Alcatel shows off IP core for LTE networks
Alcatel-Lucent on Wednesday was set to introduce its Evolved Packet Core (EPC), a set of network components that will help to power the LTE network of Verizon Wireless and other mobile operators.
LTE (Long-Term Evolution) is expected to be the next-generation mobile technology for a majority of mobile operators, while some others turn to the already available WiMax. Like WiMax, LTE is built entirely around IP (Internet Protocol) and transports all traffic, including voice calls, as packets. The new technology will be a hot topic at the CTIA trade show this week in Las Vegas, where Alcatel will demonstrate EPC.
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The move to an all-IP infrastructure ultimately will allow Alcatel and other vendors to build a single network for mobile operators instead of the mixed ones used today for 3G, said Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing at Alcatel. The broader implication of this is that carriers will be able to use one network for both wired and wireless broadband, potentially offering the same or integrated services on subscribers' PCs, TVs and mobile phones.
For mobile-phone users, that means being able to browse the Web while making a call. LTE will provide enough bandwidth for both and will transmit calls as VOIP (voice over IP), putting voice and data packets on separate "bearers" with appropriate levels of quality of service for each use of the network, Newell said. By contrast, 3G networks put voice calls on a dedicated, circuit-switched network while using a packet network for data traffic.
Alcatel's system for supporting this all-IP vision is EPC, built around Alcatel's 7750 Service Router, which is already used in wired broadband networks. The lineup consists of two plug-in modules for that router, plus two separate devices to manage the network and services.
The MME (Mobile Management Entity) and DSC (Dynamic Services Gateway) manage policy and mobility for users accessing the network. Among other things, they handle handoffs between cellular base stations and tie in to user authentication and billing systems. The Serving Gateway and Packet Data Network Gateway, implemented as hardware and software modules for the 7750, forward mobile traffic to the Internet and other IP networks.
These four elements will be ready for trial deployments this year and for commercial services next year, Newell said. Not surprisingly, Verizon has laid out the same rough timeline for its LTE rollout.
But "multiscreen" services available across a subscriber's fixed and mobile devices, using the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) standard, are farther out. Carriers aren't likely to offer any of these until after 2010 at the earliest, Newell cautioned. Referring to the full name of Long-Term Evolution, he said, "the first two words are equally important."
With an eye to the long evolution to LTE, Alcatel this week is also announcing the 9238 Base Station Macro, a platform that allows both 3G and LTE baseband units to be installed in the same cabinet.
On Monday, the company announced the next version of the Alcatel-Lucent Rich Communications Manager. Carriers can provide this browser-based portal for subscribers to use on both their PCs and their mobile phones, delivering a unified inbox for e-mail and voicemail as well as a calendar and other features.
The Rich Communications Manager works with any major mobile browser but currently uses Flash, which leaves out the popular Apple iPhone for now. The company is working on future versions that will work without a browser, expanding the offering to less-expensive phones, said Ray Colbert, director of rich communications marketing strategy at Alcatel.
In addition to conventional text, instant messaging and e-mail, the Rich Communications Manager lets subscribers archive their text messages, send mass texts to a predefined group, and drag and drop multimedia content into instant messages. There is also a speech-to-text feature so users can read their voicemail messages.
The European carrier Telefonica 02 is already using the first version of the system. The next version, to be demonstrated at CTIA, will add a synchronized calendar and will be generally available in 30 to 60 days, according to Alcatel.
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Skype shows BlackBerry, iPhone applications
Skype unveiled its iPhone and BlackBerry applications at the CTIA Wireless trade show on Tuesday, taking its VoIP capability into the inner sanctum of mobile operators that still depend on voice minutes for most of their revenue.
The peer-to-peer software company sees itself playing a growing role on mobile phones even as carriers themselves move toward VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) over fourth-generation data networks. Its loyal user base will give it an edge over any VoIP service a carrier is likely to offer, Skype Chief Operating Officer Scott Durschlag said at a news conference. The latest applications are part of the first stage in Skype's strategy, which will progress from downloadable software, to preloading by handset makers, to carriers themselves offering Skype.
[ Related: "At last, Skype set to launch iPhone application." | Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]
The BlackBerry software will be available in May as a download for the BlackBerry Bold and Curve handsets, with other models supported later, Durschlag said. The iPhone application, available now from Apple's App Store, lets AT&T subscribers make both free calls to their Skype contacts and inexpensive calls over the SkypeOut service to other phones. But the application officially only works over Wi-Fi.
