprises have long known that server vendors give very conservative operating parameters for factors like temperature. Vendors likely do that to protect their own bottom line, even though doing so may negatively affect their customers' bottom line. "They could certify them at higher temperatures than they probably do but they would probably see higher field failure rates," said Nik Simpson, an analyst at Burton Group. "The failures might not be significant to individual companies running those servers but it could be to the vendor having to replace the servers for hundreds of thousands of customers."

Microsoft is not alone among companies experimenting with pushing the limits in data centers. Intel recently published a study about a datacenter test it conducted that relied almost exclusively on outside air for cooling. Intel installed no humidity controls and only minimal air filters.

The test environment had a very similar failure rate to one using traditional air conditioning and humidity controls, Intel found. The changes could save $2.87 million annually for a 10-MW datacenter, Intel said.

Simpson expects to see companies like Microsoft and Intel that are building new Internet-scale datacenters continue to conduct such experiments because of the cost savings.

But such advancements may not affect small or medium-size companies that have their own datacenters. "For a lot of organizations, the datacenter is buried deep in a building, so there is no ambient air flow to use," Simpson noted. Many companies don't have the luxury of building a new facility in a handpicked location for their datacenters so must make due with existing facilities.

Both Intel and Microsoft said they plan further tests that, if they show similar results, will lead to implementations in their datacenters.

IBM on Monday introduced new source-code-scanning software designed to spot security bugs as programs are being written.

The software was developed as an enhancement to the Rational AppScan product line that IBM picked up last year in its purchase of security software vendor Watchfire.

Watchfire's AppScan software could find bugs in applications once they were up and running, but using technology from its research labs, IBM has now enhanced the product so it can spot flaws throughout the software development process. "We're taking that technology and we're building new releases of it, which will allow customers to take a more preemptive approach," said Scott Hebner, vice president of market management with IBM's Rational Software group.

By fixing bugs earlier, companies can save money. A flaw that may cost just $25 to fix as the program is being written can cost perhaps $16,000 to fix after the software has gone live, Hebner said.

With these new bug-finding tools IBM is now competing with source-code security analysis vendors such as Fortify and Ounce Labs, said Chenxi Wang, an analyst with Forrester Research.

By integrating source-code analysis tools with its Rational Integrated Development Environment (IDE), IBM hopes to make it easier for developers to use these products. In the past, developers have steered clear of security tools because they tended to be inaccurate or were not rolled into their IDEs, Hebner said.

IBM's new AppScan products include a Developer Edition, Build Edition and Tester Server product, all available Monday. Pricing starts at $2,650 per developer license.

Oracle is aiming to get the first version of Fusion Applications into the hands of early adopters in 2009, and the initial version of the software will deliver a significant chunk of functionality, an Oracle executive said during a panel session Sunday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

"We're pretty far along," said Chris Leone, group vice president of applications strategy. Oracle can't talk about general availability for the applications but plans to "look for some early adopters that we can get live and get started in the 2009 time frame," he added.

Those will be culled from several hundred customers who have been providing feedback to Oracle as it develops the long-awaited software. Fusion apps are supposed to combine "best-of-business" capabilities from Oracle's various product lines, which include E-Business Suite, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.

To date, Oracle has only shown off a handful of Fusion applications, which were oriented around CRM, and the project overall has been dogged by concerns that it is behind schedule.

Oracle plans to demo more Fusion software this week at OpenWorld, according to Leone. And when it is released, the initial version of the suite will include "the majority of core financials" along with human resources and CRM functionality, he said.

While it will be some time before Fusion Applications are front-and-center in Oracle's product strategy, existing customers need to get ready now, said members of the Oracle Applications Users Group Fusion Council. Leone made his remarks during a session the group held.

The Fusion Council has been trying to tell members how to get ready for working with Fusion Applications.

For example, users will have to learn to work with Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware, as it underlies Fusion Applications. In addition, Fusion will use BPEL (business process execution language) tooling instead of existing tools like Oracle Workflow.

It may also be wise for companies to investigate hiring a SOA solutions architect, Leone and other panelists said.

Oracle said Monday it is now giving customers more personalized support through a new system that combines the previous MetaLink portal with Oracle Software Configuration Manager.

The updated service, dubbed My Oracle Support, uses the configuration manager tool to connect information about a customer's IT environment with the Oracle support knowledge base.

[ Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

Oracle is claiming that the new system provides up to 40 percent faster "service request resolution."

In addition, customers receive PowerView, a dashboard for managing and tracking systems.

Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang called the new portal an "incremental improvement," but nonetheless an "improved way of identifying a customer's configuration environment and delivering targeted information, as opposed to having the customer come in and search through all the support information."

It is available at no charge to Oracle's Premier Support customers, but remains a work in progress, with some features not yet working as planned, according to an official FAQ document.

Also, while the service can provide a "patch analysis health check" that will tell customers about missing critical patches applicable to their environments, customers must actually distribute and apply the patches.

Oracle is now offering its 11g database, Fusion Middleware, and Enterprise Manager products through Amazon Web Services' EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), the vendor announced Monday at the start of its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

The vendor will also let customers use existing software licenses on EC2 at no additional cost.

To help customers get up and running on EC2, Oracle has developed a set of AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). These allow users to spool up new virtual machines already provisioned with 11g, Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Linux within a few minutes, the company said.

Oracle also announced Secure Backup Cloud Module, a software package based on Oracle Secure Backup that allows customers to backup databases to Amazon Simple Storage Service. Backups can be encrypted and the module is integrated with Oracle Recovery Manager and Enterprise Manager.

The announcements are "an important, game-changing move for both Oracle and Amazon," Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus said Monday.

"By allowing database and middleware licenses -- and data -- to be moved to the Amazon cloud without incurring additional Oracle license fees, it makes cloud-based hosting an attractive alternative for Oracle's huge, global customer base," he added. "Of course, it remains to be seen how Amazon will charge to host Oracle applications and databases in EC2 or to backup large data sets to S3."

Security concerns as well as the declining costs of scalable, on-premises grid storage products may discourage some customers from tapping the Amazon services, according to Kobielus.

That said, Oracle's announcement should have a macro effect on the market, as it "sets the stage for further virtualization of all leading database, data warehousing, and storage vendors' product stacks," Kobielus said. "So far, Oracle is the only one of the leading [database/data warehousing] vendors that has moved its relational database to Amazon, so it can be considered a first-mover in that regard."

It's likely that Oracle will look to support other cloud platforms besides Amazon in the future, Kobielus said.

But other vendors, such IBM or Teradata, may not want to support their customers moving database installations to third-party services, and may instead choose to offer their own hosted services, according to Kobielus.

Security software vendor McAfee has agreed to buy network security specialist Secure Computing in a deal worth around $465 million, it said Monday.

Secure Computing's products include Webwasher, a tool for filtering corporate Web traffic; Ironmail encrypted mail servers; Sidewinder firewall appliances and SnapGear VPN devices.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

With the acquisition, McAfee hopes to expand its security-as-a-service offer, and to sell more products and services to Secure Computing's 22,000 customers worldwide. With its existing network security services, the company expects total network security sales of around $500 million a year. In 2007, McAfee's revenue from all product lines totalled $1.3 billion.

McAfee intends to make Secure Computing part of its network security business unit, reporting to Dan Ryan. The companies expect to close the deal around the end of the fourth quarter, subject to approval from stockholders and regulators.

Like other companies in the sector, McAfee has been busily acquiring other products for its portfolio. In August it announced the purchase of Reconnex, a provider of risk management tools, for $46 million. Late last year it acquired Israeli data protection company Onigma for $20 million, and encryption and access control vendor SafeBoot for $350 million.

The contract price of mainstream DRAM chips has plunged nearly 18 percent in two weeks to reach new record lows, an online clearinghouse for the chips reported Monday.

DRAM contracts for the second half of September, which are negotiated between chip vendors and PC vendors and make up about three-quarters of the DRAM market, fell to just $1.44 per chip, according to DRAMeXchange, from $1.75 per chip in contracts for the first half of September.

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

Prices of mainstream chips, 1GB DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM chips that run at 667MHz, have been in the doldrums for over a year. DRAM makers built too many factories to compete against each other and on hopes people would take to Microsoft Windows Vista, which requires more DRAM than Windows XP, much faster than they have.

The result has been a chip glut.

A DRAM glut is great news for users because PC vendors often add more DRAM to machines or offer it free as an incentive. People who want to upgrade the DRAM in their PC can also find better prices than normal during DRAM gluts.

But this DRAM glut has been bad for suppliers. Current chip prices are below the cost of production for many vendors.

In the last round of earnings conference calls, most DRAM makers reported steep losses. Only Samsung Electronics remained profitable.

The market situation has been so bad that people are speculating that stronger companies may start acquiring weaker rivals.

A few analysts, including Uche Orji at investment bank UBS, believe Micron Technology, of Boise, Idaho, may be in talks to acquire Germany's Qimonda.

Micron declined to comment. Qimonda did not comment.

