Financial
HP
IBM
iSeries
Opinion
RFID
Software
Sun

Financial

Dell to restate 2003-2007 financials amid accounting scandal
Dell reported that it will restate the company's financial statements going back to fiscal 2003 due to accounting fraud perpetrated by senior management. According to a statement released by the company, senior management of Dell regularly falsified quarterly returns from 2003 through 2006 to create the appearance that the company had met sales targets. The disclosure comes after a year-long internal investigation into accounting irregularities that involved more than 375 professionals deployed across all the company's major regions. The investigation identified evidence that certain adjustments appear to have been motivated by the objective of attaining financial targets. Dell said that the amounts the company is restating vary by quarter and year, and that it expects the biggest restatements to come in the first quarter of 2003 and second quarter of 2004, where reductions should be 10 percent to 13 percent. In a number of other quarters, the reduction is expected to change 5 percent or less.  All told, the company expects the cumulative change to net income for the restatement period will be a reduction of between $50 million and $150 million. While Dell did not comment specifically on the fate of the perpetrators of the fraud, the company said: "Personnel actions, including terminations, reassignments, reprimands, increased supervision, training and financial penalties - have been or will be taken." A separate SEC probe into the matter is ongoing and the company noted there is no assurance that there will not be additional issues arising from that investigation.
Visit www.dell.com.


Diebold rebrands evoting business, revises forecasts
Diebold has re-branded its electronic voting subsidiary as "Premier Election Solutions" after attempts to offload the business failed. The firm also had to rein in its performance predictions, as uncertainty about the security of the machines starts to bite. The firm said: "Efforts to sell this company... have proven unsuccessful due in part to the rapidly evolving political uncertainties and controversies surrounding state and jurisdiction purchases of electronic voting systems." It also noted that large orders it was expecting in 2007 have moved into "2008 and beyond," and so needs to reduce its full year revenue forecast by around $120m. That is more than half: the business had expected to report revenue of up to $215m for the period. The news follows California's decision to decertify the voting machines made by the four biggest vendors, including Diebold.
Visit www.diebold.com.
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HP

HP Financial reports 12% increase in year/year revenues
HP announced results for its fiscal third quarter ended July 31, 2007, with net revenue of $25.4 billion, representing growth of 16% year over year, or 12% when adjusted for the effects of currency.  HP Financial Services (HPFS) reported revenue of $582 million, up from $519 million or 12% year over year. Financing volume and net portfolio assets increased 7% and 8%, respectively, over the prior-year period. Operating margin was 6.7% of revenue, comparable to the same period last year.
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IBM

IBM prepares to launch DB2 Web Query for System i
IBM announced pricing and availability details for its DB2 Web Query for System i business intelligence product. Users will be able to get started with the new product, which is based on technology developed by Information Builders, in September for as little as $1,600. IBM also detailed the OLAP, Active Reports, and Developer Workbench add-ons that expand the product's functionality, and made its best case for keeping business intelligence workloads on the venerable platform. There are many questions about the new DB2 Web Query for System i product, and IBM has tried its best to answer them, with this FAQ (in PDF format). IBM is putting together a Redbook, titled "Getting started with DB2 Web Query for System i," to introduce users to DB2 Web Query. IBM says the Redbook will become available on September 14 (the product's GA date) and will be viewable at www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247214.html.


New IBM Lotus Expeditor software mobilizes mashups
IBM announced new technology that is designed to arm professionals with the ability to combine information from different sources to create just-in-time applications needed to help close a big deal, deliver an important presentation or just get through the weather. Key to employee productivity, these situational applications or "mashups" blend Web services like news feeds, weather reports, maps or traffic conditions, with enterprise content and services from databases, spread sheets and documents, helping to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific, timely business needs. IBM Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1 software is a standards-based managed client that can extend mashups in the enterprise to a wide variety of desktop, laptop, and mobile devices on the market, helping to give customers immediate access to critical business information such as insurance and expense forms, inventory data and mobile customer relationship management (CRM). Using the next generation of the Web, or Web 2.0, IBM's Lotus Expeditor gives users the ability to be productive both on the road and on their desktops. For developers, Lotus Expeditor is designed to provide an easy way to create integrated mashups independent of the implementation technology on the client, delivering new capabilities such as aggregation of both browser-based as well as non-browser applications in mashups, helping to reduce the need to go back and forth between different applications on the desktop.
Visit www.ibm.com.