And though both applications support Skype messaging, they don't offer video calls. Skype has mastered good-quality audio for mobiles but hasn't yet cracked the technical problem of good video over the devices, which will require optimization of the carriers' networks and other steps, Durschlag said.
Though Palm's upcoming Pre handset was pictured in a slide at the press conference, Skype will wait to see how well that phone sells before committing to write software for it, he said.
There are already Palm applications for several other mobile platforms, including Android and Windows Mobile.
Skype hopes to allow Canadian iPhone users to make calls soon, Durschlag said. Today they have a limited set of Skype capabilities because of a problem involving interpretation of a patent, he said.
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AMD readying 'very low-power' Shanghai processors
Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday said it would release "very low-power" Shanghai processors within three months, a move that could intensify its ongoing chip battle with rival Intel.
The new quad-core Opteron EE chips will deliver similar performance while drawing significantly less power than its predecessors, a company spokeswoman said. AMD's server processors draws a minimum of about 50 watts of power.
[ AMD launched its 'Shanghai' quad-core Opteron late last year. | Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]
The Opteron EE server chips could become available in the next three months. The chips will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer manufacturing process and will be part of the Opteron processor family codenamed Shanghai.
AMD is also making progress with its upcoming line of six-core server processors, codenamed Istanbul.
In addition to adding two more cores, AMD is adding power management technologies and improvements to boost the chips' performance, said Margaret Lewis, a product marketing director in AMD's server and workstation division. The company hopes the Istanbul chips will deliver improved performance while drawing the same amount of power as existing quad-core Shanghai server chips.
The Istanbul chips are based on the Shanghai core, with the "same energy efficient parts" and additional cache, Lewis said. She didn't provide further details of the technologies, but said the tweaks should help the chip handle heavier processing loads.
The Istanbul chips are due in the second half of the year, Lewis said. Server vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard will support Istanbul processors on their servers when the chip is released, according to the companies.
AMD's announcements come a day after Intel announced new quad-core Xeon server chips, which the chip maker is pitching as the most significant revamp of its server chip line since the release of the Pentium Pro in 1995. The launch took away AMD's long-standing technology advantage of integrating a memory controller on the CPU.
"We're pleased to see our competitor come to use the [integrated memory controller] technology we introduced way back in 2003," Lewis said.
It's hard to directly compare Intel's and AMD's servers chips as they are based on different architectures, said Dean McCarron, principal at analyst firm Mercury Research. The chip makers compete for market share, and are pushing the boundaries in the areas of price, performance and some other metrics, he said.
Savvy server buyers look for value and take a number of cost factors into consideration, including workload utilization and power consumption of chips. That has led the chip makers to pack more power into chips via the addition of cores, which also helps reduce power consumption, McCarron said.
Adding more cores makes sense as companies look to consolidate servers and run more applications in virtualized environments, he said. Servers equipped with faster chips can execute more tasks compared to slower servers, which could help consolidate servers in data centers.
In anticipation of the first big jump out of quad-core chips, AMD demonstrated the first working units of Istanbul in February. A company representative at the time said servers with eight sockets could include up to 48 cores with Istanbul chips. Intel already ships a six-core chip for servers, known as Dunnington.
In 2010, AMD will double the core count on its processors to twelve with a chip codenamed Magny Cours, which will support the faster DDR3 form of memory. Intel is also continuously adding more cores, and will release new six-core and eight-core chips later this year or early next year.
Unfortunately for both players, the product launches are happening at the backdrop of an economic collapse, McCarron said.
"That will mask the business performance of the product. We're in a different environment," McCarron said.
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Carl Icahn gunning for Apple
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn intimated on Tuesday that after losing his bid to take over Yahoo last year, he has set his sights on Apple. Should Icahn succeed in his takeover effort, he has a radical strategy planned for Apple: To reposition the company's products as bargain computers.
Icahn has a history of pressuring companies to change their ways, and because he holds -- or has the resources to buy -- massive amounts of stock, he is often able to ensure that his voice is heard. When Yahoo rebuffed Microsoft's buyout propositions, Icahn famously stepped in, demanding that Yahoo acquiesce to Microsoft's offer and threatening a proxy fight for control of the company if he did not get his way.
[ For the complete saga of Microsoft's attempted takeover of Yahoo, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]
Icahn also had a long-running feud with Motorola, another company in which he has invested heavily. He even went so far as to file a lawsuit, which he then dropped in exchange for Motorola backing two of Icahn's preferred picks for the company's board of directors.