Some DRAM makers have also announced production cuts, but even those actions may not have much impact because they affect output in November, when demand normally slows because pre-holiday stockpiling is over.

Hynix Semiconductor, the second largest DRAM maker in the world, announced last week it will shut two older, 8-inch (200-millimeter) wafer factories. Some industry watchers had hoped the closures might boost DRAM prices, but they won't.

The two Hynix factories were not producing DRAM, according to Andrew Norwood, principal memory analyst at Gartner. They were producing NAND flash memory -- another commodity chip for which pricing has collapsed.

Tibco is releasing what it calls a major update to its complex-event processing (CEP) software on Monday, not long after its rival IBM laid out an ambitious road map for its own offerings in the space.

At this point, competition can only be healthy, according to Rourke McNamara, Tibco director of product marketing.

[ Learn more about IBM's plans for the business events processing software aquired from AptSoft. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

"We're really happy that someone else is making a big deal about software of this sort," he said. "We really see it moving now from just a few verticals into more of a mainstream technology."

In general, CEP software searches for patterns and correlations amid the large volumes of electronic transactions or "events" that occur in a company's systems, and triggers responsive actions depending on what is detected. For example, the system could determine that a customer's account had been compromised if the password and address had been changed and a significant sum of money had been withdrawn on the same day.

A report released this week by IDC said the event-driven middleware market, which encompasses CEP as well as the related categories MOM (message-oriented middleware) and BAM (business activity monitoring), grew 27.1 percent in 2007 to $1.1. billion.

IDC analyst Maureen Fleming, who authored the report, used an analogy to describe this stack of technologies: "MOM can be considered the nervous system that listens for stimuli and informs the brain," she wrote. "CEP is the brain, which contains the short-term memory and executive decision-making ability to send instructions through the nervous system to the appropriate parts of the body. BAM is the eyes of an event-driven infrastructure."

CEP accounted for only $85 million of the overall market in 2007, but grew the fastest, at 79 percent. The event-driven middleware market will grow to $2.7 billion by 2012, with CEP's share rising to more than $800 million, IDC said.

Tibco, which also has MOM and BAM products, now has the largest chunk of the CEP market, with 40.5 percent compared to 20 percent for the next-highest, Progress Software, and 7.1 percent for IBM, according to IDC.

But IBM had 65.1 percent of the overall event-driven middleware market compared to Tibco's 11.4.

Tibco is hoping to add to its share with BusinessEvents 3.0, announced Monday. New features include an interface that provides a simpler way for business users to write the rules that dictate how complex events are tracked.

"We tried to make it look as much like Excel as possible," McNamara said.

Also, users can now run queries on a stream of events continuously; and a distributed cache and rules engine provides additionally scalability -- enough to handle roughly 100 times more events than before, according to Tibco.

Tibco officials were reluctant to provide detailed pricing information but said the software begins at around $100,000.

Pretty much any of the established companies in the CEP space are worth a look, said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink.

But it's often tough to say whether one company's product is truly faster or more scalable than another without knowing, for example, what kind of events are being processed, he added: "Are they all inside a network? Are they distributed far and wide? It it one proprietary system, or spread across a heterogeneous environment?"

Also, a tool might be technically easy to use, but it can't necessarily help users come up with the type of analysis and rules that will result in real business value, he said: "Having a good interface is not enough to help people understand what these events really mean. We're really looking for an evolution in how to understand events."

Apple on Friday recalled all power adapters it packaged with iPhone 3G phones sold since mid-July in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Mexico, and several Central and South American countries.

The number of affected users will be in the millions. Recent analyst estimates have pegged iPhone 3G sales as high as 6 million since its July debut, with the U.S. market remaining Apple's largest. Apple has not stated its quarterly iPhone 3G sales, but CEO Steve Jobs said the company had sold more than 1 million in its first weekend of availability.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

The adapters, a redesign from the bulkier version included with the first generation iPhone, pose a shock hazard, said Apple in a release Friday afternoon. The company will exchange all eligible adapters free of charge through mail-in or walk-in programs at its own retail stores starting Oct. 10.

"Under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter's metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating a risk of electric shock," said Apple, which said that although it had received reports of broken prongs, no injuries had been reported.

Apple told users to immediately stop using the small adapters, which are about the size of the plug end of an extension cord.

In lieu of the adapters, and until replacements are received, users should charge their iPhone 3G phones by connecting them to their Mac or PC with the USB cable that came with their iPhone, Apple said. Alternately, users can turn to third-party adapters designed for the iPhone -- such as car chargers -- or the larger USB adapter that Apple sells for $29. Ultracompact adapters purchased separately by customers may also be eligible for replacement.

