Microsoft Tuesday revealed Windows 7 at its annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. Windows 7 is designed to replace Windows Vista as the main operating system for Windows-based PC users.

With Apple's OS X Snow Leopard also under development, we met up with Ian Moulster, Windows Live commercial lead for Microsoft, to talk through some of Microsoft's key ideas and discover what the next generation of operating systems aim to offer both Mac and PC users.

[ Check out InfoWorld's preview of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. | Is Windows 7 any good? Tom Yager says Windows 7 atones for Vista's sins, but Randall C. Kennedy says Windows 7 is more of the same old mess. ]

At this year's WWDC, Apple announced that the next version of its operating system would take a break from introducing new features and focus on performance. "We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering. "In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world's most advanced operating system."

The OS X update, expected to ship in June 2009, will be optimized for multicore processors and enable "breakthrough amounts of RAM -- up to a theoretical 16TB." Apple also promised a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X. The update will also offer out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007.

On the other side of the fence, Microsoft has had highly publicized troubles with its Vista operating system. So our first question to Microsoft was whether Windows 7 was a smokescreen for fixing some of the problems with Vista. "No," came the answer, "Service Packs 1 and 2 are fixing things," said Microsoft's Ian Moulster. "This is less about fixing things and more about building on the good stuff. This is about where we go from here."

Having got that out of they way, we got stuck into discussing the future of the operating system. It's clear that Snow Leopard is about much more than just a speed bump, and Microsoft has more than just a few "borrowed" ideas being used to fix Vista's flaws.

So let's get started with the biggest news: Sometime next year the desktop and laptop computer is highly likely to sport multitouch, touchscreen technology.

Touchscreen technology confirmedOne major new feature confirmed for Windows 7 is a vastly improved touchscreen support. Taking its cue from the iPhone and the technology from Microsoft Surface, Windows 7 will see the same kind of multitouch gestures applied to the desktop or laptop computer.

"You'll be able to drag around windows and resize photos by pulling them apart... that sort of thing," said Ian Moulster. "We've redesigned the interface to make touchscreen a lot easier, and it'll be good to see what the take up will be. We already have several ways to interact with the computer: keyboard, mouse, voice, and we see this as another way that users can interact with their computer. It's more about choice than anything, just giving users another way that they can interact."

One interest point of note is that while Google steered clear of multitouch input for its Android G1 phone (lest Apple's legal team descend upon the company with a fury), Microsoft appears to have no such qualms. We imagine that because the Surface was a multitouch product Microsoft feels a legitimate claim to the technology. However, like Google, Microsoft is also going to enable any company to develop its own gestures for the Windows 7 operating system [Insert your own joke here -- Ed].

In this sense, the ball for touchscreen technology is now very much back in Apple's court. Of course, Apple has the iPhone and has rolled out multitouch technology to the trackpads of its laptops, so in that sense Apple is the leading authority on touch-based input. However, it's made no mention at all of rolling out touchscreen technology beyond its iPhone and iPod Touch products. At the launch of the iPhone in the United Kingdom, Macworld asked Steve Jobs about the prospect of multitouch making its way to the Mac and he replied: "multitouch makes a lot of sense on the iPhone, but not so much sense on an iMac. Consider it a research project."

Are we likely to see the fruits of that research at the next Macworld Expo in January 2009? We think a touchscreen Mac just became a lot more likely.

Confirmed and rumored features in Snow LeopardEven though Apple said that the Snow Leopard was about performance, not new features, some have been announced on Apple's Web site. The first is support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal. OS X Snow Leopard will use the Exchange Web Services protocol to provide access to Exchange 2007 on your Mac. While this is of little interest to the majority of consumers, it will enable Apple to make further inroads into the corporate market with both the Mac and iPhone.

There are some features in OS X Server that we believe may make their way into future iterations of OS X. One is an application called Podcast Producer that enable users to quickly record video and audio podcasts and perform basic editing. The other is an application called Wiki Server that enables multiple users to publish and share collaborative information. Wiki Server is a strikingly interesting application that enables small groups to create and share information and files. Whether this technology is wholly dependent on the presence of an OS X-based Server, or could be rolled into Snow Leopard is debatable though.

On the whole, we have been given very little information regarding new features in Snow Leopard, mostly because the new features are performance-based (such as Apple's Grand Central technology that will enable performance gains in multi-core technologies). We have also been given no reason to believe that any other new features are in the pipeline -- quite the opposite in fact.

Whether Apple will reveal new features at the Macworld Expo 2009 remains to be seen.

Confirmed new features in Windows 7Microsoft took the time to explain some new features of Windows 7 to us. There have been a couple of user interface enhancements. You can now resize Windows by dragging them to edges of the screen. Top to maximize, bottom to minimize, and dragging to the left or right automatically resizes to half the display. If you're comparing documents side by side, you can just move the documents to the left- and right-hand sides to automatically fit both on the screen. The combination of this with touchscreen support will be interesting to see.

Other UI features will be familiar to OS X users. The Taskbar now sports a feature similar to Stacks, if you have multiple files in a program open they are gathered into a thumbnail preview that "stack" up when you hover over the icon in the Taskbar. QuickLaunch App icons have been removed and you can now pin applications into the Taskbar (similar to the "Keep In Dock" command in OS X).

"They're all just little things that make it easier to use," said Ian Moulster.

Another new feature set is something called Home Group that makes it easier for multiple users on a network to search each other's hard drive. As we haven't seen this feature in action we had difficulty visualizing it, it in effect sounds very similar to current functionality found in both OS X and Vista.

Of more interest is an extension to Windows' BitLocker (the Windows equivalent of FileVault) that enables users to encrypt USB drives and flash sticks, as well as the hard drives on their computers. Microsoft hopes this will enable users to avoid some of the embarrassing gaffes of losing confidential information that hit the headlines this year. The new BitLocker functionality will be backwards compatible to Windows XP, which will be able to open the encrypted drives, although Windows 7 is required to do the initial encryption.

Another new feature is an improved Device Manager with open support for third-party devices. The idea is that when you plug in a third-party device, the Device Manager will have a visual representation of the device and access to functions such as synching and copying of data. Companies will provide Microsoft with their own updates for the Device Manager, which will be seeded out in Windows updates.

Finally, Windows 7 has a vastly improved search function that has been enhanced to include corporate networks. "you can -- in a very granular way -- incorporate what your search will include," said Ian Moulster.

In all though, aside from the touchscreen technology we found the proposed feature set for Windows 7 somewhat lightweight. "This is a taster rather than a full set," said Ian Moulster. "We're not ready to bestow everything."

System requirements and release datesAs mentioned earlier, Snow Leopard is largely designed to take advantage of multicore Intel processors, and to that end we expect it to require a Mac with an Intel processor (so that leaves all G5 and earlier computers on the regular version of Leopard). Based upon leaked system requirements, we expect Snow Leopard to work on all Intel-based Macs.

Ian Moulster explained to us that Windows 7 would largely have the same system requirements as Windows Vista. Neither operating system is designed for the next generation of computers, but rather to make the most out of the current generation.

Interestingly, neither Snow Leopard or Windows 7 appear designed to scale down to work effectively on the new generation of netbooks. Steve Jobs, on a conference call to Macworld, recently referred to this as a "nascent" market that Apple was watching. Similarly, Windows 7 is not designed to scale down to the performance of netbooks, which currently run either Linux or Windows XP. "It's something we're watching," said Ian Moulster.

So what comes next with Snow Leopard? We are confident that more information will be revealed by Steve Jobs on 6 January 2009 at the Macworld Expo and Conference in San Francisco. Hopefully more features will be revealed, although Apple appears fairly adamant that the next operating system is about performance and not features. It will be interesting to see Apple's response to Microsoft's adoption of touchscreen technology.