Now, Icahn has designs on pushing Apple in a new direction. He claims to see a "leadership vacuum" at the company and plenty of opportunity to expand the company's user base. "Apple has aggressively pursued a niche market," Icahn said. "It has been successful in that niche, but that is only one small piece of the pie. By cutting itself off from lower price points, it is capping its potential for success."
Icahn says that Apple has pursued branding prestige with too much vigor, noting that "all the prestige in the world won't get somebody to buy a laptop for $1,000 when he could buy the same one for $600," a line of attack Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently used.
In Icahn's view, Apple should split its product line in two, maintaining "prestige" products on the higher end, but also introducing a differently branded line of bargain-priced hardware and selling it at discount chain stores, thereby extending Apple's reach among retail outlets and not just consumers.
Apple does have some presence in retail chains; it sells its popular iPhone handheld at Wal-Mart, for example. But the company has been reluctant to stray too far from its own Apple Stores and other official Apple retailers.
Although he did not say exactly how he plans to exert pressure on Apple to change its ways, Icahn historically has shown an affinity for proxy fights in which he installs individuals sympathetic to his views on the board of directors of a given company, taking the fight from public statements to the very leadership of the firm. In Apple's case, Icahn may push to install himself as CEO if merely taking over the board doesn't give him enough power to push the company in his proposed direction, suggested Lance Hawkins, an analyst at Redwoods Research.
[ April Fool's! Read more of InfoWorld's April Foolery. ]
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Microsoft asks feds for a bailout
Microsoft requested on Tuesday some $20 billion in bailout funds from the federal government, claiming that as the company controlling an overwhelming share of the OS market, it is too big to fail. The company said low adoption rates for Windows Vista, the ensuing ad campaign trying to convince people that they really do like Vista, and the increased need for development resources to rush Windows 7 to market to make people forget about Vista have necessitated the bailout.
"We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. "This is simply a crisis of dollars -- a crisis of not having enough dollars coming our way. And if Microsoft collapses, better than 80 percent of the OS market collapses with us. We are requesting these bailout funds to avoid that undesirable outcome by bridging the gap between now and Windows 7."
[ Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]
Ballmer didn't say if Microsoft executives would still receive bonuses if the company succeeded in getting bailout funds. He also did not indicate how the company intended to spend any bailout money it might receive, merely explaining that it would be used to "fund operations."
Microsoft's earnings over the past several quarters have been either flat or falling. Revenue has grown, but the company has increased expenditures, causing net income to decrease. Ballmer said that the company's current trajectory is "unsustainable in the long term" and that a government bailout would put the company back on the right track.
Irvin Pepper, an analyst with Freamon & Moreland, called the bailout request a "shrewd move" by Microsoft. "It may be unpopular, but Microsoft is so large that it doesn't have to worry about popularity. And the company would be foolish to leave all that money on the table if it can, in fact, get a bailout." Pepper postulated that Microsoft's odds of getting bailout funds are around 3 to 1.
Pepper also said that his sources within Microsoft were indicating that the money might be used for a surprising purpose: suing Apple, Google, open source companies, and other entities Microsoft has labeled "revenue stealers" in internal communications. Microsoft has antagonized the companies in the past and most recently sued Linux vendor TomTom over alleged patent violations.
According to Pepper, Microsoft sees litigation as a possible revenue stream, although he believes such a strategy would be for the short term only. "I don't see Microsoft getting into the business of suing everybody willy-nilly," he said. "But as a stopgap measure while it struggles with the economic climate, Microsoft believes litigation can be a revenue-positive undertaking."
[ April Fool's! Read more of InfoWorld's April Foolery. ]
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Red Hat ponders going proprietary
In a surprise announcement, Red Hat is looking into a move away from open source and making its flavor of Linux a proprietary OS. The shift, if undertaken, would be a tricky one that would delve into thorny legal issues of ownership within the open source community.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst indicated that the proposed move is intended to bolster Red Hat's position as a leader. "We see open source getting embraced more and more by not only customers but other vendors like Microsoft, and I think this can be directly attributed to Red Hat's leadership," said Whitehurst. "Now is the time to reassert our leadership by taking the next step and making our products and community full-on commodities. Naturally, we think this will appeal directly to enterprises, which crave the stability and security of proprietary systems."