Adapters identified by a green dot on the bottom, however, are replacements that are said to be safe to use. Adapters sold with the first-generation iPhone, and those packaged or sold separately with iPhone 3G phones in other countries, are also not affected.

iPhone 3G owners can order a replacement online starting Friday, or by taking their current adapter to an Apple retail store starting Oct. 10. Online orders, however, won't begin shipping until Oct. 10. Owners will need to provide Apple with a mailing address as well as their iPhone 3G's serial number if ordering a replacement online; those who ask for a replacement at an Apple store starting next month must also bring in their iPhone 3G.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission did not issue an accompanying alert, as it sometimes does when companies recall defective products.

Apple last launched a major safety recall in August 2006 when it recalled some 1.8 million lithium-ion batteries made by Sony that had been sold with its iBook and PowerBook notebooks. Last month, Apple's Japanese subsidiary offered to replace iPod nano batteries because of overheating issues.

This is the first recall for the iPhone, which Apple launched in June 2007 and then relaunched in its current 3G form on July 11 of this year.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Intel officially started selling its dual-core Atom 300 processor  on Monday, charging $43 for the chip.

The Atom 330 is designed for desktop computer and has two 1.6GHz processor cores and 1MB of Level 2 cache. The chip also supports 667MHz DDR2 memory. The single-core 1.6GHz Atom 230 chip supports slightly slower 533MHz DDR 2 memory.

[ For more on Intel's dual-core Atom, read the story "Supply of Intel's dual-core Atom 'very limited'." And stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

Detailed technical specifications of the Atom 330 were not available at the time of writing, but the use of faster memory appears designed to reduce bottlenecks that occur when multiple processor cores compete for access to data that is stored in main memory.

Pricing for the new chip was announced with the release of Intel's latest price list, which quotes a price based on 1,000-unit quantities, a standard measure of chip pricing. The actual price of the chips can be significantly lower for computer makers that buy them in bulk.

The list price of the single-core 1.6GHz Atom 230, intended for low-cost desktop computers, remains unchanged at $29. The price of the single-core Atom processor designed for laptop computers, the 1.6GHz Atom N270, is also unchanged at $44 -- $1 more than the dual-core desktop chip.

Intel hasn't announced plans for a dual-core Atom processor designed for laptops.

Timberland has agreed to reimburse people who received unauthorized text messages advertising its products in one of the first nationwide settlements of its kind, according to a law firm involved in the case.

Timberland, the boots and clothing company, and another company, e-commerce provider GSI, were the subject of a class-action lawsuit that charged them with sending text messages to customers in violation of the U.S. Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

Under the terms of a preliminary settlement agreement, the companies will pay $7 million into a cash fund to reimburse those who received the messages, according to KamberEdelson LLC, one of the law firms that helped bring the suit.

Timberland and GSI deny that they've done anything wrong and blamed a third-party company that they say was supposed to secure consent from the people who received the messages, KamberEdelson said.

A spokesperson for Timberland did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

People who received the text messages can visit a Web site to find out more about the settlement and apply for a $150 reimbursement.

While spam text messages don't occur at nearly the volume of spam e-mails, they are thought to be more invasive in part because some mobile users pay each time they receive a text message. Some mobile operators, including Verizon, have sued companies in an effort to stop them sending unsolicited texts to customers.

To get the cash payout, mobile users must fill out a claim form by Feb. 2, 2009. The form asks how many text messages from Timberland the phone user received each month between Jan. 1, 2003, and Aug. 1, 2008.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois must approve the settlement agreement during a hearing scheduled for Dec. 18.

The week got off to a rough start with the collapse of Lehman Brothers sending shudders through global financial markets and raising questions about whether there will be a ripple effect on the IT industry. After the market closed Monday, Hewlett-Packard added to the dismal mood by announcing it will lay off 24,600 employees as it integrates Electronic Data Systems into the HP fold. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was the victim of an apparent hacking attack on the Yahoo account she uses for official business as governor of Alaska, and VMworld brought tales of a new OS that would leave tradional ones on the trash heap.

[ Video: Catch up on the top stories of the week with the World Tech Update ]

1. Update: HP announces 24,600 layoffs in wake of EDS acquisition: Hewlett-Packard added to a bad-news Monday after the plunging stock market closed, announcing it would lay off 24,600 employees as it works to integrate its $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems into the company. Layoffs had been expected, but the size of them came as a surprise.

2. Wall Street turmoil unlike