Hewlett-Packard is supposed to be this close to buying Electronic Data Systems for somewhere in the heady neighborhood of $12 billion-$13 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, a pretty premium over its $9.5 billion market cap Friday. The paper thinks there could be an announcement on Tuesday. Buying the consultant is meant to help HP compete on the services side against rival IBM.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Building on its November 2007 preview, Oracle previewed additional planned feature enhancements of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Based on feedback resulting from close cooperation with customers testing in real-world environments, the latest preview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes planned features intended to provide Java developers with a unified design and development experience based on new open standards for Java, SOA, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Security and to help reduce the time, effort and cost of developing Rich Enterprise, Web and mobile applications.

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Likewise, pretty much the de facto standard in cross-platform authentication these days, has added Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle's version of Red Hat, to the list of some 110 Linux, Unix and Mac platforms that it supports on a Microsoft network using Active Directory. Oracle Linux now claims 2,000 customers give or take.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

Since the launch of the Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) last April, Oracle's partner ecosystem has embraced Oracle's pre-built integration products and stepped forward to deploy and extend them for specific customers. The combination of pre-built integration products from Oracle and expert services from partners provides return-on-investment and better business value by helping customers to reduce the cost and risk associated with typical custom, one-off integrations.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

Oracle, the center of much Wall Street anticipation this week, came in $100 million and change shy of expectations on the revenue front but gave the punters the 30% increase in profits they expected. It took a nasty 7% hit and passed the tailspin on to the rest of tech as a skittish Wall Street worried about the fate of spending. CFO Safra Catz said that Oracle had some difficulty closing deals towards the end of the quarter, which finished February 29 - some deals took longer, some simply didn't close. She blamed it on customer caution.

Oracle is throwing its Clusterware software at its paying Unbreakable Linux support customers for free. Unbreakable Linux being Oracle's controversial year-old version of Red Hat, which it now claims has won 2,000 customers. Previously only part of Oracle's Real Applications Clusters (RAC) widgetry, Clusterware is portable cluster software that groups together individual servers so they can cooperate as a single system.

Oracle announced that Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers at the Basic and Premier support levels can download and deploy Oracle Clusterware at no additional license fee or support cost. Oracle Clusterware is portable cluster software that groups together individual servers so they can cooperate as a single system. A fundamental component of Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Clusterware can operate independently and helps ensure the protection of an application, Oracle or third-party.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Oracle zeroed in on Salesforce.com the other day when it rolled out the latest version of Siebel's rechristened on-demand software, now called Oracle CRM On Demand 15 and targeted up to run on Blackberries with fashionable social networking and collaboration capabilities to help users find the right guy in their organization to help them close a sale.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

Doesn't Oracle have its own virtualization scheme? Isn't it Xen? Well, Oracle's soon-to-be takeover, BEA - the feds just okayed the merger - said Wednesday that it had teamed with VMware to deliver Java virtualization to the enterprise.

and Service Division that will include the four-year-old start-up EMC just agreed to buy off of him. EMC is paying cash for the Seattle-based Pi Corporation and its 100 engineers. EMC didn?t say how much but Pi was founded using Warburg-Pincus ($$$) money and EMC says the acquisition will likely dilute its EPS this year by a penny.

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

Remember how Oracle got ticked off that Red Hat wound up buying JBoss? And remember how Oracle poached Red Hat's operating system to sell as Oracle's own? Well, what goes around comes around. Red Hat is now setting out to attack Oracle through its pending takeover of BEA. Seems Red Hat has this open source project called BlackTie that it's organizing so it can migrate and replace legacy BEA Tuxedo transaction processor installations. Red Hat says it'll be Tuxedo-compatible, support Tuxedo APIs, run high-speed Tuxedo applications and before you know it turn into a commercial Red Hat product.

The Silicon Valley Watcher blog claims to have it on good authority that that shrine to software-as-a-service Salesforce.com has approached Oracle looking to get bought for $75 a share, something like $9 billion, roughly a 50% premium. And if such a deal were done, it foresees Salesforce CEO and erstwhile Larry Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff as Ellison's natural successor.

