IBM has completed its approximately $845 million tender offer for shares of tools maker Telelogic, IBM said on Thursday.

With the acquisition, IBM moves into the fast-growing market of software development for non-computer devices, such as home appliances, car anti-locking braking systems, and navigation systems. Other markets where IBM can make headway include retailers, medical systems, airplanes, consumer electronics, space telescopes, and robots, IBM said.

"Telelogic is an important element of our software and systems development and delivery strategy," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager, IBM Rational Software, in a statement released by the company. "Software is at the heart of embedded devices and systems. Whether it's used to develop the next generation of communication devices or systems for space exploration, this IBM technology has important implications for society."

The marriage of hardware and software, such as with the Apple iPhone, is creating an enormous market opportunity, IBM said. Telelogic's expertise in complex systems development will boost IBM's opportunity and leadership in the embedded and complex systems development space, said IBM. With Telelogic, IBM can accelerate innovation of products that rely on software, the company said.

Neither Microsoft nor HP have the integrated software and systems capabilities as IBM has in this arena, IBM said.

The tender offer for Telelogic was announced June 11, 2007.? The original offer of $745 million rose to $845 million because of currency fluctuation, IBM said. Telelogic will report to the IBM Rational Software unit.

Investment firm UBS Warburg Thursday downgraded Cisco stock, citing slowing orders and softness in U.S. and European enterprise markets.

The firm cut its revenue estimates for Cisco's fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in July, from 6 percent to 4 percent on a sequential basis and to 6 percent "organic" growth -- excluding acquisitions -- year over year.

"Our industry checks show orders are slowing, which gives us concern about the July quarter," states UBS analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos in his bulletin on the downgrade. "Recent checks indicate that in addition to prior softness in U.S. Enterprise, European Enterprise is slowing a bit, and Emerging Markets, while still strong, are growing in the 25 to 30 percent range, not the 30 to 40 percent target."

UBS also is lowering its fiscal 2008 and 2009 revenue growth estimates for Cisco. Estimates for 2008 are now 12.4 percent from 12.8 percent. For the following year, expectations have been lowered to 7.9 percent from 9.2 percent. Earnings-per-share estimates have been lowered by 1 cent for 2008 and 3 cents for 2009.

Cisco stated bullishly in recent quarters that it expects annual revenue growth in the 12 percent to 17 percent range, but CEO John Chambers warned that the third and fourth quarters of fiscal 2008 could be " extremely challenging." UBS now feels Cisco will need to make acquisitions to grow at that 12 percent to 17 percent clip.

"Historical analysis of $40 billion tech companies shows it's virtually impossible to grow 12 percent to 17 percent without requiring acquisitions and compromising operating margins," Theodosopoulos states. "We believe Cisco's aggressive target will require acquisitions. We think the stock will have a hard time rallying if demand is slowing and acquisitions are likely."

A Gartner study finds that IT spending has so far been largely unaffected, despite the ongoing signs of weakness in the U.S. and global economies.

On a global basis, the projected IT budget growth rate for 2008 is 3.3 percent, unchanged from a previous Gartner survey.

In the U.S., budgets are still growing, at 2.3 percent, but that represents a drop from 3.1 percent in the last study.

Meanwhile, the growth rate in Europe was 3.86 percent and 5.98 percent in Asia-Pacific, Gartner said.

Overall, "rumors of IT budgets' demise, especially in the first quarter, have been greatly exaggerated," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner Executive Programs, during a conference call Thursday.

The survey drew responses from 1,011 CIOs between Feb. 12 and Mar. 12, according to Gartner. McDonald noted that respondents were from end-user corporations, not vendors or technology service providers.

Some 62 percent of respondents said their 2008 IT budgets did not change, while 23 percent reported a drop and 15 percent said their budgets grew. On average, declining budgets did so by an average of 10 percent. However, report budget increases were about 15 percent, according to Gartner.

"We believe enterprises and CIOs are being cautious about IT spending, but not wholesale cutting," McDonald said.

"IT budgets have been modest for the past four or five years, and that modesty is paying off, because they're not as rich for targeting," he added.

Gartner also polled respondents on whether they had a spending contingency plan in place. Only 32 percent said they had one for this year.

"The contingency analysis seems to indicate that while CIOs are prepared to weather tougher economic times, the majority don't think they'll have to," McDonald said.

Financial backing for Sprint Nextel's high-speed wireless WiMax Xohm service may still be questionable, but Motorola, still sees a strong WiMax market with or without Sprint in the mix.

"WiMax will happen with or without the backing of Sprint," said Daniel Moloney, president of home and networks mobility for Motorola, the division that oversees WiMax products in an interview on Wednesday. "There's a huge global market for this technology." Motorola makes products that Sprint is deploying in its Xohm trials and rollout, and is already providing WiMax gear for rollouts in other countries.

[ Learn about Everex's new low-cost laptops that use the Sprint Xohm WiMax network. ]

Moloney said he was aware of Sprint's efforts to attract cable companies to invest $1.5 billion or more in the Xohm venture, which could cost $5 billion all told. But Moloney said he was not privy to details of what is happening with those discussions, or why some sort of deal was not reached by Monday, a deadline that Sprint imposed on the cable companies involved.

For its part, Sprint won't comment on plans to attract investors, although a source close to the discussions told Computerworld that Sprint had pushed the Monday deadline. Barry West, president of the Xohm division, on Tuesday said he was still optimistic for Xohm service, but said in an interview with IDG News Service on Wednesday that Xohm will slightly miss a target of providing commercial availability in April. He didn't specify what the new target date will be.

West said the delay was largely due to problems setting up Internet links behind the WiMax portions of the network. Trials are underway in Chicago and Washington.

Moloney agreed with many financial analysts who have said it is logical for cable companies to want to invest in WiMax, since doing so gives the cable providers an extension of wireless services to their customers already getting cable services. He said there is already a trend toward cable companies branching into the telecommunications realm as well, combining wired and wireless networks. He pointed, by way of example, to such moves by Telefonica in Madrid and Singtel in Singapore. "There is interest in blending together technologies," he said.

Motorola is interested in producing technologies for both WiMax and LTE (Long Term Evolution), which is expected to be a big WiMax competitor down the road. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is backed by both AT&T and Verizon Wireless, Moloney said.

Moloney said Sprint would itself have likely backed LTE, but could move faster with WiMax, since the latter service could come to market faster and because Sprint already owned the 2.5GHz spectrum that will carry the WiMax signal. "They could deploy today or wait two to three years for LTE," he said.

While Motorola is backing both WiMax and LTE, Moloney said he wanted investors and others to know that WiMax is going to be a strong network technology especially in developing countries such as Pakistan, where one rollout is underway. "I feel good about where WiMax is headed," Moloney said.

The fate of Sprint's Xohm seemed to be on the minds of many other executives at CTIA, including officials at AT&T. Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, was charitable toward Sprint when asked about the fate of Xohm. But he asserted that AT&T will continue to add customers as it develops its networks towards LTE. "WiMax is not a threat," de la Vega told reporters and analysts at a luncheon.

Over the next several years, AT&T official project that its LTE network can achieve 28Mbps speeds -- many times the current rates.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Dell, the world's second largest PC seller, will move faster into emerging markets and increase its services offerings as part of a plan to reverse poor financial performance, top executives said Thursday.

While Dell holds about 28 percent of the hardware and services business for small and medium-size businesses in North America, that figure falls to 10 percent for the rest of the world, said CEO Michael Dell, during an investor's conference broadcast from Round Rock, Texas.

[ See today's related story: Dell ironing out kinks in supply chain ]

For every $1 spent on hardware, businesses spend $2 on infrastructure services, a market that's worth at least $800 billion, which the company can tap into, Dell said.

Dell is targeting that segment with customizable, a la carte services and features such as remote infrastructure management. So far, the plan is working: For the fourth quarter of last year, the company's deferred services revenue grew 25 percent year-over-year, to $5.3 billion, Dell said.

"We are aggressively expanding the services portfolio of the company," Dell said.

On the consumer PC side, Dell has just a 4 percent market share outside the U.S., with most of those sales in the U.K. But Dell will try to increase that through launching new product lines.

Previously, Dell had just one consumer product line that it sold through its direct sales model, but "we are making a number of changes," including creating new product lines faster, Dell said.

