Articles by Keith Regan

In a move that could significantly alter the Linux competitive landscape, Novell has said it will buy privately held SuSE for US$210 million in cash. SuSE trails only Red Hat in the race for market share among users of the open-source Linux operating system As part of the agreement, Novell also will accept a $50 million cash investment from IBM whe...

Yahoo has discontinued its enterprise software division, which it initially set up to push its messaging and Internet broadcast offerings onto corporate desktops. The company laid off an undisclosed number of workers at locations in California, Dallas and Atlanta as a result of the division closing. Other workers found new jobs within Yahoo, as so...

Hewlett-Packard has announced it plans to stop actively selling its e3000 servers, which have a history stretching back more than 30 years However, the company said it will continue to offer service support for the product line for another three years and may extend software updates and patches beyond that time frame. HP initially signaled its inte...

Oracle has opened a second business development center on the Chinese mainland and has unveiled a program to help Japanese companies tackle this emerging marketplace. The company said its second China Development Center (CDC) is now open for business in Beijing, offering China-based companies an opportunity to accelerate their emergence into the w...

X10. Just the company name is enough to send some Internet users into convulsions. The firm was, for all intents and purposes, the first major user of the dreaded pop-under ad, which, at the time it was introduced, easily ranked as the most obnoxious and intrusive form of online advertising ever invented.

In an effort to downplay rumors that Hewlett-Packard will seek to beef up its consulting division by purchasing a major computer services company, such as EDS, HP CEO Carly Fiorina said she has passed on opportunities to make additional acquisitions. Instead, she said, she will focus on her company's ability to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions.

Saying that customer data is woefully underprotected on corporate networks connected to the Internet, IBM has unveiled services that aim to make it easier and less expensive for companies to secure that data. In addition to reducing the risk of identity theft, IBM said securing data is a corporate priority because of recent U.S. laws that stipulate stiff penalties if customers' personal information is stolen or leaked...

Intel and AMD, the two largest makers of computer chips, have moved to cut prices, setting the stage for PC prices to drop in time for the peak holiday sales season. Both chipmakers previously had stated their intention to lower prices, a move designed to clear inventory of older chip models in anticipation of next-generation product releases. Int...

Executives at search engine powerhouse Google have been meeting with investment bankers in recent weeks, fueling widespread speculation that the company will stage an initial public offering soon, possibly in the first quarter of 2004 Google has long been rumored to be the next big high-tech IPO. But with stock markets only recently recovering to a...

Microsoft has said it will expand its "most valuable professionals" program, offering more access than ever to the code underlying its most popular products. Previously, access through the Shared Source Initiative, which Microsoft launched more than two years ago to help quell concerns about security holes in its software, was limited to specializ...

The matchup many fans and advertisers hoped to see in baseball's World Series failed to materialize this year as both the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox fell apart -- again -- just short of advancing to the Fall Classic. Nevertheless, fans' feverish interest in the baseball playoffs, many of which took place while much of the U.S. fan base wa...

Amazon.com beat earnings expectations in its third quarter and predicted another record-smashing holiday season, but the e-tailer's relatively subdued forecast for 2004 raised renewed worries about the valuations of many Internet-sector stocks Sales at the Seattle, Washington-based company grew 33 percent from last year to US$1.13 billion in the qu...

Want to figure out if you're a pessimist or an optimist in the Internet age? Forget the glass half-full, glass half-empty question. Try this instead: comScore says more than 50 percent of the U.S. population used the Internet last month, the first time this has ever happened. Your reaction to that news -- beyond momentary shock at the size of the ...

Declaring itself the early leader in the race to win market share in the digital music arena, Apple has announced it sold more than 1 million songs in less than four days after launching a Windows version of its iTunes music download site The company unveiled its Windows-compatible iTunes offering last Thursday at a fanfare-filled event, aiming to ...

The SCO Group has landed US$50 million in private financing, which it said it will use to expand its business and add strength to its multibillion-dollar legal battles with IBM and others. Those lawsuits focus on alleged use of SCO's proprietary Unix code in the Linux operating system. BayStar Capital, whose other investments include Sirius Satell...

Saying it is seeing the most concrete signs to date that an economic recovery is taking hold, IBM has indicated it could reverse more than two years of layoffs by adding as many as 10,000 jobs in 2004. "We are beginning to see signs that the economy has stabilized," said CEO Samuel J. Palmisano. "As we look to 2004, more customers are expected to ...

It's possible, though anything but likely, that the Cubs and the Red Sox could meet in baseball's World Series this year. Even casual fans know the significance of such an event -- together, the teams have gone a combined 180 years without winning a World Series. The possibility of such an unlikely matchup has stirred up a storm of jokes, the most...

Executives at Oracle have announced their company is on the lookout for potential acquisitions and even briefly considered buying longtime partner and struggling tech giant Sun Microsystems. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said his company determined the Sun deal would not make sense because the two companies work well as partners. "I thought about it," ...

Forging its second major partnership involving wireless devices in as many months, Microsoft has said it will work closely with Vodafone to create Web services standards that can extend desktop applications to mobile devices. The announcement linking one of the world's top mobile phone companies -- Vodafone has ties to about 123 million mobile cus...

In a bid to reassure customers rattled by a series of headline-grabbing security flaws, Microsoft has said it will launch an initiative to make its products more secure. The push includes another revamp of the company's patch management process, which has been widely criticized as too cumbersome for enterprise users and too confusing for some home...