[ Open Sources blog: See what the key open source trends for 2009 will be | Yesterday, Red Hat released Fedora 11, which could give an indication as to the direction of RHEL | Another way Red Hat could go private: Get bought by Microsoft ]
Left unsaid by Whitehurst was how, exactly, he plans to pluck Red Hat's Linux from the open source community and wall it off. He said only that the company's lawyers were "investigating options" and declined to elaborate further.
The fundamental question raised by the move is who ultimately "owns" Red Hat Linux. The company apparently believes it does, but there is the question of the Gnu GPL, the license that some, but not all, of the Red Hat Linux source code falls under. The company may be considering separating the GPL and non-GPL code, keeping the non-GPL code, and replacing code still under the GPL with proprietary versions, but the process of separating the millions of lines of code could prove to be prohibitively costly.
Alternately, Red Hat might claim ownership of all the source code and try to figure out an escape from the Gnu GPL. To this end, rumors are circulating that Red Hat is trying to bring Gnu pioneer Richard Stallman onto its board of directors to help smooth over any GPL issues.
Joe Stewart, an analyst with the Stanfield & Barksdale Group, said that Red Hat's move could justify its risk. "They're really going out on a limb with this, and they could engender an awful lot of ill will in the IT community for basically turning their backs on their stated principles, but it's not as though they don't have a valid point here. Many open source companies have searched for new ways to monetize their offerings, and Red Hat has one: Use open source to create your product and cultivate a community, and then commodify the whole package," he said.
Whitehurst says he expects to have a final decision on the issue by the end of the third quarter.
[ April Fool's! Read more of InfoWorld's April Foolery. ]
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Twitter added to federal emergency response network
In a milestone that marks Twitter's evolution from a tool for self-obsessed 20-somethings into a vital part of our nation's telecommunications infrastructure, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has announced it is adding the microblogging service to the national emergency response network.
Beginning next January, individuals in distress will be able to send @replies or ?direct messages? to @t911help. Root servers at Twitter co-location facilities will use IP addresses and geolocation databases to route messages to the first responders closest to the sender's physical address.
[ Keep up to date on all things mobile with InfoWorld's Mobile Pulse blog. ]
?Twitter is not just about what you had for lunch any more,? said a FEMA spokesperson. ?It's about choking on what you had for lunch and being able to call for help -- even when you can no longer speak.?
Saying he was both ?honored and humbled? by the FEMA announcement, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company is currently building out its server capacity to meet the increased demand. He vowed to hunt the ?fail whale? -- the white cetacean that appears when Twitter is overwhelmed with traffic -- into extinction.
In related news, Democratic members of the House of Representatives have introduced a bill designed to ensure the accuracy of the service following complaints from their constituents about misleading messages posted to the site. The bill, titled the Twitter Integrity and Truth Act (TWITA), would lodge penalties of up to $500 per tweet for users who deliberately post false or libelous information on the service.
?With more politicians using Twitter, and more people relying on it for instant news updates, we wanted to provide incentives for people to use it responsibly,? said a spokesperson for Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-sponsor of the bill. ?We don't need more twits messing with our tweets.?
[ April Fool's! Read more of InfoWorld's April Foolery. ]
Update: HP may offer Android in netbooks over Windows
Hewlett-Packard confirmed Tuesday that it is testing Google's Android operating system as a possible alternative to Windows in some of its netbook computers.
Analysts said the move would allow HP to develop a low-cost netbook optimized for wireless networks that provides access to Web-based services such as Google Docs, but others questioned whether the Google software is ready for such a task.
[ Technology has advanced to the point that netbooks now make sense for some business uses | Special report: All about Google Android. ]
"Right now Android is barely finished for phones," said Avi Greengart, an analyst at Current Analysis. While it works well enough for T-Mobile's G1 smartphone, the software was released only last year and "the UI still feels half-finished," he said.
HP stressed that it was still only testing Android, an OS based on the open-source Linux kernel. It has assigned engineers to the task but has made no decision yet whether to offer Android in products, said HP spokeswoman Marlene Somsak. The news was first reported earlier Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal.
"We want to assess the capability it will have for the computing and communications industry," Somsak said. "We remain open to considering various OS options."
Netbooks are small, low-cost computers that are designed primarily for browsing the Web and doing basic computing tasks. The category has proved popular -- about 10 million netbooks shipped in 2008 and the number is expected to double this year, according to IDC.