As for the actual release date, we expect to see Snow Leopard on sale in June 2009.

The release date for Windows 7 is a little more fuzzy. "You get stung if you get it wrong," said Ian Moulster. "People at PDC swill get a preview copy, but we're not announcing anything beyond that. Hopefully it won't be long."

Macworld UK is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Quantum has enhanced and renamed its Vision storage management software, and added a low-end 9TB version of its DXi7500 enterprise disk backup device.

Vision manages both disk and tape storage and now provides better capacity monitoring, detailed trending and de-duplication statistics for DXi systems installed around the world, said Gabriel Chaher, Quantum's senior director for international product and field marketing, speaking at Storage Networking World Europe in Frankfurt, Germany.

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

"It looks at how much capacity you have free and in the pool today, it does it again tomorrow and the day after, and it builds up a trend," he said. "We can't predict what's coming in, nor how much duplication it'll contain, but we can tell you what trend you're on."

Formerly called StorageCare Vision and now just Vision, the software has also been optimized for operation over the WAN and monitors all Quantum disk and tape products. That includes those released since the previous Vision version came out, such as the DXi7500, Chaher said.

Brian Garrett, technical director of ESG Labs, recently tested the new Vision software. "I found tools such as the de-duplication trend analysis to be an excellent example of Vision's rich capabilities. It should bring significant value to customers grappling with the challenges associated with effective management of their data protection resources," he said.

The new low-end DXi7500 should make it easier and cheaper for enterprises to buy into high-performance de-duplication, Chaher said.

Not only does it have half the disk capacity of the previous low-end model -- 16 750GB drives, in three RAID5 groups plus a hot spare -- but because it only has one shelf of hard drives, Quantum was able to trim its cost by removing the Fibre Channel switch that's in larger models.

The 9TB DXi7500 will not overlap with Quantum's midrange DXi5500 family, which offers similar capacity points, because the 5500 has much more limited growth capability, Chaher said.

"You don't need to change controllers, just put the Fibre Channel switch back in, for the same box to grow to the full 180T-byte capacity of the 7500," he said. "Plus the 7500 has policy-based de-duplication, which the 5500 doesn't."

The company said that Quantum Vision is available as software to run on a customer's Windows server, and costs from $7500 for a system licensed to manage two disk or tape systems. List pricing for the 9TB 7500DXi is around $135,000, Quantum said.

Aruba Networks on Tuesday publicly launched programs to find new uses for Wi-Fi networks, explore future possibilities for wireless networks and study mobile computing's impact on the environment.

The Wi-Fi network vendor is initiating all three projects under the banner of Aruba Labs , a project that has been in stealth mode for about two years but is now going public and adding a broad program called the Green Island Project , said Aruba spokesman Michael Tennefoss. Aruba Labs helps third-party software providers develop new applications for wireless LANs and will assist some academics and even grade-school students in studying the emerging wireless world, according to Aruba.

[ Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Wireless LANs are now taken for granted in homes, public hotspots and some parts of enterprises, but they are relatively new as a mainstream technology. Standardized WLANs have only been on the market about 10 years and proliferated beginning earlier in this decade. Aruba said it wants to help researchers explore "blue-sky" problems on the frontiers of wireless networking and study the potential impact of an all-wireless workplace.

Part of the benefit of Wi-Fi offices is power savings, according to Aruba. For example, Aruba claims using wireless to connect client systems allows for smaller switches with fewer ports, cutting power consumption and the need for copper wiring. In addition, WLANs can open up more possibilities for designing buildings because there's no need to allow for wiring to each employee's computer.

Aruba Labs encompasses both research and development, in three main programs.

Under its Developers Program, Aruba Labs writes and distributes open-source SDKs (software development kits) and APIs (application programming interfaces) for software developers and Aruba customers to quickly develop prototypes of new wireless applications. These might include uses such as Wi-Fi digital signs that could warn of hazardous weather or missing children, or security and environmental sensors around a building, Aruba said in a press release.

With its Advanced Directed Research Program, Aruba engineers work directly with partners to study wireless networking issues through sponsored research, joint development work and grant-funded programs. This "blue-sky" research includes studies such as a two-year project between Aruba and Dartmouth University that studied the vulnerabilities of large WLAN voice networks, Tennefoss said.

The newly launched Green Island Project will sponsor research on the economic, environmental and social effects of wireless computing. Aruba said it wants to quantify these effects, such as the impact of easier telecommuting made possible by wireless. The Green Island Project is open, by invitation only, to kindergarten-through-12th-grade schools and colleges and universities that are Aruba customers. On a case-by-case basis, other institutions and companies will be admitted. The idea is to make the project a community of researchers that shares findings rather than having some members simply commercialize them, Tennefoss said. There will be conferences, Webcasts and an online forum for sharing, he said.

Aruba isn't alone in advocating an all-wireless workplace. Motorola, for one, has argued that wireless can be less expensive than wired LANs over the long haul because of factors such as lower maintenance costs for wireless than for copper wiring. Some industry analysts are skeptical about these claims, but there are settings, such as historic buildings and brick or stone structures, where Wi-Fi has made it much easier to connect workers' PCs.

Enterprises are interested in saving money by cutting power consumption, but reducing switch size or port count by going all wireless wouldn't necessarily save power, according to Michael Kanellos, a senior analyst with Green Tech Media. Wi-Fi access points still have to transmit and receive packets from client computers, and through hardware integration, conventional wired Ethernet switches are getting smaller and more efficient, too, he said. Claims such as Aruba's would have to be proved, Kanellos said.

Aruba already has evidence that more wireless networking leads to lower power demands, but one purpose of Aruba Labs will be to study such questions further, according to Aruba's Tennefoss.

The malware armies are growing, with a sharp rise in the number of computers corralled into botnets --far-flung networks of infected PCs that digital crooks use to steal financial account data, relay spam, and launch crippling Internet attacks. Now that popular Web sites can invisibly and unwillingly spread malicious software, the days of staying safe just by being careful where you surf are sadly long gone. But you can take steps to protect yourself and your PC from these threats.

The volunteer white hats of Shadowserver , a nonprofit organization dedicated to battling the bot scourge, maintain a count of how many bot-infected PCs they see with their distributed Internet sensors. In mid-June that count began to climb dramatically, eventually exploding from a sample set between 100,000 and 200,000 for most of the year to a peak of about 500,000 in mid-September.

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

Since Shadowserver's sensors don't see every botnet, the total number of bot-infected machines is almost certainly a good deal larger. And some of the apparent increase stems from Shadowserver's having launched more sensors. But "there are clearly more bots and infected PCs," says Andre´ M. DiMino, a Shadowserver founder. "There's a rise in the surface area of infections and consequently the number of bots we're seeing."

Some experts tie the botnet rise to a recent wave of Web-based attacks. SQL injection attacks , a type of assault against online applications, can crack open vulnerable but otherwise benign Web sites and allow a malicious hacker to insert booby-trapped code. When someone unknowingly browses a poisoned site, the triggered booby trap invisibly hunts for exploitable software holes through which it can install a bot or other malware. Once it infects a PC, a bot contacts a server on the Internet to pick up commands, such as to steal financial-site log-ins, from its thieving controller.

"At the time when this jump [in the number of bot-infected machines] started," says John Bambenek, an incidence handler at the Internet Storm Center , "there was a round of SQL injection attacks against thousands of Web sites." The ISC is another volunteer organization that tracks widespread Internet attacks.

Innocent Sites SufferMuch like the bot software they install, SQL injection and similar Web attacks force victim sites to do their bidding. And they have a growing number of holes to target: In 2007 one security company, SecureWorks, found 59 flaws in applications that allowed for SQL injection attacks. So far in 2008, it has found 366.