The PC industry in general is suffering from lower profits, but Dell said they'll try to create "excitement and brand lust" in their products to draw new customers.

Dell's turnaround plans come amid a gloomy backdrop for the company, which lost its footing in the face of changing market conditions and a decline in its direct sales model.

"We are not satisfied with the current state of affairs," Dell said.

Incomplete product coverage, overpaid employees and general inefficiency dragged the company down, Dell said. But it has shed 5,500 of its more than 80,000 employees, and is readjusting the salaries and benefit packages of existing workers.

The belt-tightening is expected to eventually save Dell $3 billion annually. Still, CFO and Vice Chairman Donald Carty warned: "There's a lot of work left to do."

Dell reported results for its fourth quarter 2008 in late February. Net income came in at $679 million, 6 percent less than for the same period a year before. Revenue for the quarter was $16 billion. Earnings per share were $0.31, down 3 percent from the same quarter of the previous year.

Microsoft continues to give its tacit blessing for consumers to exploit a technical loophole that allows them to upgrade to Vista with Service Pack 1, even if they don't own the necessary prior editions of Windows.

The loophole, which was also present when Vista was first released last year, allows individuals undaunted by Microsoft's licensing and installation rules to save up to $110 by purchasing a DVD upgrade of Vista SP1, rather than the full retail one.

To install an upgrade version of Vista, users are supposed to have Windows 2000 or XP already running on that computer.

Experts say Microsoft is giving its quiet blessing to the loophole in order to boost interest in Vista among the tech-savvy users likely to exploit it.

"The fact that the upgrade edition will still upgrade over itself in Vista SP1 proves that Microsoft executives knowingly support the upgrade trick," said Brian Livingston, editorial director of the Windows Secrets newsletter, which confirmed the trick in an article appearing in its Thursday edition. "I think the feature was deliberately included to make it unnecessary for more advanced and price-sensitive users to ever buy the full version. There is no ethical dilemma with people using a feature that Microsoft has specifically programmed into Vista."

Last year, Microsoft maintained that this loophole violated the terms of its license agreement, though it has not publicly cracked down on users. In a carefully worded statement, it reiterated that position.

"Just because a piece of software installs on a PC, does not mean that it is properly licensed," wrote a spokeswoman in an e-mail. "The licensing states that upgrades require a fully licensed version of Windows to be eligible to use an Upgrade license. We expect our resellers to help their customers be fully licensed for the products that they want to purchase."

The trick is moot for the vast majority of PC users. Some may have already purchased and installed Vista. Others may have access to as many retail copies of XP or 2000 as they need (OEM copies that ship with a new PC cannot be transferred to other computers).

Other individuals and small businesses upgrade to Vista only when they buy a new PC. For large corporations, volume discounts for Windows obviate any cost savings from buying an upgrade version of Vista.

Microsoft has shipped more than 100 million copies of Vista, a figure that excludes corporate volume licenses of Windows). But 80 percent are to PC makers. Only 20 percent are being bought by end users, mostly hobbyists upgrading existing PCs or Intel Mac owners intent on running Vista in virtualization mode.

Vista SP1 became available via retailers such as Amazon.com several weeks ago. The upgrade version of Vista Home Premium SP1 costs about $130, versus $239 for the full edition, though Amazon.com is temporarily offering them for $90 and $205, respectively.

Similarly, Vista Business SP1 lists for $299 and $199 for full and upgrade versions, while Vista Ultimate SP1 lists for about $320 and $220.

The prices for Vista Home Premium SP1 and Vista Ultimate SP1 are already significantly cheaper than the RTM versions of Vista released a year ago. In February, Microsoft cut retail prices for Vista up to 20 percent .

Microsoft also said last month it would offer free technical support to any user experiencing problems with installing SP1.

SP1 includes a large number of bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Microsoft has a long history of de facto toleration of loopholes that allow determined users to get its software for less than full price. For example, many online stores sell student editions of Microsoft software to any customer with a pulse.

Scott Dunn, the writer for Windows Secrets, says "it's debatable whether a clean-install of Vista's upgrade edition -- without any prior purchase of 2000 or XP -- violates any license, but the result is clearly an installed copy of Vista that is indistinguishable from a full edition."

The process is identical to that used with the RTM version of Windows Vista. Users boot up with a Windows Vista SP1 upgrade DVD and begin the full installation process. But rather than entering the product key when prompted, they skip it and continue to do a clean install of Vista that fully wipes the hard drive. Next, they boot into the unactivated version of Vista SP1 on their hard drive. After running the setup again, users select upgrade and enter the upgrade key. This installs Vista SP1 for a second and final time.

Purists say the clean install process, besides allowing the licensing loophole, also enables the OS to run with less risk of problems under the hood.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

AT&T plans to sell phones based on Google's Android operating system, after being assured by the search giant that it won't be forced to offer all-Google applications, the operator's chief executive said on Wednesday.

AT&T was absent from the initial list of mobile service providers that said they'd sell phones with Google's open-source mobile operating system, but the operator is changing its tune after a recent meeting with the search giant.

In February, AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph de la Vega met with Google for an in-depth briefing on Android, he said, speaking during a press lunch at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas. Google assured AT&T that the operator would be able to customize Android phones to include any applications, he said. "That's attractive to us. We were concerned that maybe the focus was just on Google apps," de la Vega said.

"If it's good for customers we'll offer it like any other OS," he said. "It is something we'd want in our portfolio."

When Android was launched in November, Sprint and T-Mobile said they'd use it, but AT&T and Verizon stayed mum. Shortly after the launch, Verizon announced plans to open its network to any device, which means customers could be able to use Android phones on its network at least in an unsupported fashion.

AT&T's delayed acceptance of Android points to some of the confusion that operators seem to have about the forthcoming operating system, said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. Many of them have been uncertain about how much control they might have over the operating system.

AT&T's reason for changing course could also point to some potential problems users might find with Android. If each of the operators customizes their own Android phones, it is uncertain if applications will be able to run across all the different phones. "It's unknown," said Golvin.

In addition to Android phones, de la Vega said that the much-anticipated 3G iPhone will become available in the next few months. AT&T's entire line of smartphones will be available in 3G models within that time frame, he said.

Less than a month after closing its DoubleClick acquisition, Google announced on Wednesday significant but expected changes in the ad services company that include reducing its staff and selling part of its Performics division.

Google will lay off or offer "transitional roles" to about 25 percent of DoubleClick's U.S. workforce, a source familiar with the plan said. The person, who asked not to be named, said that staffers offered a transitional role would be employed in a contract position for a certain period of time

Google acknowledged that DoubleClick's staff will be cut without offering details about the number of positions eliminated. "Since our acquisition of DoubleClick closed on March 11, we have been working to match and align DoubleClick employees in the U.S. with our organizational plan for the business. As with many mergers, this review has resulted in a reduction in headcount at the acquired company. Today, we are laying off some DoubleClick employees in the U.S. and placing others in transitional roles," Google said in a statement.

Prior to the layoffs announced Wednesday, DoubleClick had 1,500 employees worldwide, including 1,200 in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Google has decided to divest itself of the SEM (search engine marketing) and SEO (search engine optimization) group within Performics, a move that had also been anticipated. Providing SEO and SEM services puts Google in some potential conflict of interest situations that could damage its relationship with independent SEO and SEM firms and with Performics clients.

"It's clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Googles mission and core to the trust we ask from our users," wrote Tom Phillips, director of the DoubleClick integration process, in an official blog posting .

Google doesn't yet have a buyer for the Performics business, but it has "received preliminary interest" from some current partners, according to Phillips. "Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold," he wrote.

Google will retain Performics' affiliate marketing business and integrate it into existing Google operations, Phillips wrote.

SEO and SEM firms, which provide services for improving Web sites' search-engine rankings and running effective search-engine ad campaigns, had been vocal about their displeasure at having Google, until now a partner, turned into a competitor via Performics.

A key concern in the SEO area was that Performics would get special access to inside information about Google's search-engine algorithms, putting independent SEO firms at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, there was concern that Google would push its in-house Performics SEM services at highly discounted prices, or maybe even for free, in competition with SEM service providers.