Android was designed for mobile phones but has been seen by some others besides HP as a potential OS for netbooks. Some enthusiasts have been testing Android on netbooks such as Asustek's Eee PC, and chip makers such as Qualcomm and Freescale hope to bring Android to netbooks running on their Arm-based chips.
HP may have in mind a netbook optimized for use with Web-based services such as the Google Docs hosted applications suite and Google's online storage service, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.
The fact that notebooks are designed to provide quick access to online services, often over wireless networks, makes them in some ways like oversized smartphones.
There are also no license fees for Android, which could allow hardware makers to offer lower-priced computers than those running Windows. However, consumers have been willing to pay extra in the past for netbooks running Windows, analysts noted.
HP already offers some PCs with a choice of Linux or Windows, and introducing another OS choice would come with some risk, said David Daoud, a research manager at IDC. Some end-users don't like Linux because they are unfamiliar with it, he said.
"We've seen a number of netbooks returned as a result of the Linux OS. Consumers are used to the Microsoft Windows world," Daoud said. Linux adoption remains weak on client computers, especially in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe, he noted.
Still, there may be an upside for Android if HP were to make it work in netbooks. HP's heft as the world's largest PC maker would widen Android's use, Daoud said. It could see success in emerging markets like India and China, where Linux adoption is growing.
But HP would need to deliver a consumer-friendly product that makes Linux easier to use in PCs, Daoud said.
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Conficker activation passes quietly, but threat isn't over
An expected activation of the Conficker.c worm at midnight on April 1 passed without incident, despite sensationalized fears that the Internet itself might be affected, but security researchers said users aren't out of the woods yet.
"These guys have no designs, I think, on taking down the infrastructure, because that would separate them from their victims," said Paul Ferguson, a threat researcher at antivirus vendor Trend Micro, calling the technology and design of Conficker.c as "pretty much state of the art."
[ Related: "Fake security software scammers jump on Conficker." | Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
"They want to keep the infrastructure up and in place to make it much harder for good guys to counter and mitigate what they've orchestrated," he said.
Conficker.c was programmed to establish a link from infected host computers with command-and-control servers at midnight GMT on April 1. To reach these control servers, Conficker.c generates a list of 50,000 domain names and then selects 500 domain names to contact. That process has started, researchers said.
Exactly how many computers are infected with Conficker.c is not yet known, but the estimated number of systems infected by all variants of the Conficker worm exceeds 10 million, making this one of the largest botnets ever seen.
While infected computers have started reaching out to command servers as expected, nothing untoward has happened.
"We have observed that Conficker is reaching out, but so far none of the servers they are trying to reach are serving any new malware or any new commands," said Toralv Dirro, a security strategist at McAfee Avert Labs, in Germany.
This may just mean the people who control Conficker are biding their time, waiting for researchers and IT managers to relax their guard and assume the worst is over.
"It would be pretty stupid for the guys running Conficker to use the first possible opportunity, when everybody is very excited about it and looking at it very carefully," Dirro said. "If something was going to happen, it would probably happen in a couple of days."
Time is not on Conficker's side. The worm can be easily detected and removed by users. For example, if a PC is unable to reach Web sites such as McAfee.com, Microsoft.com, or Trendmicro.com that is an indication that the computer may be infected.
In addition, IT managers can easily spot traffic coming from odd domain names and block access to the computers on their company networks. "The longer criminals wait, the less infected hosts they've got," Dirro said.
Additional help comes from a loose coalition of security vendors and others called the Conficker Working Group, which has banded together to block access to domains that Conficker is trying to communicate with. But it's not immediately clear whether those efforts, which have been successful at blocking earlier versions of the worm, will be effective against the activation of Conficker.c.
"We can't really say how successful the attempts at blocking them or not routing them are," Dirro said. "That's something we'll see when the first domain actually starts serving malware, if at least one starts doing that."
Despite the uneventful passing of the activation deadline, the threat presented by Conficker remains real.
"These guys are very sophisticated, very professional, very determined and very measured in how they implement and make changes to things," Ferguson said, adding that Conficker.c is better defended and more survivable than previous versions of the worm. "This activation on April 1 was probably just arbitrary and picked to cause hysteria."
At some point, the people behind Conficker.c could try to generate revenue from the botnet they've created or they could have other intentions.
"The big mystery is that there's this big loaded gun out there, this network of millions of machines that's under the control of persons unknown," Ferguson said. "They've given no indication of what their motives are other than toying with people."