Tracking down and closing those holes before crooks find them can be a real challenge. Just ask BusinessWeek.com. That site was only the latest big-name online property to suffer an attack. When we checked Google's Safe Browsing scan report at the end of September in our research for the print-magazine version of this story, the report said that among BusinessWeek.com's 2484 pages the search giant had found 213 that "resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent" over the past 90 days. The report didn't list the site as suspicious overall, and stated that "the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 09/11/2008." In reply to our inquiries, a BusinessWeek spokesperson wrote that "the attack affected only one application within a specific section of our website, and that application has been removed."

The Big Risk: Web ExploitsAccording to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, for a would-be botnet criminal these Web exploit attacks are by far the preferred choice for distributing evil code. "It's almost unheard of these days for these guys to try and send the attachment in e-mail," he says. "Even e-mails will typically direct you to an infected site."

Stewart hasn't noticed any major growth in the large botnets that he watches, but he says he typically sees an ebb and flow in the size of distributed malware networks. When IT workers and antivirus companies catch on to bot infections and clean them up, the crooks respond by infecting a new batch of PCs. "They're having to keep up these seeding campaigns to keep up their botnet size," Stewart says.

Those seeding campaigns typically employ Web attacks that target outdated browser plug-ins and other vulnerable software. "Flash and RealPlayer [plug-ins] -- those are the big ones," Stewart says. The attacks are often successful because it can be hard for users to know when a plug-in is old and susceptible, especially if it's so old as to predate automatic updates.

The free Personal Software Inspector (or PSI) from Secunia can make that task easier. It will scan for outdated software and also provide links to patches or updated versions. A good antivirus program will also help, of course, and a firewall capable of blocking a bot's phone-home connections can provide a secondary layer of defense.

PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

T-Mobile's G1 Android phone is about to get cheaper -- at least, if you look in the right place. Wal-Mart will start selling the Google-powered device at a discounted rate this week, the company has confirmed.

Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers...The G1 will become available Wednesday in select Wal-Mart stores for $148.88, with a two-year agreement. That's $31.11, or about 17 percent, less than the T-Mobile pricetag of $179.99. The offer will be available to all new T-Mobile customers and to any existing customers who qualify for upgrades. As of now, about 550 locations are slated to participate.

[ Read Tom Yager's  First look at the T-Mobile G1 and take a tour of the G1 with InfoWorld's  slideshow. ]

"They will launch in top markets where consumer interest is expected to be very high and where the T-Mobile 3G coverage area is available," says Wal-Mart spokesperson Melissa O'Brien.

Most major metropolitan areas will be included, O'Brien says, though specific locations aren't yet being revealed -- so you may want to make some calls before you make the drive. More stores are expected to be added as the phone becomes more readily available.

Cost ComparisonThe Wal-Mart distribution deal gives G1 added bragging rights when it comes to comparative sticker price . The iPhone 3G , available through AT&T and Apple, starts at $199. A $20 difference, as originally established with T-Mobile's G1 price, may not sound like much. Savings of $50, though, could be a stronger selling point.

Mobile MathG1's manufacturer, HTC, is now projecting sales of 600,000 devices by the end of the year, according to a published interview with its chief executive last week.

"It will be more than what we originally planned," CEO Peter Chou told The Mercury News . "I'm saying we will ship more than 600,000."

Early estimates had placed G1 pre-order sales alone at 1.5 million, though those figures were later called into question . As for future sales, Chou declined to provide any specific numbers but said he expects to "do more next year."

"We are confident about our competitiveness," he stated.

PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

InfoWorld got the message loud and clear from readers and analysts that the IT community is opposed to unionization. And the unions we contacted had little to no interest in representing tech workers.

One conclusion: IT workers don't want help fighting for health care and retirement benefits, for overtime compensation, or for guarantees against outsourcing and downsizing

An conclusion: IT workers view unions as entities that thwart creativity, flexibility, risk-taking, and the unique tech culture.

[ Find out why tech workers oppose unions. | Discover how to beat the high stress of many IT jobs in InfoWorld's special report. ]

For those IT workers feeling overpressured in their work but unwilling to contemplate the traditional union, an emerging organization -- the International IT Worker's Group (IITW) -- may just be the answer. Like unions, the IITW protects IT worker's rights while serving as a resource for information and assistance. But unlike unions, the IITW is focused on protecting individual workers more than protecting the group as a whole, say cofounders Jack Edwards and James Smith.

Former coworkers with experience in everything from small startup companies to large corporations, Edwards and Smith spent several years developing the IITW idea. The idea recently moved from concept to reality, and the group is now accepting new members at no fee. Edwards and Smith hope to hit 10,000 members by 2009; they will begin charging monthly membership fees in early 2009 to pay for the organization.

When creating the framework for the IITW, Edwards and Smith studied other organizations and unions to find a model they believed would serve IT workers' needs.

"There is no model out there that does what we want our group to do," Edwards says. "IT workers are not the same as everyone else. Unions such as the United Steelworkers have their place, but their position doesn't fit the mentality and lifestyle of an IT worker because IT workers don't like being told what to do."

Additionally, Edwards' years as a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) helped him decide how he didn't want the IITW to operate. He remembers one particular day when he was managing a crew that was performing a time-sensitive electrical job. The project was quite complicated, and his crew fell behind.

"I have never been one to sit back and watch other people work, so I jumped in and helped complete the job," Edwards said. "An IBEW union rep told me that it was against the bylaws for me to be doing the work, so I quit the union."

So Edwards and Smith turned the IITW into a working group, rather than a union. The IITW's mission is to ensure equality and representation for all information and technology workers. It strives to be a key resource for IT workers, helping them overcome the roadblocks of career advancement and the detriments of the economy. Specifically, its founders say that the IITW will help members acquire portable health care, educational services, legal direction, and financial assistance, all while providing overall protection of IT workers' rights and acting as a news and information source for members.

"Our main goal is assisting others who run into situations where they need help or information, such as easing the cost of health care or assistance with reviewing legal contracts," Edwards says. "Our large membership base will have buying power, lobbying power, and a united voice, but we are not going to go into a workplace and try to strong-arm employers."

Texas Memory Systems has broken the 1 million input/output operations per second barrier with a flash storage system deployed by a U.S. customer, the company announced Tuesday.

Texas Memory's RamSan-5000 is the first flash memory-based solid-state disk system that can process 1 million IOPS, the vendor said.

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

IBM boasted in August that it cracked the 1 million IOPS barrier in research known as Project Quicksilver, but IBM did not say when its 1 million IOPS technology would be available for sale. (Compare storage products.)

Texas Memory's flash, already on the market, can scale up to several million IOPS, either by installing a Turbo feature that costs extra or by simply increasing capacity, says Woody Hutsell, executive vice president of the company. But last month was the first time a customer deployed a flash system delivering 1 million IOPS, Hutsell said.

The 5000 deployment combines 10 RamSan-500 arrays, each of which delivers 100,000 IOPS. A customer could combine 20 such arrays for 2 million IOPS, Hutsell notes.

Texas Memory has been selling solid-state disks for about 30 years, specializing in RAM-based drives. Texas Memory began selling flash-based storage this year in response to market trends driven by adoption of flash by consumers and EMC's decision to sell flash to corporate IT departments.

A 1 million IOPS, RamSan-5000 with 20TB of RAID-protected flash memory would cost roughly $1.5 million, Hutsell says. A RAM-based solid state system that delivers more than 1 million IOPS would cost about $400,000 but include just 1TB of storage.

Hutsell said he can't reveal which customer deployed the 20TB, 1 million IOPS flash system, but his company says it would be useful for accelerating the most critical applications used by large enterprise, government, military, and research organizations.

Working with either Fibre Channel or InfiniBand interfaces, and with a RAM cache of 640GB, the system reaches 1 million random read IOPS with response times of less than 1 millisecond.