A potential conflict of interest situation involved the conceptually divergent missions of Performics and Google's ad sales business. Performics is supposed to get its clients the highest return on investment from their paid search campaigns -- spending as little as necessary to achieve their goals. But Google's business is to sell as much advertising as possible. This, critics pointed out, could lead Performics to put Google's interests above those of its clients.

The Performics SEO services also put Google in the business of taking money from clients in exchange for helping them rank better in search-engine results, something Google has always vowed not to do. Moreover, Performics provides paid inclusion services into search engines that engage in this practice, in which a company pays a search engine to include its Web site in its index. Google has always been highly critical of paid inclusion services, and doesn't offer them.

Sprint Nextel won't make the April launch it had planned for its Xohm WiMax service, largely because of problems setting up Internet links behind the WiMax part of the network, the head of the project said.

The carrier will miss the target of commercial availability in April, though not by much, said Barry West, CTO of Sprint and head of the Xohm business unit, in an interview at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas Tuesday evening. Even in the Chicago and Washington, D.C., areas, where Sprint's WiMax service is in trials, the network isn't as good as West would like it to be, he said.

The national rollout of WiMax, still an emerging technology, is a big bet for Sprint as it loses subscribers and struggles in third place behind AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the U.S. mobile market. The full cost of the project has been estimated at $5 billion, though Sprint has put off discussions of how much it will actually invest until it releases financial results for the first quarter. The company has also backed off earlier projections that the network would reach 100 million U.S. residents by the end of this year. A new forecast is yet to come. The company reportedly has been in talks with cable operators to help pay for the project.

But West is not worried about WiMax itself working. What's holding Sprint back is simply the logistics of building the network, and specifically the problem of provisioning "backhaul" connections to the Internet, he said. Mobile operators typically lease T-1 lines from their cell sites for these backhaul links, but those lines only provide 1.5Mbps. WiMax is designed to deliver more than that to every subscriber.

Fatter leased lines, namely DS-3s (45Mbps), can't be had for any price at many of Sprint's cell towers, West said. So the carrier wants to use point-to-point microwave wireless connections. Though these are used widely in other parts of the world -- about half of all backhaul in Europe is microwave, and more than that in Asia, IDC analyst Godfrey Chua estimates -- Sprint is practically treading on virgin territory by seeking it in the U.S., according to West. There are few engineers well-versed in setting it up, and Sprint has to overcome zoning issues for many installations, he said. The procedures of setting it up are also quite different, with the need to find an unobstructed line of sight through the air and deal with zoning issues, he said.

Getting enough backhaul capacity to achieve the promised speed of WiMax is no doubt a problem, though it's probably not the only one Sprint's facing in the rollout, IDC's Chua said. Even where they are available, leased DS-3 lines are several times as expensive than T-1s, which cost on average $300 in the U.S.

The fact that landline carriers have made T-1s relatively cheap and easy to buy in the U.S. is one reason microwave hasn't been widely adopted here, West said. In fact, the lines always cost just slightly less than deploying microwave, he said.

"They price it very carefully so that it doesn't work out," West said.

The WiMax backhaul issue is symptomatic of a national problem for Sprint, which leases T-1s for almost all of its approximately 45,000 cell sites, said Infonetics analyst Michael Howard. AT&T and Verizon Wireless, affiliated with wireline carriers themselves, suffer less from this issue. Ethernet is another possible solution to the high-capacity backhaul problem, but that would require fiber, which isn't available in many cases, Howard said. It may not be economical for AT&T and Verizon to deploy fiber just to serve a Sprint WiMax base station, he said.

Intel officially unveiled its low-power, newly architected Atom processor line at its Intel Developer's Forum in Shanghai Wednesday.

The chips, aimed at the embedded and mobile Internet device markets, are designed for low-power and long battery life, according to Anthony Yung, a spokesman for Intel. The company introduced five new Atom processors, and said that they began shipping some to OEM vendors last month.

The architecture, which reportedly was redesigned from the ground up, includes the 45 nanometer high-k transistor formula released with the Penryn family of chips late last year.

"This is designed around efficiency," said Yung. "We're seeing the trend already toward small form-factor or ultra mobile PCs."

Intel noted that Fujitsu, Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Lenovo all plan to bring sell Internet devices based on the Atom processor, which was previously codenamed Silverthorne.

Mobile Internet devices are small, "pocketable" products that fall in between small laptops and smart phones in size and capability.

"I think it's a very interesting processor," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif. "With Atom, we're seeing a low-powered processor that combines solid performance with low power consumption. It's an embedded processor that uses an x86 instruction set so it will run PC software like Adobe's Flash and Sun's Java. That will be easy to develop for."

The Atom processor, though, isn't just a new chip. It's a building block that will be critical to a good portion of the chips listed on Intel's future product road map, according to industry analysts.

Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz., said in a previous interview that the Atom processor is a building block for a big part of Intel's strategy going forward. "It's one step toward them getting down toward a power range that can compete with other embedded architectures," he added, noting that the Silverthorne architecture will be worked into future processors like the upcoming Morristown platform, which is slated to ship in 2009.

Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, a research firm based in Nashua, N.H., added that Atom represents a whole new processor class for the chip maker. "Power is part of the equation for all Intel processors these days," he said. "I'm sure there's going to be technology sharing in other products with this technology."

Intel reports that the new chip, which is the company's smallest and fastest chip under 3 watts, has a thermal design power range of 0.65 to 2.4 watts, compared to 35 watts for a typical laptop chip. It also has an average power range of 160 to 220 milliwatts and an idle power range of 80 to 100 milliwatts.

Nearly three months after closing the biggest merger in its history, SAP has set the dual challenge of integrating Business Objects' BI tools more tightly with its enterprise resource planning software while also maintaining the independence of those tools to appeal to non-SAP customers.

The man in charge of this balancing act is John Schwarz, the former CEO of Business Objects who now heads the new BI division at SAP. Schwarz sat down with IDG News Service recently to discuss the integration plans, the future of BI, the emergence of Microsoft as a competitor, and why BI is still so hard to do. As reported separately last week, Schwarz also talked about SAP's plans to retire some overlapping products. Following is an edited transcript of the interview:

IDGNS: You announced your first joint offerings in January -- nine packages of SAP and Business Objects software -- but you plan much tighter integration in the future. Can you talk about those plans?

Schwarz: I'd be happy to, but I want to make another point first, which is that while we're integrating (Business Objects capabilities) into SAP as tightly as we can, we're giving an equal level of priority to not integrating in such a way that we can't sell outside the SAP domain. So the Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft customers are just as important to us as the SAP customers.

Given that, there are some obvious things we have to do and then some interesting things that we are doing because they'll add a lot of value. The obvious things are we need to integrate so that customers who have SAP NetWeaver and SAP BW [SAP's data warehousing and BI platform] can use the Business Objects content seamlessly without having to build bridges or connectors. We used to link using connectors and special bridges because we didn't have access to the technology; now we can use the components that are part of the SAP SOA architecture so that we're integrating directly to those interfaces. So as it relates to access to information, there's going to be a direct link from XI -- our Business Objects platform -- to BW as it is today, but directly, natively integrated. We will integrate using NetWeaver where appropriate, without dragging NetWeaver along into an independent Business Objects installation.

We are also borrowing technology [from SAP] called Business Intelligence Accelerator, or BI Accelerator, an in-memory data management tool that was built by SAP primarily to improve the performance of access to massive data structures inside BW. We have attached to BI Accelerator our query and our search capability, we will probably also attach our OLAP client, so we'll be able to do queries or search or slicing-and-dicing of the in-memory data cube with lightning speed. Ultimately, I'd like to use the technology outside of the SAP BW context as well, so we'll have the ability to do in-memory analytics everywhere, so that's a very exciting development on the BI side.

IDGNS: What will that mean for the non-SAP customers?

Schwarz: Obviously, the value of BI Accelerator is performance, it's having access to large volumes of data quickly, so if you take a look at a typical data warehouse at a large company, they'll have billions of rows of information, often with many hundreds of columns of data in each row. When you start to do global search or start building reports that have to read all that data, the performance starts to be a significant barrier. So the more we can do to make access to that information really instant, the more the data becomes useful.

We are also working in the data integration area to share componentry in the Master Data Management solution. So SAP has a Master Data Management solution that's currently built primarily to underpin the collection and migration of data into the SAP processes, but we'd like to use it as a way to manage all of the data in the enterprise, whether it's SAP or non-SAP.

