IBM

IBM and Oracle has come to a settlement over lawsuits launched against each other. IBM sued Joanne Olsen, a 30-year Big Blue veteran and former head of its services division. The lawsuit was filed by the company after Olsen was gained over by Larry Ellison after the purchase of Sun Microsystems.

In its filing IBM complained that Olsen had failed to take a year's gardening leave and was therefore taking advantage of confidential company information to help Oracle-Sun, which was now a direct competitor for big server and storage contracts.

An executive who oversaw development of the iPhone 4 at Apple is leaving his post. Mark Papermaster has been head of Apple's iPhone and iPod hardware engineering department since 2009 when he joined the company from IBM.

According to many speculations his departure is linked to the problems with the antenna on the iPhone 4. Meantime, Apple, declined to comment on the reasons for his departure and say whether he resigns or is fired.

International Business Machines has partnered with Aetna Inc to launch a service meant to help hospitals improve patient care via better management of electronic medical records and other digital data.

IBM says the new service developed in association with Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management, would help physicians access patients' health data like previous medical records, claims, and lab data from multiple sources and quickly analyze what the best treatment might be.

Two anti-trust investigations have been launched against the International Business Machines Corp by European Union on allegations IBM is abusing its dominant position in the mainframe computer market. One investigation was launched after complaints filed by emulator software vendors T3 and TurboHercules against IBM's practices. This probe focuses on IBM’s alleged tying of mainframe hardware to its mainframe operating system.

IBM is establishing a consortium in association with the European Union and a number of universities to conduct a research into new cloud-computing models in a move to reduce costs for hosting and maintaining Internet-based services.

As it became known Friday, IBM Corporation is bringing an action in a New York State court against Joanne Olsen, former services division general manager of the company.  

31-year Olsen left IMB to join Oracle by Larry Ellison after the purchase of Sun Microsystems - which put the two firms in more direct competition.

IBM's annual X-Force Trend and Risk Report revealed that the number of software vulnerabilities dropped in 2009 with the number of flaws in document readers and multimedia applications up 50%.

X-Force research and development team deals with the vulnerability disclosures and collects other data on Web-based attacks. Thus, last year the team recorded 6,601 new vulnerabilities, a 11% drop from the previous year.

As it became known, IBM started a long-awaited upgrade to a range of its servers and other hardware targeting to make them more energy-efficient. This move will let IBM production to be more competitive than rival HP and Sun Microsystems products.

According to, International Business Machines Corp Monday report, the new POWER7 system, including new microprocessors, storage and middleware, will be able to process more data than its predecessor POWER6, making them useful for utilities with electrical grids or banks conducting electronic trading.

European stocks markets rose modestly today as speculation of a pickup in corporate dealmaking helped offset earlier losses in Asia while Wall Street was to remain closed for the Martin Luther King public holiday.
With Wall Street closed later to commemorate the life of the civil rights leader and economic news limited, investors think the rest of the session will prove to be lackluster.
When Wall Street returns on Tuesday, the focus will turn towards the next batch of fourth quarter corporate earnings figures, including those from Citigroup Inc. and IBM Corp.

According to the latest survey y IBM consumers want more retail stores to be more interactive and personalized online.

"It's a smarter consumer out there today, one who is really willing to engage with the retailer," said Shannon Miller, a business development lead for IBM's Global Business Services.

32,000 consumers were polled online for the research to figure out how much interactivity they want from the retail outlets they frequent. An overwhelming interest was shown for more online customization services.

Next year IBM wants to release its new chip that will be deployed in the University of Illinois supercomputer which is believed to become the world’s fastest.

The IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer will be able to perform complex calculations instantly and it will be housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today.

IBM has opened a business analytics center in London to focus on services for the U.K.'s financial sector, which drives a major portion of the nation's economy.
IBM said the center's initial focus will be on tracking risk positions across markets and assets classes. The center, opened on Tuesday and located at IBM's South Bank offices, will employ 400, although IBM said that number could double as demand for analytics services increases.

Monday, IBM is anticipated to close $225 million acquisition deal. Under the agreement the world's biggest technology services company is buying Guardium, database security start-up.

 Guardium, a subsidiary of Israel's Log-On Software, started as an Israeli company in 2002, but later, in 2003 it moved to Boston. Guardium has about 60 employees and all will profit from the sale.

 At an annual conference in San Francisco this week Oracle Corp declared the open war against International Business Machines Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced a $10 million prize to a company who would prove that IBM systems ran database software—which businesses use to store and sort through digital information—even half as fast as those from Oracle. IBM was also invited to participate.

 IBM is delighted to introduce an inexpensive Web-based corporate email service that will compete with Google Apps, which has recently suffered several high-profile outages.

Thus, IBM will likely try to capitalize on the damage that those outages have caused to Google Apps over the past year. Last month millions of business users could not access their email for almost two hours.
As it was announced Thursday, IBM plans to start selling its LotusLive iNotes n