A Georgia company is suing Oracle for fraud and copyright infringement, saying the vendor is unlawfully using the company's technology to build user interfaces associated with Fusion Applications, a long-awaited, next-generation product family set for release next year.
MB Technologies of Warner Robins, Georgia, is the developer of Bindows, a toolkit that lets developers create "the exact look and feel" of a Windows user interface for their Web applications, according to the complaint.
The company entered a licensing agreement in 2004 with EPM (enterprise performance management) vendor Hyperion, according to the suit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
After Oracle acquired Hyperion in 2007, MB asked for an addendum to the original agreement, the complaint states.
The companies met several times, and Oracle executives told MB the vendor intended to use the Bindows technology only in Hyperion products that existed at the time of the acquisition, it adds.
Oracle officials also said the company planned to replace Bindows entirely "in the near future," according to the complaint. Those pledges were used by Oracle to "induce" MB to agree to an addendum "at lower license pricing," it states.
But in October 2007, Oracle sent MB a draft of the addendum that included a section stating it would license Bindows "for use in Oracle Fusion products," something the companies had never actually discussed, and which would "necessarily have changed the pricing of the aforesaid license," according to the complaint.
MB then offered to negotiate a Bindows licensing deal for Fusion, but Oracle ultimately removed the clause from the addendum, according to the complaint.
However, in recent months MB learned that Oracle was in fact using Bindows in connection with Fusion products, according to an e-mail exchange filed with the suit.
"Bindows is used in three EPM components that are add-ons to the Fusion applications," Oracle executive Robert Gersten wrote in reply to MB, according to the filing. "We believe it would be better for my group to not re-write these GUIs of these components. It would be nice to work out something that is favorable to both parties."
But the two sides were apparently unable to agree on a price.
MB claims it made repeated attempts to reach an agreement with Oracle, but that ultimately, its "good faith efforts were in vain."
The company is asking for a variety of damages, including any profits Oracle has made from the use of Bindows. An attorney for MB Technologies could not immediately be reached.
Oracle has not yet filed a response to MB's complaint. An Oracle spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
5 must-have IT management technologies for 2010
As more companies expand virtualization deployments and consider cloud computing, the average IT environment will grow ever more complex. For enterprise IT managers in 2010, that means they must update the technologies they use to monitor, manage and optimize the environment.
Management must-dos in 2009
Industry watchers say some of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations in 2010 are more cultural than technical. From breaking the trend of working in domains, or silos, and aligning IT services better with business needs, IT departments face many formidable tasks in 2010. Virtualization and cloud computing, for instance, require actions be taken across IT domains and will push IT organizations to break down such barriers to new technologies.
"A big limitation today in achieving the true value of some of the latest tools is IT organization, especially in enterprises. Enterprises work in silos, not only between different domain areas (for instance, network, application, server, desktop and storage) but also within domain areas such as Linux server management, mainframe management, Windows management and virtualization management," says David Williams, research vice president at Gartner. "This situation is understood and is slowly starting to be addressed with new roles and cross-domain teams being established. In 2010, IT organizations will continue to visit how they are organized to allow IT operations to become more service-centric and business-aligned."
Analysts say if the cultural hurdles can be cleared, a handful of tools will make adopting advanced technologies in 2010 easier for the majority of IT departments. Here is a brief look at five technologies industry watchers say could become mandatory for optimized IT service delivery and advanced data center operations in the coming year.
No. 1: IT service assurance
Managing the performance of IT service delivery involves myriad technologies reporting on various perspectives, including the user experience with an application.
That means IT departments need to be able to get visibility into network traffic flows as well as application performance across multiple components supporting IT services. From advanced discovery technology to traffic flow analysis to transaction monitoring, IT departments need to see the entire path of a service -- even as it exits in the corporate network and travels through external cloud environments, for instance.
The premise of IT service assurance isn't entirely new and until recently was more commonly a concern for service providers, but enterprise IT organizations have started to evolve into service providers in their own right. Companies such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM and now EMC are touting the ability to provide insight into the life cycle of an IT service. The speed at which companies are adopting and expanding their use of virtualization and the growing interest in internal and external cloud computing environments heightens the need for such technology in 2010.