IDGNS: What's the timeframe for that?

Schwarz: There will be a continuing stream of improvements coming out in MDM, but because it's such a relatively new field it's hard to predict when there's going to be a definitive end-to-end MDM solution. Right now, we're focused on the PIM [product information management] side because that's where it grew up from. We'd like to deliver a CRM version of MDM and ultimately an HR version for employee data. There's a lot of development going on, I'm just not able to give you a date and say that by the end of the year it will be finished. I doubt if that's likely to be the case.

IDGNS: You have two goals with this merger: To integrate Business Objects technologies more tightly with SAP, but also to stay independent and work with non-SAP platforms. They seem like conflicting goals; how do you reconcile them?

Schwarz: Let me start by explaining the business justification. Business Objects is coming to SAP with more than 70 percent of its revenue based on non-SAP environments. SAP did not spend more than $6 billion to lose 70 percent of the revenue that Business Objects brings to the table; it's essential to maintain the run rate in our business. So we're very committed to it on that basis alone. Secondly, SAP's justification for buying Business Objects was at least partly to increase its own addressable market, and how better than by going after platforms that are non-SAP?

Now, you are right, as you go after this broad market there are trade-offs. The trade-offs are mitigated by SOA. SAP is committed to SOA architecture across the board; all of the services that one needs to see and integrate into SAP are now surfaced using SOA interfaces, and that makes it easy because Business Objects was also an SOA-architected business.

IDGNS: I can see the business incentive, but the challenge is to say independent while giving [SAP CEO] Henning Kagermann the tight integration that he's looking for.

Schwarz: Yes, but I think in that context my challenge is no greater than Rob Ashe's [the former CEO of Cognos, now part of IBM]. IBM is a very neutral company and wants Cognos to support DB2 [IBM's database] as well as Oracle. If you really want to have a BI component inside a large software company, you've got to let the BI component live as it did before, otherwise you destroy its value. Maybe that's not so important for Oracle and Microsoft, who are focused on a vertical stack, so Hyperion may have a tougher time in that regard than we do.

IDGNS: Do you see Microsoft emerging quickly as a competitor? They're adding a lot of BI capabilities to SQL Server and tying that to Dynamics.

Schwarz: Microsoft is a credible competitor -- certainly, the technology they are developing for individual users or individual applications is interesting. It's not an enterprise solution yet. Will it ever get there? We'll see. We work with Microsoft -- they OEM some of our technology inside their portfolio, so it's a good relationship. I could see a road map that says we will continue to partner and grow more integrated as we work with a new Office suite and as we work with SharePoint and build collaboration using their tools, or I could see us moving into more of a competitive direction if Microsoft is unwilling to cooperate or if they insist on adding functionality that gets more and more competitive. That road is open, too.

IDGNS: CIO magazine just published an article entitled, "Business Intelligence: A technology category in tumult." These big BI mergers -- Oracle-Hyperion, IBM-Cognos, SAP-Business Objects -- create uncertainty for customers about road maps and where the technology is heading. Why would anyone risk starting a major BI project today?

Schwarz: My experience with customers is that they can't wait. The business drivers for BI are so dramatic and so pressing that no one waits just because they are uncertain about what the vendors are doing. They simply drag us in and have us explain what's going on.

IDGNS: BI vendors talk about how businesses can improve performance by analyzing data from multiple sources, but when you talk to IT people, they say it's hard to get even two clean, reliable sources of data for real-time analytics. Why is BI still so hard to do?

Schwarz: The fundamental problem rests in the following: There are on average, in any sizeable organization, six systems that deal with customers -- you've got tools for selling, order processing, billing, maintenance, and marketing. These systems were traditionally built independently, and each has its own way of describing a customer. So this data is to some degree incorrect, and reconciling which of these systems is the primary, accurate representation of the business is very hard. So the idea of master data management, which in essence is not a tool issue but a political issue -- figuring out who is the real owner of the information -- is where the real problem arises, and it's different for every customer. So it's hard to come up with a solution that says, out of the box, here's what you do. You need someone to do the analysis to understand what the sources of data are, how good the systems are that produced that data, which of the systems holds the real canonical version of that information, and then align your systems to that one. Because you can clean up your data once, but if the underlying systems that created the data remain the same, a nanosecond later you need to clean it all again.

IDGNS: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said you can overcome this problem by putting all your data in an Oracle database, but obviously that won't work for all customers. So are we just left to struggle with this problem?

Schwarz: I think we are. It's good for our business, by the way. The interesting thing is that many customers can't agree among themselves. I had dinner last night with four CIOs who represented four divisions at a large customer. They are to some degree different businesses, but at the end of the day, they deal with the same end consumer, even though the consumer has four different relationships with the company. They would like to get a single view of the consumer, and there isn't a power in their organization who has the right to decide which is the right view. So they struggle and they compromise and they build subsets of those views that they try to reconcile, and even that's hard to do.

IDGNS: Having good tools is only one part of doing BI. There is also governance and how a company should architect its systems. How much of a role should BI vendors play in telling customers how to design their IT?

Schwarz: A very large role because BI is wholly dependent on access to information. If the information is not available or architected poorly, or incorrect for that matter, which is 90 percent of the problem, the BI doesn't deliver any value. So the ability to create a trusted broad universe of information is a fundamental success factor for the customer, which is why we went after the EAI market ourselves, because we didn't want to depend on other players to do it for us.

IDGNS: So what advice do you give them about the ways to architect their system?

Schwarz: We try to deliver reference examples of other customers who have done this successfully, we work with our partners who make their living designing data environments, partners like BackOffice Associates, a premium MDM solutions provider, to make sure their tools are mapped to ours in a way that makes the solution easy. There are some fairly intellectually intensive techniques that are brought to this problem because it's not a tools issue, it's a design issue.

IDGNS: You've talked about creating a closed-loop process where SAP users will be able to draw from real-time BI data at key decision points in a business process. What does that mean?

Schwarz: That closed-loop process is where we try to link the management of strategy to the management of the execution of day-to-day business processes and ultimately optimize those processes by understanding, in real time, how well they are delivering results.

What we now need to build are the analytics that will give the business user the opportunity to understand how well is the process performing and how well is the data supporting decisions that the user might want to make. There are already many analytics embedded inside the SAP suite, but we need to add more, we need to make the analytics more industry-specific, and we need to make the analytics more intelligent. We need to give managers a broader perspective. Today the analytics tend to be buried inside the process, they tend to be very single-process specific, so you get a lot of data out, but the synthesis still has to happen in the human mind. We'd like to begin to synthesize bigger pieces of it and deliver analytics that are more useful to a decision maker. That work is under way right now. We have people across 26 different industry sectors who are building the knowledge and the analytics that are required to bring value to the customers.

IDGNS: Forrester Research Analyst Boris Evelson said the only way BI will become really pervasive is by integrating it tightly with business processes. Instead of having a separate BI portal, an analytics tool will pop up at key decision points in a business process. How do you see the future of BI? Will we always have stand-alone BI, or will it merge into the background?

Schwarz: You have two types of BI. What I think Boris is talking about is in-process analytics, and I think it's essential, and we are doing our piece of that as I'm sure will the other application providers. However, in order to do what we talked about, which is linking strategy to execution and giving them this closed-loop process, you need to see all your processes operating in concert end-to-end. So, yes, you can instrument any one process in the series and get a view of what that process is doing, but the process may be perfectly fine. If the linkage of the processes is not working well, then the outcome will not be good. So the value of having an independent BI that can span all these different things and give you the predictive analytics and the model to understand your end-to-end business is just as important as these in-process analytics.

I would argue that there are many BI apps that have nothing to do with the underlying process. Think of a call center, where you want to do an analysis on the sentiment of the people calling in. The process that manages the call might be OK, and you might get analytics on how fast they take you to dispatch or how long did you have to wait in queue, but in order to say if you've dealt with a thousand customers in a day and that, in their spoken words they all talked about a certain issue that wasn't necessarily registered in the process itself, how do you get that info out? So those kinds of BI solutions that are the higher-order capabilities are just as valuable as the embedded BI that Forrester's talking about.