"The unique combination of RAM cache to accelerate writes and flash memory to accelerate reads results in a system that is optimally balanced for critical enterprise, research and government applications, such as large [online transaction processing] systems or data warehouses, video on demand, data rendering, geospatial analysis, seismic processing and data acquisition," Texas Memory states.

Flash memory has gained attention among enterprise IT executives because of its fast performance and energy efficiency. When Sun Microsystems launched plans to embed flash into servers this year, storage chief John Fowler said that flash consumes one-fifth the power of rotating disk drives and is a hundred times faster.

The Ram-San-5000 requires 3,000 watts of power and occupies 40U of rack space.

"Deploying a hard disk-based system with similar performance would require 5,000 hard disk drives, consume over 90,000 watts of power and require at least five racks," Texas Memory said.

As it prepares to launch its long-awaited Business ByDesign on-demand ERP product, SAP is mulling over the future of its hosting division. Options under consideration include a sale, partnership, or a move to integrate the unit's services staff back into the parent corporation.

The company's main competencies lie in software services and support, not datacenter management, SAP spokesman Christoph Liedtke said Tuesday.

Liedtke stressed that SAP has not yet made any decision regarding the hosting business.

Meanwhile, SAP is getting ready to launch Business ByDesign on a broader basis.

The company previously scaled back rollout plans for the service, choosing instead to initially focus on six markets -- China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- while it ensures it can turn enough of a profit on the offering.

The company has said it will initially host Business ByDesign on its own and bring in partners later. Nothing has changed in that regard, Liedtke said.

SAP has named a number of initial pilot customers for the software. "You'll start to see customers coming live on it in greater numbers next year... in the first trimester time frame," said SAP executive board member Bill McDermott in an interview Tuesday.

SAP is also moving to build out the Business ByDesign ecosystem. It recently announced a series of partner-provided enhancements to Business ByDesign, centering on payroll, payment reference data, business-to-business collaboration, and sales and use tax processing.

Microsoft on Tuesday for the first time publicly demonstrated Windows 7, the next major release of its OS for PCs that Microsoft insists will reflect lessons learned from the widely panned Windows Vista.

Microsoft also laid out a road map for the release of Windows 7 and handed out a pre-beta version to developers at the PDC, where it also demonstrated new features in a keynote address Tuesday.

[ Special report:  Microsoft's PDC | Will the new Microsoft OS be better than Vista? Join the Windows 7 conversation in Randall C. Kennedy's Windows Sentinel blog | See Tom Yager's first look at Windows 7. ]

The first public beta of the OS will be available early next year, and subsequent test releases and release candidates will follow based on that feedback, said Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of Windows and Windows Live at Microsoft.

Windows 7 is still targeted for release three years after Vista, he added. This would put its business release in late 2009 and general availability at the end of January 2010 if the OS remains on schedule.

In his keynote Tuesday, Sinofsky said Microsoft is learning its lessons from Vista, which was widely criticized by users and the press, and spoofed famously in humorous television advertisements by competitor Apple.

Sinofsky acknowledged that some of the criticism was deserved, particularly around Microsoft's lack of preparing its hardware, software, and peripheral partners for Vista's release, even though it was more than five years in the making.

Early Vista users experienced incompatibility with applications and found that devices and peripherals would not work with the OS because drivers weren't available upon the release of the OS.

Microsoft won't repeat this mistake with Vista, Sinofsky said, and because the OS kernel -- or its underlying code base -- is the same as the one in Vista and Windows Server 2008, all of the devices and applications that work with those OSes should also run on Windows 7.

"All of this device and compatibility work will pay off in Windows 7," he said.

Microsoft also will tweak the UAC (User Account Control) feature, which was new in Vista, so it will be less of an inconvenience and work more efficiently for users, Sinofsky said.

UAC prevents users without administrative privileges from making unauthorized changes to a PC. But because of how it was set up in Vista, it can prevent even authorized users on the network from being able to access applications and features they should normally have access to.

UAC did this through pop-up windows, which also were spoofed by Apple in television ads because Vista users reported they appeared so frequently, even when users were performing authorized tasks.

Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft "went a little too far with UAC," but as a result the Windows client OS is now more secure. In Windows 7, Microsoft will focus on the security aspects of UAC but will ensure it is not an invasive feature for users, he said.

During Tuesday's keynote, Microsoft showed off some new features in Windows 7, including a streamlined view of all the files and folders contained not only on a user's PC, but also any other PCs on networks that the users are allowed access to.

This feature is called Libraries, and it will improve desktop search in Windows 7 by allowing users to search more comprehensively across PC folders than ever before, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft also changed its Gadgets feature, another new Vista feature. Gadgets are mini-applications that give users quick access to information, such as stock prices or weather, with icons that users in Windows 7 will be able to move around the desktop. In Vista, gadget icons were confined to a task bar.

Perhaps the sexiest new Windows 7 feature demonstrated Tuesday was its touchscreen interface, which lets people use their fingertips and small hand gestures to control applications on their PCs.

Microsoft demonstrated how touchscreen controls can replace the mouse for things like opening the taskbar and choosing a Windows Explorer window. If a user opens a folder with photos in it in Windows Folder, they can scroll through those photos using their fingers, and drag a photo into a Windows Paint application window and draw directly on the photo.

Enterprises are stepping up efforts to counter spying operations that aim to steal their trade secrets, according to a former U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who now works for Xerox.

Companies such as Wal-Mart, DirecTV, and Motorola have in recent years been victimized by employees or others who stole sensitive data, said David Drab, a principal in Xerox's information and content security services section. Drab spent 27 years in the FBI fighting organized crime and economic espionage.

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

"The payoffs are high and the risks of getting caught are low," Drab said.

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that economic espionage costs the world's top 1,000 companies £22.4 billion ($34.7 billion) annually, Drab said. Another study by the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals found companies spent $2 billion on spying activities in 2004.

"The secret of business is knowing something that no one else knows," Drab said. "That's hard to keep in this world. Keeping critical information is difficult to do."

Enterprises are victimized in a few different ways. One is "walk-offs," where employes steal data and found their own company. Another is "hire-offs" where other employees go and work for the one who stole the data. Those scenarios affected both Applied Materials and Qualcomm, Drab said. Airline manufacturer Boeing was damaged by an employee who was recruited by China to steal information on projects such as the Space Shuttle throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Spying operations are very difficult to detect, especially if the person who is carrying it out is professionally trained, Drab said. And when a company does suspect something and approaches law enforcement, they often don't know exactly what has been stolen.

Defending against espionage requires knowing who has access to product development, marketing, sales and engineering information, Drab said.

Policies and procedures for handling confidential information should be clearly communicated to employees, Drab said. In some cases, employees who have access to sensitive data should be given extra incentives for doing well since their departure with that data could be damaging.

Absent technological controls, employees should also be observed for inconsistent behavior, such as sudden lifestyle changes, frequent overseas trips, security infractions or disciplinary problems, all of which can precede an information breach.

"Espionage is a huge problem, there is no question about it," Drab said. "Too often we look for technology to solve things that can't be solved."

Google has settled lawsuits brought against it by major publishers and authors that argued that Google's wholesale scanning and indexing of in-copyright books without permission amounted to massive copyright violations.

The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google announced the settlement on Tuesday and will hold a press conference to discuss it further.

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The lawsuits were brought after Google launched a program to scan and index books from the libraries of major universities without always getting permission from the copyright owners of the books.

Google then made the text of the books searchable on its book search engine, although it argued it was protected by the fair use principle because it only showed snippets of text for in-copyright books it had scanned without permission.

The settlement comes after two years of negotiations and resolves a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP's membership, Google and publisher groups said.

The settlement must still be approved by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Microsoft on Tuesday is unveiling an upgrade to its .Net Micro Framework for building applications for embedded systems, featuring expanded language and processor support. Release of Version 3.0 of the framework is being announced at both Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles and the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston.