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Microsoft bolsters cloud app development
Microsoft began offering Tuesday a preview of enhancements to the company's .Net Services platform for building cloud-based applications, focusing on Web standards and interoperability, the company said.
.Net Services is a component of the company's Azure Services Platform for cloud computing. It also features Microsoft-hosted, developer-oriented services to help with building cloud-based and cloud-aware applications. The Community Technology Preview of .Net Services M5 (Milestone 5) offers improved support for standards including REST, ATOM, JSON, SOAP, and HTTP.
[ Find?out what's different about developing cloud apps. ]
"From the beginning, .Net Services was designed for multicloud, multiplatform use," said Steve Martin, Microsoft senior director of developer Connected Systems Division product management, in a blog entry. "Developers can use the .Net Services in conjunction with any programming language (using support for industry-standard protocols, or via available SDKs for .Net, Java and Ruby) on any platform to create or extend federated applications."
The M5 Access Control Service adds a management service supporting REST and ATOM for managing rules. Access Control Service provides capabilities for controlling user access to Web applications and services by federating with multiple standards-based identity providers.
The service bus in M5, for connecting and messaging between network endpoints, offers durable queues and routers supporting SOAP and HTTP, Microsoft said. Also, M5 REST-based activities are supported on the bus, including Put, Get, Post, Delete, and custom verbs for orchestrating messages.
Microsoft demonstrated cloud-to-cloud interoperability at the Mix09 conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, Martin said. "Specifically, we showed how the Access Control Service and Service Bus could be integrated with a Python application deployed into Google App Engine using just two lines of code," he said.
The company is seeking feedback on the CTP, he said. Commercial availability of the improvements to .Net Services is planned for later this year. The CTP, offered in the form of a March 2009 SDK for the technology, can be accessed via Microsoft's Web site.
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Gartner: IT spending drop-off worse than after dot-com bust
Global IT spending is expected to decline nearly 4 percent in 2009 over the previous year as industry watchers confirm the current recession will see more losses than the dot-com bust in 2001, Gartner reports.
"The IT market slowdown will be worse than 2001, that downturn was tech-related. Today there is a general slowdown in demand for products and services across the board and IT spending is not immune," said Richard Gordon, research vice president of global forecasting at Gartner, Tuesday on a conference call announcing the spending forecast.
[ The predictions come on the heels of a report stating that the U.S. tech industry gained jobs in 2008. ]
Gartner reported that global IT spending will reach about $3.2 trillion in 2009, a 3.8 percent decline in growth from the $3.3 trillion spent in 2008 -- which marked a 6.1 percent growth over 2007. The research firm adjusted its spending forecast downward across all segments, attributing the cutback in spending to the economic recession. IT spending in 2001 saw a 2.1 percent decline, according to Gartner.
"The impact on IT spending is becoming clearer. As global economies continue to decline sharply, IT departments are trimming budgets and consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending," Gordon said. "The first quarter of 2009 provided confirmation that key markets and vendors have entered a recession."
Hardware in particular will see a nearly 15 percent decline as fewer companies invest in 2009 and are expected to spend $324.3 billion, compared with $381 billion spent on hardware in 2008. Software spending will be about flat at $222.6 billion. IT services will decline 1.7 percent with total spending reaching about $796 billion. As for the telecom sector, Gartner expects to see a nearly 3 percent decline in spending with total investments reaching $1.9 trillion.
Despite the promise of government stimulus packages in the long term, Gordon explained, they won't be able to offset the "bleak near-term outlook." Global financial markets have yet to stabilize, and that means IT buyers aren't confident on where to invest their budget dollars.
"Economic conditions have continued to erode business confidence in all regions. There is a continued general sense of uncertainty in the market and a lack of clarity of actual amount of toxic debt out there," Gordon said. "IT organizations will look for ways to shift spending from capital expenditures to operational efficiencies."
Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Update: Google bans tethering app from Android Market
A developer is reporting that Google has banned his tethering application from the Android Market, one of the first hints that the store may not be as open as Google has promised.
WiFi Tether for Root Users, an application developed by Seth Lemons and a partner, has been banned from the market for violating the developer distribution agreement. The application lets users connect their G1 Android phones via Wi-Fi to their laptops and then access the Internet from the laptop using the phone's cellular connection.