Then suddenly at the beginning of December - after canceling a meeting at Icahn's offices in New York - BEA and Oracle are each marking up a draft merger agreement without any sweetened price being agreed - or even extended - and then without so much as a by your leave Icahn calls BEA advisor Goldman Sachs on January 11 with the Eureka price and by January 16 Oracle and BEA were executing a definitive agreement.

Global enterprise software company Oracle said it has bagged an order from Idea Cellular to implement Siebel CRM applications, which will address problems arising of the telco's extensive channel and dealer network and meet its fast-expanding customer base. Idea's strategic outsourcing partner -- IBM -- would undertake the implementation process across all channels and customer facing departments in 11 existing and two new circles of operations, Oracle said in a statement here.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97. This latest release provides an open platform for customers to choose hardware, operating systems and database technologies based on their unique IT strategies and business requirements. Relying on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Tools 8.97, customers may also adopt current advancements in Oracle Enterprise Linux and many components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

'It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software,' said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as vice president of marketing, responsible for all marketing activity. Whatcott arrived from Adobe, where he led marketing for LiveCycle and Flex.

Remember two odd years ago when Oracle went and bought InnoDB, the source of MySQL's crucial storage engine, and there for a heart-stopping minute or two it looked like MySQL was toast? Well, MySQL founder Monty Widenius says the company is moving along toward replacing its own MyISAM default storage engine with a new one called Maria after one of his children.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Our very favorite reaction to the Sun-MySQL acquisition came from industry pundit John Dvorak who calls it 'perhaps the worst single event I have ever witnessed in the history of tech mergers and acquisitions.' He says that given Sun's abominable track record with acquisitions and the fact that Sun can't afford to spend a billion dollars on a company with $60 million in revenue coupled the fact that MySQL is 'the most competitive and biggest threat to Oracle,' he's close to being convinced that Sun is acting as a 'stooge' for Oracle, which wants it dead. The MySQL code can be resuscitated from a fork.

Oracle announced that Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is using Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing on an Oracle enterprise grid to power the largest smart meter initiative in the United States to date, helping businesses and households become more energy-efficient and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Utilities Network Management System Release 1.8.0, an integrated suite of real-time operations technology applications designed to improve network reliability, maximize asset utilization, reduce outage durations and increase customer satisfaction.

It said this morning that it had reached a compromise price with BEA and that the acquisition would go through after all, having been resisted by BEA, demanded by BEA's biggest stockholder, the dangerous Carl Icahn, and walked away from by Oracle. Oracle is going to pay $19.375 a share, less than the $21 that BEA wanted but more than the $17 it put on the table back in October. That works out to $8.5 billion, less the $1.3 billion that BEA has in the bank, as Oracle pointed out, for a grand total of $7.2 billion cash to be paid for by a combination of cash on hand and a short-term loan. Oracle has $8.4 billion in the bank so the financing's no problem. Its original bid valued BEA at roughly $6.66 billion.

Sun, Oracle's sometimes best friend, turned into an Oracle competitor this morning when it said it was buying MySQL, the open source database that's part of the famous LAMP stack. It's paying a billion dollars. MySQL was supposed to go public this year but picked the easier monetization route. Sanford C. Bernstein estimates MySQL?s financial position at breakeven on $60 million-$80 million on trailing 12-month revenues although over 100 million copies of the database have been downloaded. Sun is paying $800 million cash for MySQL's stock and assuming about $200 million in options. But Sun has been known to overpay for acquisitions before. Remember its fatal $2 billion Cobalt Networks deal?

With BEA gone to Oracle, the speculators have turned to TIBCO Software, figuring the smaller middleware company is likely to be swallowed by some bigger fish. Its stock shot up better than 11% on the news that Oracle was buying BEA. Its market cap is $1.4 billion.