The value proposition of .Net Micro Framework is it brings modern computing models found on the desktop, such as .Net, to the embedded space to address the increasing connectedness and complexity of new device scenarios, Microsoft said. Version 3.0 has been in a beta release since July.

[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Native code interoperability in the release extends the technology to languages such as C and C++, said Colin Miller, product unit manager for .Net Micro Framework at Microsoft.

"What that means is no longer do you have to have all your code in managed code or C#," Miller said. Developers can extend the .Net object model with native libraries, he said. Managed code runs inside a virtual machine while native code is compiled down to the hardware, making it run faster, Miller said.

Also new is managed code access to USB devices and support for Windows Presentation Foundation, touch and gesture support and Visual Studio 2008. FAT32 file system support, for moving data to a device, is enabled as well. Release 3.0 backs Wi-Fi integration.

Version 3.0 supports the ADI Blackfin processor family and SSL encryption for TCP/IP stack.

Also highlighted in Version 3.0 is backing for Device Profile for Web Services, a Web profile enabling plug-and-play for networked devices. A PC or other device can connect to DPWS-enabled devices on a network and then invoke the functionality for that device. Developers can build applications that communicate with devices.

Yahoo's Zimbra, the provider of a communications and collaboration suite that rivals Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange, will make its cloud computing debut on Tuesday.

Zimbra has so far relied entirely on third-party hosting partners to offer the SaaS (software-as-a-service) version of its suite.

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

However, it is now taking advantage of Yahoo's datacenters to become a hosting provider for customers in the education market that want to access the suite on demand.

Most of the about 400 educational institutions that use the Zimbra suite have it installed on their own premises, said John Robb, vice president of product marketing and product management.

The reason is a combination of universities traditionally wanting to keep the Zimbra software on their own servers for data security and privacy reasons, coupled with little outreach from the hosting partners towards the education market, he said.

However, demand for SaaS applications is picking up among educational institutions, so Zimbra saw an opportunity to offer this option to schools and universities, Robb said.

The Zimbra-hosted option isn´t available to business customers outside of the education market, where the vendor continues to rely 100 percent on its partners, he said.

The move by Zimbra is consistent with the strategy of its parent company Yahoo, which in June announced its plans to create its Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group and in July teamed up with Intel and HP to form cloud computing labs.

Zimbra planned to become a host for on-demand versions of its suite, the company's co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj told IDG News Service in September 2007, days after Yahoo bought his company.

The price of the hosted suite for students and alumni is $2 per year per mailbox without advertising, or free with advertising. This includes the Zimbra Desktop component for working without an Internet connection; open APIs for IT system customization and integration; and disaster recovery backups. The paid option also adds synchronization capabilities for iPhones, 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and phone support. By comparison, the traditional on-premise deployments cost $1.50 per mailbox per year.

For faculty, the price of the on-demand option is $35 per year per mailbox and includes other features like synchronization with Outlook and BlackBerry devices. If schools install Zimbra on their own servers, faculty accounts cost $8 per year per mailbox.

Kansas State University is an early adopter of the Zimbra hosted suite, signing up for 30,000 student, faculty and staff accounts, according to the vendor.

Since the Yahoo acquisition in September 2007, Zimbra has doubled its installed base to about 20 million mailboxes. It has now more than 30,000 customers in more than 80 countries.

Asked whether Yahoo's plan to lay off about 1,500 employees -- 10 percent of its staff -- before the end of the year will affect Zimbra, a Yahoo spokeswoman said this via e-mail: "We are approaching these cost reductions strategically, taking care to balance identifying opportunities for efficiency with maintaining the proper investment levels in our key priorities. While we have identified an overall global goal for reducing our costs, specific decisions about impact have not yet been made."

Dell planned to refresh its line of Optiplex desktops on Tuesday with 10 new models, including a thin-client computer based on Intel's Atom processor. The company will also expand the availability of its Flexible Computing and Managed Desktop services, now available in the U.S., to customers in other markets.

Dell's latest products arrive at a difficult time, with markets roiled by fears of a global recession and companies cutting back on expenses in the face of expected weaker demand. Dell isn't immune. The company warned last month that end-user demand had softened in the U.S., as well as in parts of Europe and Asia. But Dell said its latest products can help companies cut their IT costs -- provided companies are willing to invest capital in new computers.

[ Get the analysis and insights that only Randall C. Kennedy can provide on PC tech in InfoWorld's Enterprise Desktop blog. And download our free Windows performance-monitoring tool. ]

"These machines do consume less power than what's out there in the infrastructure today. With depreciation cycles of four or five years, those aging desktop machines out there are costing customers more money," said Jeff Clarke, senior vice president of Dell's Business Product Group, in a phone interview.

The updated Optiplex range and the broader availability of Dell's Flexible Computing and Managed Desktop services reflects Dell's desire to offer its customers more than just hardware.

"It's a signal of where Dell is going, this notion of hardware, software, and services integrated together to bring a solution to the market place," Clarke said.

The Atom-based Optiplex FX160 thin client is priced starting from $399 and was designed to complement Dell services, like its On-Demand Desktop Streaming offering for customers.

The FX160 gives customers another option when deciding how they want to run their systems, Clarke said, adding that Dell has long sold third-party thin clients to its customers. "We really believe in flexibility and not coming in and saying that the only way to do it is have a virtual client, or the only way to do it is a thin client," he said.

The Atom's capabilities are well suited to a thin client, where the horsepower of Intel's mainstream processors aren't necessary. "The types of applications that are being deployed in call centers and point-of-sale locations are very single, or in some cases dual, application-based and the Atom processor has sufficient horsepower to do one or two applications in parallel," Clarke said.

Introduced in June, Atom has been a runaway success and Intel has worked hard to keep pace with fast-growing demand, leading some computer makers to grumble about product shortages. But Dell won't face that problem. "I won't have a supply issue," he said.

Besides the FX160, other models in the new desktop lineup include the Optiplex 960, 760 and 360. These systems will be available in a range of form factors and are priced starting from $863, $593, and $476, respectively.

Search engines such as Google are increasingly being used by hackers against Web applications that hold sensitive data, according to a security expert.

Even with rising awareness about data security, it takes all of a few seconds to pluck Social Security numbers from Web sites using targeted search terms, said Amichai Shulman, founder and chief technology officer for database and application security company Imperva.

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

The fact that Social Security numbers are even on the Web is a human error; the information should never be published in the first place. But hackers are using Google in more sophisticated ways to automate attacks against Web sites, Shulman said.

Shulman said Imperva recently discovered a way to execute a SQL injection attack that comes from an IP (Internet Protocol) address that belongs to Google.

In a SQL injection attack, a malicious instruction is entered on a Web-based form and answered by a Web application. It often can yield sensitive information from a backend database or be used to plant malicious code on the Web page.

Shulman declined to give details on how the attack works during his presentation at the RSA Conference on Monday, but said it involves Google's advertising system. Google has been notified, he said.

Manipulating Google is particularly useful since it offers anonymity for a hacker plus an automated attack engine, Shulman said.

Tools such as Goolag and Gooscan can execute broad searches across the Web for specific vulnerabilities and return lists of Web sites that have those problems.

"This is no more a script kiddy game -- this is a business," Shulman said. "This is a very powerful hacking capability."

Another attack method is so-called Google worms, which use the search engine to find specific vulnerabilities. With the inclusion of additional code, the vulnerability can be exploited, Shulman said.

"In 2004, this was science fiction," Shulman said. "In 2008, this is a painful reality."

Google and other search engines are taking steps to stop the abuse. For example, Google has stopped certain kinds of searches that could yield a trove of Social Security numbers in a single swoop. It also puts limits on the number of search requests sent per minute, which can slow down mass searches for vulnerable Web sites.