Management must-dos in 2009
Industry watchers say some of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations in 2010 are more cultural than technical. From breaking the trend of working in domains, or silos, and aligning IT services better with business needs, IT departments face many formidable tasks in 2010. Virtualization and cloud computing, for instance, require actions be taken across IT domains and will push IT organizations to break down such barriers to new technologies.
"A big limitation today in achieving the true value of some of the latest tools is IT organization, especially in enterprises. Enterprises work in silos, not only between different domain areas (for instance, network, application, server, desktop and storage) but also within domain areas such as Linux server management, mainframe management, Windows management and virtualization management," says David Williams, research vice president at Gartner. "This situation is understood and is slowly starting to be addressed with new roles and cross-domain teams being established. In 2010, IT organizations will continue to visit how they are organized to allow IT operations to become more service-centric and business-aligned."
Analysts say if the cultural hurdles can be cleared, a handful of tools will make adopting advanced technologies in 2010 easier for the majority of IT departments. Here is a brief look at five technologies industry watchers say could become mandatory for optimized IT service delivery and advanced data center operations in the coming year.
No. 1: IT service assurance
Managing the performance of IT service delivery involves myriad technologies reporting on various perspectives, including the user experience with an application.
That means IT departments need to be able to get visibility into network traffic flows as well as application performance across multiple components supporting IT services. From advanced discovery technology to traffic flow analysis to transaction monitoring, IT departments need to see the entire path of a service -- even as it exits in the corporate network and travels through external cloud environments, for instance.
The premise of IT service assurance isn't entirely new and until recently was more commonly a concern for service providers, but enterprise IT organizations have started to evolve into service providers in their own right. Companies such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM and now EMC are touting the ability to provide insight into the life cycle of an IT service. The speed at which companies are adopting and expanding their use of virtualization and the growing interest in internal and external cloud computing environments heightens the need for such technology in 2010.
BlackBerry service hit by second outage in a week
IDG News Service - An outage hit BlackBerry smartphone service in the Americas on Tuesday night, operator Research In Motion confirmed. The outage is the second to affect users in less than a week.
"Some BlackBerry customers in the Americas are currently experiencing delays in message delivery," the company said in a statement. "Our technical teams are actively working to resolve this issue for those impacted. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Hundreds of messages are hitting social-network services like Twitter every few minutes from users experiencing problems. The volume indicates the problems are widespread and affecting users on several carriers.
The support line and RIM's Internet-based support forums offered no additional information on how long the outage is expected to last.
E-mail service was disrupted last week when some users were unable to receive messages for several hours on Thursday morning. The cause of the problem has not yet been revealed. Before that the last wide-scale outage occurred in February 2008 when a software upgrade at RIM took service out for several hours.
At the end of November RIM had about 36 million customers on the BlackBerry service. The company doesn't break down subscribers by region but just under two-thirds of the US$3.9 billion it recorded in revenue during the third quarter came from the U.S. and Canada where the outage is centered.
"Some BlackBerry customers in the Americas are currently experiencing delays in message delivery," the company said in a statement. "Our technical teams are actively working to resolve this issue for those impacted. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Hundreds of messages are hitting social-network services like Twitter every few minutes from users experiencing problems. The volume indicates the problems are widespread and affecting users on several carriers.
The support line and RIM's Internet-based support forums offered no additional information on how long the outage is expected to last.
E-mail service was disrupted last week when some users were unable to receive messages for several hours on Thursday morning. The cause of the problem has not yet been revealed. Before that the last wide-scale outage occurred in February 2008 when a software upgrade at RIM took service out for several hours.
At the end of November RIM had about 36 million customers on the BlackBerry service. The company doesn't break down subscribers by region but just under two-thirds of the US$3.9 billion it recorded in revenue during the third quarter came from the U.S. and Canada where the outage is centered.
iMac firmware update fails to fix flickering problems
iMac have reported that the firmware update released earlier this week has not solved their flickering display problems, according to Apple's own support forum.
Apple issued the firmware update Monday, saying that it was designed to "address issues that may cause image corruption or the display to flicker" on 27-in. iMacs equipped with the ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards.
But users continue to complain on Apple's support forum that the update was no fix for them.
