Linux Distro Xandros Buys Email Specialist Scalix
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

They became partners earlier this year, and now they are a single company. Xandros, an up-and-coming commercial Linux distributor based in New York that wants to bring Linux to Windows shops, has acquired Scalix, a maker of open source messaging and calendaring software that hails from the HP-UX Unix base and that was ported to Linux a number of years ago after a licensing deal with Hewlett-Packard. READ MORE >

HP Buys System Management Tool Maker Opsware for $1.6 Billion
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Since it was founded during the IT downturn in 2002, systems management software maker Opsware has spent a lot of time and money creating the system and network management tools that it has always said cope with the deficiencies of tools made by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others--and it has spent lots trying to convince the data centers of the world that its Opsware System was just the right thing to bring server, storage, and network sprawl under control. Yesterday, HP admitted that Opsware was right after all, announcing that it would spend $1.6 billion to acquire Opsware. READ MORE >

IBM Creates New Power, SMB Server Divisions
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past decade and a half, IBM's two midrange server lines--formerly the AS/400 proprietary server line and the RS/6000 Unix server line but now known as the System i and the System p, respectively--have been on a course to merge. First, they started supporting similar APIs, then similar Power processors, then the exact same hardware, including Power processors, memory, disks, and other peripherals. Then, they started supporting each others' respective i5/OS and AIX operating systems. It would be logical to assume that eventually the System i and System p brands would eventually fall by the wayside and there would be just one Power server line. READ MORE >

As I See It: Lawyers, Lies, and Statistics
by Victor Rozek

Here's a statistic guaranteed to curdle the cream in an IT professional's coffee. The huge populations of China and India have produced a correspondingly huge crop of offsprings--628 million kids under the age of 15, give or take a village. That's a lot of young people who will soon (if they haven't already) enter the global labor market. Americans, on the other hand, have sired some 60 million moppets, who blissfully haunt the nation's malls, unaware of the approaching competitive tidal wave about to engulf them. READ MORE >