Yahoo recently expanded the list of products that can't be advertised on its search engine, but it appears the company could be more stringent in enforcing its ad rejection policies.

IDG News Service queried Yahoo's search engine on Monday with obvious keywords clearly intended to trigger ads for products and services that violate the company's search ad editorial guidelines. The experiment produced multiple ads that Yahoo apparently should have rejected.

Interestingly, it wasn't only outside advertisers that managed to place inappropriate ads: Yahoo itself appeared to violate its own guidelines with at least one questionable ad from a company unit.

Upon reviewing the examples of possibly inappropriate ads submitted by IDG News Service, Yahoo said that not all violated its editorial guidelines. It declined to identify the infringing ones, but said it had removed them, as it does whenever it sees noncompliant ads.

"We evaluate our marketplace and advertising policies -- including unacceptable content -- on an ongoing basis. We also continually refine our review processes and procedures in an effort to serve the most appropriate and relevant ads to our users," it said in an e-mailed statement. Yahoo's ad screening process involves human reviewers and automated filters.

One that should have been easy to flag was an ad for Ephedra products from Yahoo's Shopping comparison shopping engine. Ephedra products are listed by Yahoo Search Marketing as an example of products of questionable legality. The U.S. Federal Drug Administration banned the sale of Ephedra-containing dietary supplements.

Yet, a search on Monday triggered an ad titled "Best Ephedra Products" from Yahoo Shopping. The same keyword query from Monday failed to produce the ad on Wednesday, suggesting it may have been among the ones pulled.

The finding that Yahoo is accepting an undetermined number of ads that should be banned comes less than two weeks after the company announced it had expanded the list of products and services it won't accept ads for to include cigarettes, academic essay-writing services, fake ID or fake diplomas, and firearms, ammunition, and fireworks.

IDG News Service also found an ad from a vendor apparently based in Hong Kong marketing an HIV home test kit, an apparent violation of Yahoo's policy against such kits that haven't been approved by the FDA. Figuring out which of these kits are FDA approved isn't difficult: Only one such product has the FDA endorsement. This was another ad that Yahoo apparently removed.

Searching for "pyramid scheme" triggered multiple ads for so-called MLM (multilevel marketing) companies. These companies, which aren't necessarily illegal, operate under a model of selling via distributors that are offered commissions not only for their sales but also for sales of people they recruit. These MLM companies are considered to be illegally operating pyramid schemes if most of their sales are made among distributors instead of to end consumers.

Why a legitimate MLM company would want its ads to appear whenever someone searches for "pyramid schemes" is highly suspicious. On Wednesday, the roster of MLM company ads triggered by the "pyramid scheme" keyword was gone, replaced instead with ads from vendors that sell products related to this topic, such as books from Amazon.com.

Yahoo's guidelines also forbid ads for products designed to descramble cable and satellite signals to get such services for free, yet on Monday a search for "cable descramblers" called up an ad blatantly promoting "Cable Pirate Boxes." That ad also seems to have been removed.

IDG News Service also found ads on Monday for cigarettes, designer product knock-offs, police radar detectors and rifle ammunition, all of them from categories banned by Yahoo's guidelines.

Iona Technologies is offering technology to link Microsoft applications with systems from Oracle, IBM and others.

Key to the arrangement is the launch of Artix Connect for WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). The product extends connectivity with legacy applications from within the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment. Users can integrate Microsoft applications with platforms from BEA, IBM, Oracle, Tibco and CORBA applications.

Back-office legacy systems are wrapped behind WSDL interfaces. A .Net developer can connect with Java or CORBA without needing custom adapters or new code generation, Iona said.

"Microsoft's strategic commitment to interoperability and open software fits well with Iona's heritage of making software work together," said Eric Newcomer, CTO of Iona, in a statement released by the company. "Through these efforts, Microsoft is recognizing and helping Iona and others to deliver high-quality interoperability solutions for today's heterogeneous IT environments. Over the past 18 months, we have worked closely with Microsoft product management to ensure Artix Connect for WCF delivers the kind of seamless interoperability our customers require."

Artix Connect for WCF will ship in May, Iona said.

VMware has this week officially made available its Lifecycle Manager tool, which allows IT managers to better control the lifecycle of VMs (virtual machines), right from their creation, through to their decommissioning.

It does this by tracking (via a web interface) who created or owns the VM, when it was requested, who approved it, where it is deployed, how long it has been in operation, and when it is scheduled to be decommissioned.

VMware has essentially used the virtual environment automation technology it inherited from the Swiss company Dunes Technologies, which it acquired back in September last year.

According to Douglas Phillips, senior product marketing manager, EMEA, Dunes' underlying platform was called VSO. "VMware Lifecycle Manager is a totally separate tool developed by VMware, but it uses VSO as the underlying platform," he told Techworld.

VMware has also added a highly useful chargeback feature to Lifecycle Manager, which gives IT managers the ability to measure and chargeback the use of specific virtual machines to individual department owners. These chargeback metrics can also be tied in to existing financial systems.

This feature is going to become increasingly useful with more and more deployment of large-scale virtual machines within the enterprise.

"A recent ESG survey of current and planned virtual server adopters, showed that current users expect that the number of their virtual machines will grow by 173 percent over the next two years," said Mark Bowker, industry analyst at ESG.

"To handle this massive growth, VMware Lifecycle Manager delivers IT organizations a method to automate best practices by implementing a standardized approach for managing user requests for the provisioning of virtual machines, while simultaneously eliminating manual and repetitive tasks," he added.

Lifecycle Manager also allows customers to create a catalogue of standard IT services. Users then pick and choose from a menu of virtual machines with different properties. It apparently also streamlines requests and approvals, as VMware Lifecycle Manager establishes a scalable mechanism to route and approve all requests for virtual machines, which "helps ensure compliance with internal policies."

VMware Lifecycle Manager is now available for purchase, and costs $895 per physical CPU socket.

According to Phillips, this price is fixed across all geographic regions, although there is an unlocked version of the product (typically used by large global accounts), with a one-time cost of $20,000.

After an operator started selling a service that lets parents control the Web sites their kids access on their phones, the service provider noticed something unusual: The third most popular category of Web content being accessed by phones monitored by the service were job hunt sites.

"We were convinced there must have been a problem because kids aren't looking at those sites," said Simeon Coney, vice president of business development for AdaptiveMobile, the company that offers the monitoring technology to operators.

But then AdaptiveMobile figured out that the operator had broadly advertised the service as one that blocks adult content on handsets. Companies noticed and started buying the service to restrict access to sites by employees. The mobile workers were visiting the job sites.

AdaptiveMobile launched its Policy Control Framework monitoring service for the North American market at the CTIA conference Tuesday in Las Vegas. It's already being used outside of North America.

Mobile operators that want to offer the service to users must implement AdaptiveMobile's product in their networks. AdaptiveMobile's technology then monitors Web traffic to and from phones and can block traffic that doesn't meet set rules.

If an operator sells the service to parents, they can log on to a Web page to set rules for their children's cell phone use. AdaptiveMobile has created packages of Web sites appropriate for different age groups. Parents can choose one of the packages and add or delete sites from it.

In addition, parents can set time frames during which kids can access the Web from their phones. They can also restrict other basic communications, including phone calls and text messages to and from certain numbers.

In the U.S., a tier two operator is in the process of rolling out the service, but AdaptiveMobile wouldn't reveal the operator's identity. Some operators in other regions charge a monthly fee for the service while others give it away as part of family plan packages, Coney said.

While enterprise use of the service has so far been by chance, that could change. "We're in discussions with operators about bringing this out to the corporate markets," he said.

Enterprises are starting to recognize that they want more control over employee use of mobile phones, he said. Most employees know that their laptops and PCs at work are monitored by IT administrators, but they often know that their mobile phones aren't, opening the door for possible abuse, he said.

Nanotechnology manufacturers need stricter regulations to avoid environmental problems and diseases like cancer, according to a report released by an environmental advocacy group.

The nanotechnology manufacturing process is largely unregulated for environmental issues, but could cause several problems, according to the report by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. The group called for regulation of nanotech manufacturing particularly in Silicon Valley, where nanotech has emerged as a major industry, with more than 110 nanotech companies and research facilities.