"Flickering/tearing has been occurring occasionally (once a day maybe), so I downloaded and installed the firmware update, but I'm still experiencing the same problem," said a user identified as "gjdhks999" today on the massive thread dedicated to the flickering issue. That thread lists more than 1,600 messages and has a view count of more than 263,000, making it the most-read of those on the iMac forum.
"I, like everyone else, has verified that the firmware update does NOT fix the issue," added Joe Liu on the same thread. "Strangely enough I seem to be able to recreate the issue by doing the following things: 1. Use computer all day. 2. Turn off overnight. 3. Turn on in morning -- within 90 minutes it's flickering."
Some users, in fact, claimed that the firmware update had made their iMac start flickering. "Ran the firmware update last night and had no flickering," said Patrick Seguin on Tuesday. "Today I have flickering galore."
Others, however, said the update had at least reduced the flickering. One, dubbed "smakus" on the thread, guessed that the firmware update had reduced the clock speed of the ATI's card's graphic processor. "The power supply and video card have drastically reduced in temperature," smakus reported. "The flickering is still present, although it happens once, then immediately goes away, whereas before, it would flicker then steadily escalate, getting worse and worse until the blackouts started. This tells me one thing. They most likely de-clocked the video card to produce less heat, or are somehow ramping it down until the power is needed."
Display issues have plagued Apple's 27-in. iMac desktop computers since the new machines debuted Oct. 20. Users have reported cracked screens, a yellow tint in part of the display, irritating flickers and black bands.
The problems prompted one Canadian Web developer to collate the complaints on a specially built Web site, and may have been one of the reasons why Apple slapped a two-week shipping delay on 27-in. iMacs earlier this month.
That Web developer, Scott Pronych of Nova Scotia, who created the Apple iMac (Fall 2009) Issues site to track the problems, has added a "Flickering after Firmware Update" category to the site. As of mid-day Wednesday, Pronych had logged 26 accounts of the firmware failing to fix the flickering problem.
Apple issued the firmware update Monday, saying that it was designed to "address issues that may cause image corruption or the display to flicker" on 27-in. iMacs equipped with the ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards.
But users continue to complain on Apple's support forum that the update was no fix for them.
"Flickering/tearing has been occurring occasionally (once a day maybe), so I downloaded and installed the firmware update, but I'm still experiencing the same problem," said a user identified as "gjdhks999" today on the massive thread dedicated to the flickering issue. That thread lists more than 1,600 messages and has a view count of more than 263,000, making it the most-read of those on the iMac forum.
"I, like everyone else, has verified that the firmware update does NOT fix the issue," added Joe Liu on the same thread. "Strangely enough I seem to be able to recreate the issue by doing the following things: 1. Use computer all day. 2. Turn off overnight. 3. Turn on in morning -- within 90 minutes it's flickering."
Some users, in fact, claimed that the firmware update had made their iMac start flickering. "Ran the firmware update last night and had no flickering," said Patrick Seguin on Tuesday. "Today I have flickering galore."
Others, however, said the update had at least reduced the flickering. One, dubbed "smakus" on the thread, guessed that the firmware update had reduced the clock speed of the ATI's card's graphic processor. "The power supply and video card have drastically reduced in temperature," smakus reported. "The flickering is still present, although it happens once, then immediately goes away, whereas before, it would flicker then steadily escalate, getting worse and worse until the blackouts started. This tells me one thing. They most likely de-clocked the video card to produce less heat, or are somehow ramping it down until the power is needed."
Display issues have plagued Apple's 27-in. iMac desktop computers since the new machines debuted Oct. 20. Users have reported cracked screens, a yellow tint in part of the display, irritating flickers and black bands.
The problems prompted one Canadian Web developer to collate the complaints on a specially built Web site, and may have been one of the reasons why Apple slapped a two-week shipping delay on 27-in. iMacs earlier this month.
That Web developer, Scott Pronych of Nova Scotia, who created the Apple iMac (Fall 2009) Issues site to track the problems, has added a "Flickering after Firmware Update" category to the site. As of mid-day Wednesday, Pronych had logged 26 accounts of the firmware failing to fix the flickering problem.
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