[ InfoWorld's Test Center takes a developer's-eye view of smartphone platforms and surveys the possibilities for mobile apps | Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]
In a letter to Lemons' partner, Google states that the application violates the developer distribution agreement. It cites a section that says Google may remove an application if it violates the device maker's or the operator's terms of service. The letter then points to T-Mobile's terms of service, which expressly forbid tethering phones to a computer. T-Mobile is the only operator in the U.S. to sell an Android phone.
The tethering application was on the Android Market for a few weeks and had more than 10,000 downloads and a 4.5 star rating from users, Lemons said.
The move is notable because Google has promoted Android and the Android Market as being open. Developers do not have to submit applications for approval; they simply pay US$25 to become part of the developer program and then they can upload their application to the market.
Because the idea is that there will be one Android Market to serve all future phones based on the operating system, this incident raises some interesting questions, Seth notes in his blog. "Does this mean that apps in the Market have to adhere to the ToS for only T-Mobile, even when other carriers sign on? Will all apps have to adhere to the ToS for every carrier that supports Android phones?" he writes.
The tethering application can only be used by people who had enabled "root" access to their G1 phones. The developer versions of the phone are rooted but regular users also can enable it, in exchange for some downsides including lower security.
People commenting on a story about the incident reported by the Android Community Web site note that G1 users can download applications directly from developers, circumventing rules that may prohibit apps from the Market.
Google has not replied to a request for comment on the matter.
Tethering applications have also been denied from Apple's iPhone App Store, but that store requires applications to submit to a review process and appears to have more strident rules.
This story was updated on March 31, 2009
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Fedora 11 beta posted with new security, developer features
The Fedora Project released a beta of the next version of its free Linux OS with new security, desktop, and developer features that provide a glimpse of the direction Red Hat could take with its enterprise Linux distribution.
The Fedora 11 beta is available online for download from the project's Web site. The project outlines some of the feature highlights of the release in a blog post. The final release of Fedora 11, code-named Leonidas, is scheduled to be available by the end of May.
[ While Fedora tests out new features for enterprise Linux, Red Hat's CEO is questioning the relevance of desktop Linux | Follow the latest news and trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog. | Read about the very best open source software products in InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Software Awards 2008. ]
Red Hat uses Fedora as a proving ground for new technologies for its RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). While not all of the features in Fedora end up in RHEL, it is a good way for people to test and use features before deploying them in a production environment or using them as part of RHEL, said Paul Frields, Red Hat's Fedora Project Leader. A combination of Red Hat and third-party developers contribute code to Fedora, and Frields manages the integration of Fedora features into RHEL.
New Fedora 11 features include one that will be useful for people working on desktop PCs that connect to Fedora servers in the back end, Frields said. A new automatic-content installation feature that leverages Fedora's PackageKit software-management system lets users automatically download a font, feature, or even an application they need if they come across a file that needs an extension not found locally on a PC.
"If I e-mail you a document using OpenOffice.org on your new Fedora 11 system, you can download that attachment, and PacketKit will install it for you," he said.
The feature works by detecting what a file needs and then accessing a software repository running in Fedora. The repository includes only free and open source software.
Frields said this kind of feature differentiates an open source system like Fedora from a proprietary OS like Windows because that model is meant to "sell you more software," not provide free extensions or fonts.
Fedora project developers also have added security for virtualized containers running on the OS by extending Fedora's security model, SELinux, Frields said. A new extension called Svirt provides access control for virtual guests, locking what processes the guests have access to, he said.
The feature works in the same way that SELinux provides a "valet key" for other processes in the system, only letting them touch other processes relevant to the task they're performing to prevent the spread of an attack on a specific process, Frields said. "So if something happens to a virtual guest, there is very little opportunity for an attacker to get access to the rest of the system," he said.
Fedora 11 also includes a new cross-compiler for Microsoft Windows applications that lets developers build applications for the Windows OS on the Fedora system. Developers can use whatever language they need -- usually C++, Frields said -- to build the application.
The current version of RHEL is 5.3, with 6.0 being the next major release of the OS that would incorporate Fedora features. Red Hat has not laid out a timeline or feature set for RHEL 6.0, Frields said. However, the company is always adding new functionality to incremental releases of RHEL.
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Zend Technologies readies a new PHP application server
Zend Technologies is putting the finishing touches to Zend Server, a new Web applications server aimed at mission-critical PHP applications. In beta testing since Feb. 18, the final version is now about a week from launch.