In reality, it just forces hackers to be a bit more patient. Putting limits on search also hurts security professionals who want to do automated daily searches of their Web sites for problems, Shulman said.

Shulman said he's seen another kind of attack called "site masking," which causes a legitimate Web site to simply disappear from search results.

Google's search engine penalizes sites that have duplicate content and will drop one from its index. Hackers can take advantage of this by creating a Web site that has a link to a competitor's Web page but is filtered through a proxy server.

Google indexes the content under the proxy's domain. If this is done enough times with more proxy servers, Google will consider the targeted Web page a duplicate and drop it from its index.

"This is quite a business hassle," Shulman said.

One way Web site administrators can defend against this is barring their Web site from being indexed by anything other than the legitimate IP address of a search engine, Shulman said.

Despite the economic downturn, Microsoft intends to ramp up the number of servers running in its datacenters worldwide by 15 times over the next five years.

The growth, outlined in a presentation on Monday at its Professional Developers Conference, is designed to handle increased hosted computing demand from enterprise software running on its new Windows Azure platform , also announced Monday, as well as third-party services Microsoft hopes to attract.

[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Microsoft expects to boost the number of datacenters it operates by three times, its power usage by 15 times, and the Internet traffic going out of its datacenters by nine-fold, said Benjamin Ravani, general manager of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, during a technical session.

Ravani said Microsoft operates "tens of thousands of servers" but would not disclose the exact number.

Microsoft had announced similar growth projections earlier this year. But Ravani's reiteration of those comments come a week after Redmond announced plans to tighten its fiscal belt, including cutting $500 million in spending this fiscal year by slowing hiring and cutting travel and marketing expenses.

Despite its belated arrival to so-called cloud computing services, Microsoft appears to be sparing no dime on building out a back-end infrastructure that tops competitors such as Amazon.com , Google, and Salesforce.com.

Microsoft has announced five datacenters in the past 12 months, including in San Antonio, Texas, Chicago, and Des Moines, Iowa. Both its Chicago and Des Moines datacenters will be massive, $500 million facilities that will have many of its servers pre-configured and installed in shipping containers .

Investing in a big way now, Microsoft has argued, will save money later.

Demand for some services is already huge. Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger Monday has more than 450 million unique users in the system, passes more than 8.3 billion messages and performs more than 1 billion Web authentications a day, said Ravani.

Besides touting the scale of Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, Ravani also touted the resiliency of its network, which he said was the result of several hard-earned lessons.

For instance, in November 2006, half of a million users of a Microsoft online service experienced authentication delays for several hours. The problem was an overload of the authentication system caused by a poorly-written internal batch job. As a result, Microsoft created a policy that all batch jobs need to be tested first, and increased security, so that users can't access key data services without authorization.

In a March 2007 case, 75 percent of users for Microsoft's online services were unable to log in for five hours. Microsoft discovered that a bug with a partner's service had also resulted in too many authentication requests. Ravani described it as a "denial of service attack on Windows Live ID."

Microsoft improved its monitoring to detect such service failures more quickly, developed fine-grained throttling at many different levels of its architecture to prevent out-of-control traffic, and implemented a policy says "your transactions get dropped if they exceed quota, so you don't eat other partners' lunch."

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft late Monday denied it had neglected to register "Windows Azure," the name of its new cloud computing platform, with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office .

According to the spokeswoman, Microsoft submitted a trademark application for "Azure" last Friday.

[ Related: Internet searches revealed Microsoft forgot to trademark Azure. And for more news out of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, see InfoWorld's special report. ]

Earlier Monday, Ray Ozzie , the company's chief software architect, unveiled Windows Azure , a cloud computing version of its operating system. Azure, which will compete with Amazon.com 's Elastic Compute Cloud, targets developers who create online services and software.

Searches on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database run throughout Monday failed to find either "Windows Azure" or "Azure Services Platform" as registered trademarks. Microsoft used both names to describe its Software and Services technology.

The spokeswoman laid the blame on the agency. "I can tell you that it is absolutely not correct that Microsoft 'forgot' to register the trademark," she said in an e-mail. "It is up to the Patent Office to update its database, but you will see it listed there shortly, if not already."

Searches on the Patent Office database done at 11 p.m. EDT Monday, however, continued to come up empty.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

With the launch of Sprint's WiMax wireless broadband data service, called Xohm (pronounced "zome") in Baltimore in early October, Sprint was able to rightly claim it is the first carrier to offer the long-awaited official version of the technology to businesses and consumers. (Clearwire, a provider of pre-standard WiMax service that Sprint's Xohm unit will be merged into later this year, began its service offerings earlier.)

The Sprint WiMax service operates as fast as 4Mbps. One early WiMax adopter says Xohm is delivering good connection speeds: "When it first started I was getting about 2.1Mbps, but yesterday we were getting 3.2Mbps," says Richard Levy, president of National Imaging Systems, an HP imaging products dealer.

[ Find out whether WiMax delivers as promised with our hands-on review in the InfoWorld Test Center's "Road test: Does WiMax work in the real world?" ]

Levy says it gives him about three times the performance of his T1 line but costs just $35 per month; by contrast, a typical T1 line usually costs him at least $500 per month.

And there's the benefit of having high-speed access anywhere you happen to be: "Time is money. If you have five to six salespeople looking up pricing with clients on the [phone] line waiting for an answer, the faster response time makes a big difference in customer satisfaction," Levy says.

WiMax works well if you do business locally Michael Thelander, CEO at the market researcher Signals Research Group, warns that what may be good for one small business owner in Baltimore may not be the answer for a Fortune 500 company. "If you are a company that operates in Baltimore this service is fine. But larger companies want broadband data wherever they are," says Thelander.

Companies thinking of broadband for remote users may still prefer to use a service with nationwide coverage. And although WiMax has a higher data rate than AT&T's current version of HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), says Thelander, there is nothing to stop AT&T from upgrading its network with more backhaul, thus giving large companies the same user experience as WiMax with a far greater coverage area. AT&T's HSPA network is available in dozens of cities, to both iPhone 3G users and notebook users with 3G cards. Equipment automatically switches to the slower EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) networks when outside the 3G HSPA network's range. There is no similar rollover for WiMax service when out of range, but Sprint expects to offer WiMax-EGDE combo cards for laptops and for Intel to offer combo WiMax/EDGE chips for use on laptop motherboards.

Another catch is the WiMax technology can be pricier to deploy, limiting carriers' ability to expand. Sprint is deploying its WiMax service on a 2,500MHz frequency far higher than Verizon's 700MHz and 1,700MHz frequencies. "The higher the frequency, the more cell sites needed and the more expensive it is to deploy," Thelander says. The question becomes how long Sprint will be able to subsidize the cost of broadband data before it is forced to raise subscriber fees.

Sprint plans to set up service in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and northern Virginia, in addition to its existing service in Baltimore. Clearwire operates now in Anchorage; Boise; Dayton, Ohio; Duluth, Minn.; Honolulu; Nashville; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Rochester, N.Y.; Seattle; Syracuse, N.Y.; Tacoma, Wash.; Winston-Salem, N.C.; plus another dozen smaller cities in central California, northeast Florida, Minnesota, Oregon, North Carolina, northern Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The appeal of WiMax to IT: wireless WANs Surprisingly, it is not WiMax's mobile capabilities that will appeal most to IT managers. Rather it may be its use as a network service in remote offices where setting up a T1 line with a telecom service would take time, have higher costs, and be more difficult to manage.

Levy says it took five minutes to set up. "It would have taken less, but I use an old Apple [Mac] and I had to upgrade the operating system."

Instead of a wireless PCMCIA card, Levy uses a desktop receiver and router to route the service around the office. "It's about the size of a double-handled coffee cup."

Don Stroberg, vice president of sales for Sprint's Xohm unit, believes that just as some users have cut landline telephone service and now rely solely on their cell phones, Xohm will appeal to home and office users as a sole networking fabric.