"Small particles are associated with well-known diseases such as asbestosis and silicosis, granulomas, and lung inflammation," the report says. "Based on this knowledge, we can expect that the inhalation of particles as small as engineered nanoparticles could be hazardous."

Members of the NanoBusiness Alliance, a nanotech trade group, have been working with environmental groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to address any concerns, and the group has called for more U.S. funding for research into the health and environmental effects of nanotech, said Sean Murdock, the alliance's executive director.

The toxics coalition uses "loaded language" and "abstract fear-mongering" discussions about cancer and other diseases in an attempt to raise concerns about nanomaterials, Murdock said. "There's nothing out there that suggests [nanomaterials] are intrinsically more dangerous" than other manufacturing materials, he said.

The toxics group seems to be calling on the nanotech industry to "prove a negative," to prove that no nanomaterial will ever be dangerous, he added. He instead called for a constructive dialogue about nanotech and possible environmental impacts.

Without stronger regulation, California and other areas with nanotech manufacturing could face toxic cleanup problems similar to problems with toxic spills reported in Santa Clara County, California, by IBM and Fairchild Camera in 1981, the group said.

Lawmakers "just need to learn from our [past] lessons," said Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. "There's no reason we should repeat them."

Some nanomaterials can cause brain damage in fish or be breathed deep into lungs, although many of the health effects are unknown, the group said. The material nanosilver could cause similar problems as silver in water environments, which has caused reproduction problems with some clams, the group said.

Most U.S. environmental regulations cover companies that generate large amounts of materials, in some cases more than 10,000 gallons of a regulated material, said Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. But nanotechnology plants won't generate that volume, with a diameter of a human hair about 75,000 nanometers. Nanoparticles generally are smaller than 100 nanometers in size.

"We're looking at a new technology, and we have a 40- or 50-year-old environmental policy framework," Davis said. "It's archaic. It's designed to regulate chemicals that were developed 100 years ago."

The U.S. government's National Nanotechnology Initiative, which helps fund nanotech research, has a budget of $1.44 billion in 2008, the group noted. But only 4 percent of that budget is targeted at health and environmental implications, the report said. "It's really a lack of accountability on the federal government, because of the funding structure," Davis added.

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition called for new environmental regulations specifically focused on nanotech and labeling requirements on products containing nanotech. The group also suggested that local governments pass laws requiring nanotech companies to disclose what chemicals they use in their manufacturing processes.

This story was updated on April 2, 2008

Microsoft may be set to extend Windows XP 's availability for low-cost laptops and a new generation of handheld devices, but it won't give the aged operating system a general reprieve from its June 30 retail and OEM cut-off, analysts said Tuesday.

[ Join InfoWorld's effort to save Windows XP! ]

"Not likely," said Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry, citing Microsoft's need to push Windows Vista.

"XP has had one reprieve already," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with JupiterResearch. "And there are ways they can extend the life of the technology without extending the life of the XP brand."

Last September, Microsoft gave Windows XP a five-month stay, saying it would continue selling the operating system to large computer makers and at retail through the end of June, rather than call it quits Jan. 31, 2008, which had been its original plan.

Tuesday, reports surfaced that said Microsoft would also relax the June 30 deadline for low-cost laptops, such as the Asus Eee, and the low-priced pocket devices which plan to use Intel's Atom processors. Those laptops and devices will lack the horsepower to run Windows Vista.

"There's clearly a need for something like XP in the mobile or ultramobile market, where it shines relative to Vista," Gartenberg said.

Cherry agreed that Vista has no place on low-powered hardware but said Microsoft was in a tough spot. If Vista's specifications preclude its use on laptops in the $200 to $300 range, as they certainly do, and Microsoft doesn't want to cede the turf to Linux, its only choice is XP. Yet Cherry said Microsoft would put XP to bed if it could.

"Regardless of what happens, at the end of the day we've got XP, Vista -- all five versions of it -- and then Windows 7 coming along," Cherry said. "How long can they keep maintaining three big globs of code?"

But if the people are expecting Microsoft to lengthen the lifespan of Windows XP for all users, they're dreaming, Cherry continued. "I think it's likely that Microsoft will extend the deadline, but I don't think everyone will like what it is. They won't keep it alive for all."

Cherry again cited the difficulty of maintaining the code base for XP at the same time it makes the case for Vista and develops Windows 7. He also dismissed the fact that last September, Microsoft promised to make Windows XP Starter Edition available in emerging markets -- generally defined as countries like China, India, Russia, and the like -- through June 2010. "There's a difference between maintaining something like XP Starter and XP for anyone who wants it," Cherry argued.

Interest in Windows XP's longevity has been driven by several factors, including the approaching June 30 deadline and the imminent release of another service pack, but the biggest reason users seem to want XP to live is a general reluctance to upgrade to Windows Vista.

Earlier this week, Forrester Research released results of monthly surveys during 2007 that polled more than 50,000 enterprise computer users. According to the surveys, Windows XP usage remained constant throughout the year at slightly over 89 percent of all Windows users in businesses. Windows Vista, meanwhile, grew from nearly nothing to just over 6 percent, but appeared to get its gains at the expense of Windows 2000, not the dominant Windows XP.

A Forrester researcher said the data hinted that companies might hang on to Windows XP until the next iteration, Windows 7, is available in late 2009 or early 2010, skipping Vista altogether.

Gartenberg acknowledged the pressure to push out XP's drop-dead date came from Vista's troubles. "In the past you could argue that the latest and greatest from Microsoft was better. But for many people and businesses, that just doesn't fly this time.

"It boils down to the simple question," he continued. "If Microsoft can't convince their customers to move to Vista, will they will be able to kill XP?"

U.S. federal government officials are confident they will meet a June 30 deadline to support IPv6 on their backbone networks, but they see challenges ahead in transitioning their production networks to this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

Challenges cited by federal IPv6 leaders include the lack of IPv6-enabled security devices and software applications available in the commercial marketplace as well as budgetary constraints and training hurdles.

IPv6 represents a major upgrade to the Internet. It replaces the current version of the Internet Protocol, known as IPv4, with a new and improved version that features vastly more IP addresses along with built-in security and network management enhancements. The Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet's premier standards-setting body, created IPv6 in 1995. 

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a requirement in 2005 that all U.S. federal agencies must be capable of passing IPv6 packets on their backbone networks by June 30, 2008.

Karen Evans, OMB administrator for E-Government and Information Technology, said in March that she expects agencies to meet the June 30 deadline. She wouldn't comment on penalties an agency would face if it missed the deadline.

Evans is encouraging federal agencies to continue working toward production-level IPv6 deployments despite the challenges they have expressed meeting the June deadline.

"We want agencies to take advantage of the business opportunities afforded to their missions with the implementation of IPv6,'' Evans said in a statement. "We feel it is important for agencies to modernize their network infrastructure to support emerging IPv6 applications and technologies and to minimize the risk associated with the products [that] are already IPv6 enabled.''

Pete Tseronis, co-chair of the Federal CIO Council's IPv6 Working Group, says OMB's June 30 IPv6 deadline is more of a recommendation than a mandate.

"We don't like the term mandate,'' Tseronis says. "It's what agencies should be doing as part of their tech refresh anyway. The federal government took an initiative by way of OMB to rally support for IPv6 and to get all the federal agencies engaged in the discussion about IPv6. June 30 is the first real milestone of what we hope will be a successful deployment of IPv6.''

Agencies are required to submit quarterly reports to OMB that include their IPv6 progress. "To date, there have been no agencies that appear to be saying: We will not be meeting the June deadline,'' Tseronis says.

Meeting the OMB requirements for IPv6 is a pass/fail process. Among the agencies that have already achieved compliance with OMB's IPv6 requirements are the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Education, and the Social Security Administration, Tseronis says.

"I'm very optimistic'' that most federal agencies will meet OMB's IPv6 deadline, Tseronis says. "Are people going to do it at the 11th hour and stay up all night? Possibly.''

The Department of Defense is working under a similar deadline to migrate to IPv6. The department issued a memorandum in 2003 outlining a five-year transition to IPv6. By September 2008, the department has vowed to have all of its core networks able to process IPv6 traffic.

The Defense Department first will transition its unclassified IP backbone network -- dubbed NIPRNET -- to IPv6, followed by its classified IP network, which is called SIPRNET.