"The release date now smells like April 8. We might pull it in by a day, unless there's a showstopper," said Zend Technologies' new CEO, Andi Gutmans. One of the creators of PHP and a founder of Zend, he was named CEO last month.
[ Last year, Zend teamed with Adobe to add Flex to PHP for developing rich Web apps. ]
The company already offers a Web applications server, Zend Platform, so what distinguishes the two?
"That's a question I get a lot," said Gutmans. "Zend Platform is for multiserver environments: It's a clustered application server," he said.
Zend Server, on the other hand, is a single-server offering, "channel-ready" so it can be shipped more closely integrated with the operating system as, for example, in a virtual machine image. "It's cloud-ready with support for virtualized environments," Gutmans said. "We are looking at appliance vendors to bundle it."
The clustering capabilities of Zend Platform will make it more suitable for applications that require "a certain context when the user comes to the Web site," he said.
Over the past few years, Zend has been adding tools to help enterprises write and deploy applications in PHP, including Zend Studio, a development environment, and Zend Framework, a collection of standard objects and Web services created with the help of the user community.
"Zend Server's launch is the 'finale' to everything that has come out of Zend Technologies since 2005. It completes the applications lifecycle," said Gutmans. "We deliver consistency across the application lifecycle, the same environment."
Gutmans sees that consistency as important when 75 percent of Zend's customers develop on Windows boxes -- but 95 percent of them go on to deploy on Linux.
Zend Server will run on Linux and on versions of Windows from Windows XP through Windows Server 2008, working with the Apache or Microsoft IIS Web servers. Zend Platform offers similar support -- and the company also offers a version of Zend Platform for i5/OS, the successor to IBM's OS/400 operating system.
One of the features of the new Zend Server is the ability to roll out patches automatically.
"Zend Server gives reliability and security. If there's a security vulnerability we will do a hotfix for you," he said.
Although Gutmans touts Zend Server's integration with its development tools as one of its strong points, that doesn't mean the company is trying to shut competitors out of the market.
"We will work with competing development-tool vendors as long as they tie into our deployment environment."
One company Gutmans doesn't expect to see competing in the PHP development tool market is Microsoft: "I don't see them integrating PHP support in Virtual Studio in the near future," he said.
Nevertheless, Microsoft is looking for a larger slice of the PHP market, and now offers easy installation of the latest community version of PHP for Windows alongside its IIS Web server through the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta. Version 1.0 did not include the PHP components.
Another industry giant that might be taking an interest in PHP is Google. Ever since the company launched the Google App Engine, a service for running Web applications written in Python on Google's servers, last April, developers have been calling for Google to support other programming languages, notably PHP.
Gutmans was forthright about the search company's decision to only support Python initially: "Google would be dumb not to do PHP support on App Engine."
"If they want to do it with Zend Server I would be happy," he said -- but as to whether they will, "I don't comment on discussions we are having. There is nothing immediate from Google."
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HP unwraps Cloud Assure
Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday detailed new services and software that it claims can help businesses turn to the cloud, namely by boosting security, performance, and availability.
HP put the new offerings under the umbrella of Cloud Assure. They include HP Application Security Center, HP Performance Center, and HP Business Availability Center. All three are delivered SaaS-style and customers also get a team of engineers to perform security scans, test performance, and monitor availability, HP said.
[ In an interview with InfoWorld, author Nick Carr explains the many ways cloud computing will disrupt IT. | Also, the once-secret Open Cloud Manifesto sees light of day. ]
IDC identified those three areas -- security, performance, and availability -- as key concerns that IT shops have with hosted applications. To that end, HP Application Security scans networks, middleware, Web applications, and operating systems and conducts penetration testing to give customers a snapshot of security risks. The Center gauges cloud services to make sure they meet service-level agreement requirements. And the availability service monitors cloud-based applications for service uptime and performance.
HP said it is targeting three types of cloud service environments with the new offerings: Infrastructure-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service, and of course Software-as-a-service.
Naturally, it remains to be seen whether HP's new wares will drive enterprises to adopt cloud services, as the company claims, but analyst firm Gartner predicts that cloud spending will skyrocket in 2009.
Hewlett-Packard said that these new products and services are part of its initiative to build out a broader set of cloud-based offerings.
"Over time, we'll add [to Cloud Assure] a number of other products that are already available today," explained Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of software products at HP, in a Webcast Tuesday morning. Purhoit added that technologies such as disaster recovery, and the ability to run customers' IT processes, are candidates.
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