WiMax is not faster Wi-Fi, but it is reliable and standard Perhaps one obstacle that needs to be overcome before WiMax is acceptable to an IT manager is the simple fact that WiMax is often confused with Wi-Fi. But only the names are similar. For example, WiMax is 100 percent IP, whereas Wi-Fi is not.

Bob Egan, one of the creators of the original Wi-Fi spec and now chief mobile analyst for the consulting firm Mobile Competency, says network security, reliability, and manageability are where the major differences lie between WiMax and Wi-Fi. "When consumers reach for the telephone, they want the dial tone to be there," he says. Because WiMax operates in the regulated spectrum band, Sprint can layer in enterprise-level security and reliability that is not available with Wi-Fi. "Wi-Fi competes with garage door openers, microwaves, and a hobbyist's remote control airplane," Egan says.

WiMax has also been in development for about 15 years, giving it the edge over technologies such as LTE (Long Term Evolution), the 3G successor whose standard has only recently been approved. The 802.16d "fixed wireless" WiMax standard used by Sprint and Clearwire was finalized in 2005, though the 802.16e mobile version remains in draft mode.

"WiMax has become a telecom-grade, high-performance, wide-area wireless network, while its broadband wireless competition is only now developing the test equipment," Egan notes.

Embarcadero Technologies will preview its Delphi Prism .Net development product today at the 2008 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. It features a managed code database engine that targets Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Available later this year, Delphi Prism is expected to let developers use the Delphi Prism programming language to build Windows .Net applications, using Microsoft .Net 3.5 technologies such as Silverlight and ASP.Net. Featured in Delphi Prism is Oxygene, a Common Language Runtime compiler engine that supports CLR-based platforms such as .Net and the open-source Mono runtime.

Delphi Prism fuses Web, rich Internet application, and desktop .Net application development with a .Net database engine and ADO.Net connectivity, Embarcardero said.

[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Also at PDC, Compuware announced Version 9.0 of its DevPartner code quality product. Features in DevPartner 9.0 include application security scanning, integrated management reporting, and support for new and legacy Microsoft technologies, Compuware said. Its capabilities help improve an IT organization's ability to diagnose software security vulnerabilities, defects, and performance problems early in the development process, the company said.

Version 9.0 scans Microsoft ASP.Net application source code, Compuware said. The product now supports 32-bit application development on Windows x864 platforms and .Net Framework technologies such as Visual Studio Team System 2008, Windows Server 2008, and .Net Framework 3.5. Also supported are Windows Presentation Foundation, Language Integrated Query, and ASP.Net AJAX Extensions.

Microsoft will reveal on Tuesday its intent to open up its planned "M" application modeling language via the company's OSP (Open Specification Promise), according to the company.

The company will offer up parts of M via OSP, Microsoft's Steve Martin, senior director of product management for the Microsoft Connected Systems Division, confirmed at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles on Monday.

[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

With OSP, the company promises not to assert legal rights over patents on implementations of affected technologies. M is part of the company's Oslo platform for software modeling and is to be used for building textual domain-specific languages. The announcement is planned for Tuesday at the conference, Martin said.

A Microsoft official revealed the plan in a blog entry on Monday. Specifically, the M language specification, including MSchema, MGrammar, and MGraph, will be published under OPS, said Sam Ramji, Microsoft senior director of platform strategy.

"This will facilitate the interoperability of the Oslo declarative modeling language, codenamed 'M,' with prominent industry standards like WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols, and security standards," Ramji said.

Other parts of Oslo include a modeling tool codenamed "Quadrant" and a repository. The company has expressed intentions to release a preview of Oslo technologies at the conference.

Although Microsoft registered the Web site for its new Windows Azure more than 14 years ago, it has not trademarked the name of its new cloud-based operating system, Windows Azure, Internet searches revealed Monday.

According to searches conducted by Computerworld, Microsoft has not applied for a trademark for either "Windows Azure" or "Azure Services Platform" with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Microsoft used both names to describe its software-plus-services technology.

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

Microsoft's own trademark list also omits Azure, though that list has not been updated since earlier this month.

Other Microsoft technologies, including Windows Vista, DirectX, Hyper-V and Surface, however, have been trademarked by the Redmond, Wash. company.

Earlier Monday, Ray Ozzie , the company's chief software architect, unveiled Windows Azure as Microsoft's cloud-computing platform. Ozzie said that work had started on Azure just before Amazon.com Inc. launched its own Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The two platforms, EC2 and Azure, will likely compete for developer attention.

Microsoft will release a preview of Azure at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), where Ozzie debuted the technology. He did not spell out when Azure would be generally available, however.

But while Windows Azure doesn't show up in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's database, Microsoft more than planned ahead when it registered the "azure.com" Web site.

A search of registered sites found that Microsoft grabbed azure.com -- the site it also unveiled Monday that hosts information about the new platform -- in October 1994. The site is currently registered at GoDaddy.com, a cut-rate domain registrar that currently is running a $9.99 per year special.

Microsoft also owns the "azure.net" domain, which it registered in November 2003.

JackBe, looking to take advantage of the growing use of mashup technology in corporate IT operations, Monday announced the general availability of a developer edition of its Presto enterprise mashup software. The company said the updated offering aims to ensure that the software meets the security and governance requirements of large companies.

JackBe described the new Presto Developer Edition as a single-user version of its Presto software. The company said free support services are available to users through JackBe's new Mashup Developer Community.

Mashup applications lash together data from various sources into applications that fit a company's specific needs or work processes.

"The developer or IT-centric side of the house needs more help with mashups -- this was an interesting realization for us," noted Chris Warner, JackBe's vice president of marketing. "We had a pitch for over a year that mashups can help the business become more self-serve. Inevitably, a mashup has to connect to a bunch of systems that have a great deal of security and governance overhead."

The new online developer community offers mashup training videos, code samples and demonstrations for both novice users and those with more experience, JackBe said. It also includes interactive forums monitored and moderated by JackBe engineers.

Researchers at Independent Security Evaluators say they've discovered a security flaw in the Android browser that could make users of phones with the browser vulnerable to attack.

Android, Google's open-source software that is currently only running on one phone, HTC's G1, is based on outdated open-source components, the researchers say. As a result, the vulnerability they have discovered was previously known and fixed, but Google didn't incorporate the fix into Android, they say.

[ Special report: All about Google Android | Take InfoWorld's slideshow tour of the T-Mobile G1 and then read Tom Yager's first look at the iPhone killer. ]

The G1 went on sale last Wednesday from T-Mobile USA, and Google published the source code behind Android on Tuesday. Other manufacturers, including Motorola, are expected to also release phones running Android in the future.

On a Web page for ISE, Charlie Miller, Mark Daniel and Jake Honoroff wrote that they won't reveal much about the vulnerability until Google fixes it. However, they say that Android users who visit malicious Web sites may find their sensitive information stolen. That's because an attacker could access any information the site uses, including saved passwords, information entered into a Web application form and cookies.

The researchers also say, however, that the impact of the attack is limited because of Android's security architecture. An attacker can't, for example, control functions of the phone such as the dialer.

Google said it is developing a solution to the problem. "We are working with T-Mobile to include a fix for the browser exploit, which will soon be delivered over the air to all devices, and have addressed this in the Android open-source platform. The security and privacy of our users is of primary importance to the Android Open Source Project -- we do not believe this matter will negatively impact them," the company said in a statement. It did not say when it expects to push out the update.

The researchers say that they notified Google of the issue on Oct. 20.

The incident raises questions about potential difficulties that the Android community might face in the future. Because Google has adopted an open model with Android, many vendors and operators in the future may offer a variety of phones, each potentially with slightly different versions of the operating system. If vulnerabilities are found in the future, phone makers and operators will have to determine if their version of the software is affected and then coordinate the distribution of a fix to users.

At Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled the company's much-anticipated cloud computing platform, dubbed Windows Azure.

Primarily a platform for developers, Windows Azure plays host to the .Net Framework, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and an offering called Live Services, which, according to Ozzie, will extend Azure services "outward" to connect with locally running Microsoft software. Using this rich environment, developers will be able to build and deploy Web applications and services running on Microsoft's worldwide infrastructure of datacenters.

[ For more news from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Previously known as Project Red Dog, Windows Azure "is a scalable hosting environment for you to deploy your apps in our cloud," said Microsoft corporate vice president Amitabh Srivastava, one of the key players behind the platform.

"Windows Azure is a new Windows offering at the Web tier of computing," Ozzie said. "This represents a significant extension" of the Windows computing platform, he said.

Windows Azure serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform, which helps developers build applications spanning from the cloud to the datacenter and PCs, the Web, and phones, Microsoft said.

Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services. A limited Community Technology Preview of the Azure Services Platform is being made available at PDC. A road map for Azure is set to be revealed in 2009.

Key components of Azure Services Platform include the following:

-- Windows Azure, for service hosting and management and low-level scalable storage, computation, and networking. -- Microsoft SQL Services, for database services and reporting. -- Microsoft .Net Services, which are service-based implementations of .Net Framework concepts such as workflow. .Net Services previously was called BizTalk Services. "The services themselves, we found, were actually more identifiable to the .Net community than BizTalk," said Steve Martin, Microsoft senior product management director in the company?s Connected Systems Division. -- Live Services, for sharing, storing, and synchronizing documents, photos, and files across PCs, phones, PC applications, and Web sites. -- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud.

Azure was compared to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services platform by a PDC attendee interviewed after the morning presentations.

"I think it's certainly Microsoft's answer to Amazon's EC2 platform," said Joshua Lane, software developer at InRule Technology. "Amazon just announced that they?re going to be able to host Windows in the cloud and that sort of thing so this is Microsoft's answer to that."

Another attendee, Suhas Mallya, data architect at Aztecsoft, said Azure "looks impressive."

"First of all, it builds on something that people are already familiar with," the Windows platform, said Mallya.

He did add it was a little too early to determine whether Microsoft can succeed with Azure. "I found the demos a little slow," Mallya said.

Ozzie couched the announcement as long in coming. At last, he said, Microsoft could tell the "complete story" of Microsoft's transition to services. "We are deeply and genuinely combining the best of software with the best of services," said Ozzie.

Azure services will be accessible from technologies such as HTTP, REST, the WS* specifications, and Atom, said Microsoft's Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, in a blog post on Monday.

"The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language, and technology," Ramji said. "We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure."

Proofs of concept have been delivered showing how open source developers can build applications to run as services, such as a developer using the Eclipse IDE to write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure, Ramji said.

The sprawl of management consoles, the proliferation of data they provide, and the rising use of virtualization are adding challenges to corporations looking to more effectively manage mixed  Linux , Windows, and cloud environments.

Traditional standards are being tapped in order to bridge the platform divide and new ones are being created to handle technologies such as virtualization that create physical platforms running one technology but hosting virtual machines running something completely different.

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The goal is better visibility into what is going right or wrong -- and why -- as complexity rises on the computing landscape.

Some help is on the way. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) last month began hammering out virtualization management standards it hopes will show up in products next year. Those standards will address interoperability, portability, and virtual machine life-cycle management, as well as incorporate time-honored management standards such as the Common Information Model (CIM).

Vendors such as Microsoft , VMware, and Citrix are on board with the DMTF and are creating and marketing their own cross-platform virtualization management tools for x86 machines. Linux vendors, including Novell and Red Hat , and traditional management vendors such as HP also are joining in.

To underscore the importance of heterogeneous management, Microsoft is supporting Linux within its virtualization management tools slated to ship by year-end rather than relying on third-party partners.

And the vendor said in April it will integrate the OpenPegasus Project, an open source implementation of the DMTF's CIM and Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards, so it can extend its monitoring tools to other platforms.

The trend toward services is forcing IT to think about management across systems that may have little in common, including the same LAN. Services are increasingly made up of numerous application components that can be running both internally and externally, complicating efforts to oversee all the piece parts, their platforms and their dependencies.

The big four management vendors, BMC , CA, HP, and IBM, are handling the mixed-environment evolution by upgrading their monolithic platforms to better manage Linux as its use grows. And a crop of next-tier vendors, start-ups and open source players are angling for a piece of the pie by providing tools that work alone, as well as plug into the dominant management frameworks.

"We are starting to see IT put more mission-critical applications on Linux and from there you only start to see the stronger growth [of Linux]," says Ute Albert, marketing manager of HP's Insight management platform. In January, she says, HP will boost its Linux support with features HP already supports for Windows platforms, such as capacity planning.

Analyst firm the Enterprise Management Group reports that use of Linux on mainframes has grown 72 percent in the past two years while x86 Linux growth hit 57 percent.

In the trenches, users are moving to suck the complexity out of their environments and make sense not only of individual network and systems components but of composite services and how to aggregate data from multiple systems and feed results back to administrators and notification systems.

Console reductionAt Johns Hopkins University, managers are trying to reduce "console sprawl" in a management environment that stretches across 200 projects -- many with their own IT support in some nine research and teaching divisions, as well as healthcare centers institutes and affiliated entities.

Project leader pick their own applications and platforms with about 90 percent to 95 percent running Windows and 5 percent to 10 percent on Linux. There are also storage-area networks, network devices, Oracle software, Red Hat, VMware, EMC , IronPort e-mail relays, and hardware from Dell, HP, and IBM.

John Taylor, manager of the management and monitoring team, and Jamie Bakert, systems architect in the management and monitoring group, are responsible for 15,000 desktops and 1,500 servers, nearly 50 percent of the university's total environment.

"Our challenge is we do not want to create another support structure," says Taylor, who has standardized on Microsoft's System Center management tools anchored by Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007.

Because Taylor doesn't control what systems get rolled out, he is using Quest Software's Management Xtensions for System Center to support non-Windows infrastructure.

"Quest allows us to bring in anything with a heart beat," Bakert says.

And that allows for managing distributed applications, which incorporate multiple components on multiple platforms.

"Microsoft has a limited scope of what they are bringing into System Center at this point," he says.

For instance, Bakert uses Quest Xtensions to monitor IronPort relays that work with Microsoft Exchange to ensure everything in the e-mail service is monitored in one tool.

The Quest tools also let Bakert store security events on non-Windows machines so he can report on both Windows and non-Windows platforms, which helps with collecting compliance data.

Taylor and Bakert also are beta testing Microsoft's System Center Service Manager, slated to ship in early 2010, with hopes they can reduce System Center consoles from five to one.

Eventually, Service Manager's configuration management database will host data from Configuration Manager and Operations Manager, as well as incorporate ITIL, a set of best practices for IT services management, and the Microsoft Operations Framework.

Taylor and Bakert also are testing System Center's Virtual Machine Manager, slated to ship by year-end, which will manage Windows, the VMware hypervisor and Suse Linux guest environments.

Virtualization getting mixed management workout

Microsoft ironically had the title as first to support mixed hypervisor environments because it was last to release a hypervisor -- Hyper-V.

Without the benefit of the in-development Microsoft code, VMware, Novell, Red Hat, HP, and others are momentarily playing catch-up on cross-platform management support.

Novell is using its February 2008 acquisition of PlateSpin to support management across both physical and virtual environments. The company's existing partnership and interoperability agreement with Microsoft has yielded virtualization bundles and the company's acquisition of Managed Objects last week will give IT admins and business managers a unified view of how business services work across both physical and virtual environments.

"In the datacenter we see that people are not saying consolidate [on a platform],