"We will meet the OMB mandate,'' says Kris Strance, who leads IPv6 transition for the Defense Department and works in the Office of the Secretary of Defense CIO. "The OMB mandate only requires that you pass IPv6 packets across the network. It does not require the infrastructure, for example the DNS servers, the security devices and such, to be IPv6 capable.''

Strance says the Defense Department could have met the OMB mandate several years ago when it upgraded all of its routers to IPv6-capable devices.

"Frankly, the OMB's bar is much lower than we have been working toward in DOD,'' Strance says. "We are working toward a true IPv6 capability.''

Strance says NIPRNET will not be an operational IPv6-capable network by June 30, despite the agency having worked on IPv6 transition for five years. The big holdup is the lack of IPv6-capable security devices, including firewalls and intrusion-detection systems that meet the National Security Agency's requirements.

"We're going to see certain vendors come in this spring to test security devices. These are beta versions, so I suspect there will be some time before we have production of security devices that meet our requirements,'' Strance says.

Federal CIOs have been focused on getting their network infrastructures ready for IPv6. But one challenge for full-fledged IPv6 deployments is the lack of IPv6-enabled applications. (Take a sneak peek at IPv6 services in the works from carriers.)

"The honest truth is that applications have not been our focus,'' Strance admits. "Our focus has been the networks. Without the networks, the applications don't have any transport. So that's next. We recognize right up front that the applications are where you achieve the advantages of IPv6. The core doesn't do anything for you, but the core has to come first.''

"Applications need to be developed ... but you have to put the cart before the horse,'' Tseronis says, explaining why federal agencies have been focused on enabling core networks with IPv6. "Most agencies have the attitude -- right or wrong -- that when it comes to their networks, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. . . . The IPv6 applications that are going to wow you, first and foremost, require you to upgrade your infrastructure.''

Strance says the first IPv6-enabled application that the Defense Department will roll out is VoIP.

"We've been working with the vendors now for several years to get IPv6-capable VoIP products, and starting this January we began evaluating these products,'' Strance says, adding that the Defense Department will run an IPv6-enabled VoIP pilot on its voice network in 2009. "We have a fairly large amount of VoIP on SIPRNET. We started that as a pilot, and it's been very successful in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.... It's IPv4, but there's a potential there to move it to IPv6.''

Another hurdle to full-fledged IPv6 deployment is budget constraints. Agencies have paid for the upgrades required to meet the OMB IPv6 mandate through their tech-refresh budgets.

"IPv6 will be phased into the agencies' infrastructure and applications through their life-cycle management,'' Evans says. "Over the next few years, the majority of network operating systems, hardware, and network-enabled software packages will include IPv6 capabilities. As many federal agencies continue to refresh their network architecture components, the new and improved hardware and software components are expected to support IPv6 capabilities.''

The Defense Department, which is furthest along in IPv6 deployment, says tech-refresh funding isn't enough to cover the upgrade.

"What we've learned is that there are additional resources that are required to do engineering, integration, testing and evaluation activities to prepare for IPv6, and frankly we hadn't planned for that initially,'' Strance says.

Some of that additional funding needs to go to training.

"Training is an important part of the integration process, and agencies should invest in recruiting and training their staff in how to architect, manage and secure IPv6 networks,'' Evans says.

Tseronis says federal agencies need to have the right technical people to manage IPv6 deployments.

"IPv6 is all about end-to-end security and not doing network address translation,'' Tseronis explains. "It's about having the right people, recruiting the right people and developing the skill sets you need.''

The Defense Department, however, says that the training component was less expensive than the integration and testing required for IPv6 deployment.

"Our experience with the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) is that training is not a huge issue,'' Strance says. DREN has been running IPv6 for three years.

Overall, Strance says the challenges agencies face in deploying IPv6 in production mode are numerous.

"Nothing has been easy about this,'' Strance says. "Maintaining interoperability is a significant challenge, and that's something we're very mindful of. Security has been the biggest challenge, I would say. Understanding the vulnerabilities that IPv6 brings when you implement it.... Lastly, we have to accommodate a huge legacy in DOD. Being able to do that isn't easy.''

Major League Baseball's MLB.TV online broadcasting service encountered serious technical difficulties for the second straight day on Tuesday, as affected paying subscribers fumed about missing games.

At around 7 p.m. Eastern Time, minutes prior to the start of Tuesday's first games, MLB disabled its Mosaic media player, the application that gives premium-level MLB.TV subscribers the advanced viewing features they pay for.

Mosaic remained unavailable for about three hours, but even after it became operational again, an undetermined number of subscribers still were unable to watch games due to technical problems affecting MLB.TV's log-in process.

MLB on Wednesday didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the outstanding technical issues affecting MLB.TV, whose premium-level subscription costs either $19.95 per month or $119.95 per year. A lower-level subscription tier costs $14.95 per month or $89.95 per year.

The Mosaic and log-in problems carried over from Monday, which was the league's opening day, widely awaited by baseball fans.

Tom Prendergast, an e-commerce product manager in Canton, Mass., in his second season as a premium-level subscriber, has given up on MLB.TV after the technical problems prevented him from watching games again on Tuesday.

"I am very upset now and plan to call and cancel my service if I can ever get through," he said via e-mail, alluding to the long wait times he has experienced in the past two days when calling MLB.TV's customer support line.

His anger and frustration are echoed by many other MLB.TV subscribers who are sounding off in an official MLB customer support forum and official Mosaic blog.

A common comment among those posting messages in these sites is why an organization with MLB's resources can't get its MLB.TV service ready in time for the start of the season. Others are planning to cancel their subscriptions, while some are voicing intentions to file formal complaints against MLB with consumer protection agencies and even possibly take legal action.

Based on the latest information posted by MLB representatives on the official Mosaic blog and on the customer support forum, it seems that Mosaic should be working correctly now. They're also pledging that the log-in problems will be fixed prior to Wednesday's first game, which is scheduled to start at 1:05 p.m. ET.

In an interview Tuesday, Robert Bowman, president and CEO of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, MLB's interactive media and Internet company, acknowledged that MLB.TV has had technical glitches at the start of prior seasons.

But he said that the MLB.TV team does its best to have the system ready under difficult circumstances. "It's a complicated process. We can't get into the ballparks and test things out until we actually have games in the ballparks, so we have a one-day spring training" for testing everything end to end, he said.

One thing is clear: The technical disruptions have marred what was supposed to be MLB.TV's most significant rollout of new services and enhancements, trumpeted by the league on its Web site and through a series of recent press releases.

For example, in addition to upgrading Mosaic using Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology, MLB.TV is debuting this year enhanced premium-level video streaming at a rate of 1.2Mbps, more than double its previous rate, and in a 16:9 widescreen format.

SpringSource, which leads development of Spring Java technologies, on Wednesday announced availability of SpringSource Enterprise, which includes tested and indemnified software along with product and development capabilities and support.

?With SpringSource Enterprise, customers receive stable, secure, and trusted downloads and support directly from the creators of Spring,? said Neelan Choksi, chief operating officer at SpringSource, in a statement released by the company.

Featured in SpringSource Enterprise are:

* Spring Enterprise Edition, which is the latest version of Spring. Bug fixes and monitoring integration are included.

* Support to maximize production uptime, developer productivity, and application performance.

* Performance Suite, featuring applications to develop, test, and run Spring applications.

The Performance Suite includes tools to benefit from application development, advanced database integration, and application monitoring and management. Featured in Performance Suite are: Tool Suite, an Eclipse development environment for building enterprise applications using Spring Portfolio; Advanced Pack for Oracle Database, to enable enterprise Java applications using Spring to leverage Oracle database features; and Application Management Suite, for enterprise application management.

There's a lot of buzz about Facebook, but what is it, exactly? What does it do? Can anybody join? How much does it cost?

In this article, I'll give you the basics of joining Facebook and what you can expect to find there. I'll explain the opportunities and services available for businesses and for individuals, based on my experience as a newbie who recently joined.

Until I became a member, I didn't really know what Facebook was. A friend of mine had told me that he met his fiancée on Facebook. Another friend said she gets together with her friends from all over the city on Facebook every Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. Then I overheard a colleague at work say that he'd been looking for his high school girlfriend for years and, just recently, found her on Facebook, living in Scotland with her deceased husband's family.

All these things left me confused. At first, I believed Facebook was an online dating service, then I thought it was a chat room, and then a worldwide phone directory. Then another colleague told me that members could advertise anything imaginable -- from skiing to skydiving to skeet shooter's clay pigeons -- on the Facebook Marketplace, for free. That sold me. I signed up that very day.

The home page lists many of the features available after you join.

About FacebookFacebook was launched in February 2004 by a young Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg. It started out as a sort of virtual campus hangout for Ivy League students, but quickly expanded from the university to the universe, and now anyone 13 or older can join.

It's growing quickly across the globe (250,000 people become members every day) with new sites in Spanish, German, and, soon, French.

It's also gaining on the more established social-networking site MySpace. Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang says, "We predict that the total registered users of Facebook will eclipse the total amount of MySpace users in Q4 of 2008 but, even with that said, MySpace and Facebook will coexist, because they both serve different purposes to different audiences."

According to Owyang, Facebook is more of a lifestyle site. That is, like the college campuses where it was launched, Facebook has become a central networking hub where its members can connect and share, in spite of their busy lives. Its largest, growing audience is the 35-and-over crowd. MySpace tends to attract the younger social surfers who are more media conscious and therefore flock to MySpace's "bands and brands" multimedia options, which include various forms of artistic self-expression.

Joining FacebookJoining Facebook is as easy as 1-2-3.

1. Go to Facebook.com and create a UserID (your e-mail address), password, and birth date (all three are mandatory fields). Notice that the Sign Up dialog box on the home page says: Sign up for Facebook. It's free and anyone can join. (So that answered my questions about who could join and how much it costs.)

2. Next, type in a security code (a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart or CAPTCHA; you know, one of those strings of jumbled up, curvy letters that look like shorthand on a roller coaster).

3. Then, Facebook says: You will get an e-mail shortly telling you how to confirm your account. The e-mail provides a link back to Facebook that, when activated, takes you back to the program to begin the ride.

First things firstThere were so many features available, I wanted to hurriedly search through them all so that I could determine which ones might apply to me and my interests.

I quickly noticed, however, that until you join a network (centered around your city, job, high school, or college), and complete a profile, you can't really get much information.

So I went back to the home page and started over.

If you follow certain steps in order (right after you join), Facebook attempts to identify your circle of friends and colleagues by asking you to list your local city, place of work, college, high school, and various e-mail accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.

If all your connections are in one area, just select the Find Friends button. If your job is one state, college in another, and high school in another (as in my case), Facebook takes the information you provided and selects the top three areas, then prompts you to choose the place you identify with most. At this point, you are then invited to "join a network."

Find friendsOnce you join a network, select Find Friends and, in seconds, Facebook generates pages filled with people in your area. My network in Salt Lake City has more than 75,000 members. So I started browsing randomly through hundreds of screens of happy faces, all of which display names, network, city, and a series of options you can choose, such as send message, poke (which is the Facebook way of tapping someone and saying "hi, what's up, thinking about you"), view their friends, or add their friends to your own friends list. You can also use the Sort Method box to narrow your search by sex, age, relationship status, political views, and so on.

The best thing about this method of "finding friends" is that you can browse through hundreds of member profiles anonymously. You can see what old friends and colleagues are doing -- such as looking up an old sweetheart or finding out what happened to an old college professor -- without committing to anything. Curiosity, however, doesn't always result in personal contact, because, like so many others in this country, I work all the time. But when I read that an old friend of mine had lost her mother to cancer, I did send her a message and a Facebook gift. Now I find that I surf my "friends" network several times a week.

Another great benefit is the option to "Browse All Networks," all over the world. You can't join them all, because Facebook only allows full access to one network at a time, although you can change networks twice every 60 days. But even without full access, you can search for friends in other cities or countries, see postings of local events, browse the local marketplace, join groups, and read the local discussion boards or bulletin boards. That's a lot of access for a network visitor.

My favorite feature, however, is that I can access Facebook from my BlackBerry, which means I can check messages, listen to new music, and view my friends' photos from just about anywhere, even on the plane when I'm traveling (which means I'm having fun instead of stressing about air pockets and downdrafts).

So what is Facebook? It's all those things mentioned above and more. It's an online dating service; a chat room; a worldwide phone directory; an e-mail account; a photo, video and file-sharing warehouse (with unlimited file storage); a place to join or create new clubs or social forums (called Groups); a personal bulletin board (called the Wall); a social calendar (called Events); free advertising in the Marketplace; personal blogs (called Notes); a voter registration service; and even more.

Creative business solutionsIn this case, more means lots of creative opportunities for businesses, bands, and other groups and organizations. For example, with Facebook's social ads, members can create a home page "Sponsored Story" where businesses can promote their products and/or services through the news feed feature, which provides continual updates about what a user's friends are doing. And expanding on that function is the Facebook "Sponsored Group," where businesses can "message blast" registered group members through Facebook's internal e-mail system.

In addition, companies can create mini Web sites (called Facebook pages) where companies, bands, celebrities, and politicians can design custom profiles for their business or career. It's sort of like an online brochure/résumé/advertisement of your products, services, and skills.

Other business opportunities include the Facebook developer's platform (for companies that want to build applications to interface with Facebook) and the Facebook polls for statistical analysis and demographics.

But the site has had its share of controversy. Last month, Facebook responded to user protests and made it easier for members to delete their accounts and all associated data.

It earlier took a lot of heat for its advertising tracking service called Beacon that many deemed to be too intrusive into users' privacy. In December, Facebook responded to the criticism and let users turn off the feature.

In 2006, Facebook was widely lambasted for its news feed component, also because of privacy concerns. Zuckerberg apologized and instituted better privacy controls.

Security/privacyA timeline of Computerworld articles demonstrates the breadth of security/privacy issues that have haunted Facebook.

-- Nov. 9: New Facebook ad system raises privacy concerns

-- Nov 30: Facebook's Beacon more intrusive than earlier thought, CA says

-- Dec. 3: Beacon's user tracking extends beyond Facebook, CA says

-- Dec 3: Facebook's Beacon just the tip of the privacy iceberg

-- Dec 5: Facebook caves in to Beacon criticism

-- Dec. 7: Facebook doesn't budge on Beacon's broad user tracking

-- Dec. 10: Facebook partners quiet on Beacon privacy brouhaha

-- Dec. 10: Facebook Fiasco May Lead to Closer Look at Online Privacy Issues

-- Dec 14: Disgruntled Facebook users look to get disabled accounts reactivated

-- Feb. 13: Facebook bends to user protests, makes it easier to delete accounts

Michael Greene, an analyst at JupiterResearch, says the news feed program has developed into one of the site's better features, especially for businesses. "By allowing users to quickly scan their friends' updates, it has helped turn Facebook into a daily addiction for many users and allowed Facebook to develop innovative browsing options such as its iPhone application."

In each case, Facebook acted to address member complaints. Greene says Facebook "has a tremendous track record for considering their members and responding to their needs."

Facebook's strength, Greene notes, is its ability to link people together in networks, whether geographically based or centered around a school or employer, and provide a fun, highly usable communications platform for friends within these networks.

And the site is continuing to evolve and build on that strength. Recently it rolled out new privacy controls that determine who gets to see members' data, and announced it was developing an online chat service.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft may have won a year-long quest to make its OOXML (Office Open XML) document format an ISO-recognized international standard, but claims of foul play in the voting process may come back to haunt the software giant when the European Commission concludes its latest antitrust investigation of Microsoft's business practices.

When the Commission, Europe's top antitrust authority, opened a probe into Microsoft's business practices in January, it said part of the investigation would examine whether OOXML, as the format is known, is "sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products."

A month later ,the Commission sent a confidential request for information to all the national divisions of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in Europe, asking for information about the ongoing process of assessing OOXML.

"In your opinion, have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote on the ECMA 376 proposal as regards your organization? If so please provide details and any relevant facts," the Commission wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by IDG News Service. ECMA 376 is the title under which Microsoft submitted OOXML for consideration by the ISO.

The request for information, known as an Article 18 letter, is a formal procedure carried out by the Commission's antitrust officials, designed to gather evidence of antitrust abuse.

It was used in the first Microsoft investigation, which concluded in 2004. The repli