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iSeries

INFINITE Software announces new version of Infinite iSeries
INFINITE Software Corporation announced it has released its latest version of its popular Infinite iSeries product. Version 4.00.05 provides greatly expanded support for complex date and time functions; support for basing pointers and pointer arithmetic; enhanced ability to handle large files, large database files, larger database keys, support for Oracle 10 and the newly released 11G. It also provides improved and extended support for embedded SQL and enhanced performance for embedded SQL and ODBC performance. The Web components of the Infinite iSeries Suite now include the integration of Click Once technology that replaces the previous Rich Client technology. This provides better styles inheritance and application management behavior, an expanded SOA implementation based on powerful, yet easy-to-use wizards and dynamic visibility. The new release also provides expanded BI capabilities including more powerful scheduling.
Visit www.infinitesoftware.com.
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Opinion

‘Green IT doesn’t work if users see red’ says Symbio Technologies
The concept of “green” computing will not be widely accepted if IT administrators and desktop users have to pay too big a price to save money and the environment say Gideon Romm and Roger Del Russo, co-founders of stateless computing leader Symbio Technologies, a pioneer and innovator in the greening of IT. What’s more, Romm and Del Russo readily admit that achieving economic and ecological benefits for businesses was not a priority in their original business plan. The Symbio solution – in use around the world – consists of small, inexpensive diskless thin clients linked to the server by the Symbiont boot appliance. “This approach creates an environmentally-friendly, cost-effective solution that represents the future of computing,” said Del Russo, noting that “Symbio provides a data-secure environment with desktop devices that have no moving parts to break, do not make noise or create heat and use less energy running than PC’s do when turned off (and plugged in). In a nutshell,” he said, “Symbio enables excellence. We save energy, boost an organization’s economic outlook, and help the environment while letting everyone in the enterprise work on all the same applications and at the same speeds as their wasteful, old-fashioned friends laboring on costly, energy-consuming and non-secure PC’s.” 
Visit www.symbio-technologies.com.
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RFID

Inside track on the prosperous business of active RFID
In January 2006, Aberdeen Group reported that, whereas only 8% of manufacturers had recently adopted active RFID, a remarkable 48% planned to adopt it. Most of those were jumping straight to active RFID without experience of passive RFID. IDTechEx reported that the percentage of RFID expenditure related to active was about to rise from about 15% to 25%. On cue, 2007 has seen huge orders for active RFID. Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), a form of active RFID, have been installed in 100 hospitals in the last year. VDC forecasts 40% yearly growth in RTLS to 2010 and IDTechEx sees active RFID as a whole reaching $7.2 billion in 2017, partly due to a booming RTLS sector. Because active RFID is now so important as a market and prosperous for participants, IDTechEx has a major stream on the subject at its conference “RFID Europe” in Cambridge UK on 18-19 September.
Visit www.idtechex.com/RFIDeurope.
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Software

Add On Systems partners with ObjectFX for transportation mapping and analysis features
ObjectFX Corporation, a leader in delivering dynamic geospatial solutions, announced that Add On Systems, Inc. will offer the ObjectFX FleetScape system as part of its suite of transportation monitoring products and services. Using data from a trucking company’s existing business systems, in combination with vehicle location data from GPS and other geo-positioning systems, the FleetScape solution provides a dynamic and highly customizable map display and console showing the location and up-to-the-minute status of items of interest such as trucks, trailers, containers, warehouses, fuel stops, repair facilities and drop yards, as well as a variety of analytics that help companies monitor and improve their operations. Typical analytic views available through FleetScape’s Web-based interface include visually highlighting regions with high or low revenue potential and showing areas with excess unused capacity. Users can perform a number of customizations to the system to address their own unique business needs.
Visit www.objectfx.com or www.addonsystems.com.
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Sun

Sun advances work on novel chip interconnect
Sun Microsystems announced it has solved one of the key problems of its Proximity technology. The novel chip interconnect someday could enable a new level of ultra-dense, high speed computer and communications systems. Much more work remains before the computer maker is ready to talk about products based on its technology. However, Proximity holds promise for becoming an alternative to optical communications at the board level. Sun recently demonstrated a four-port, 10 Gbit/second Ethernet switch based on a new package that uses Proximity to link seven chips in a multi-chip module. The system itself is not novel because chip makers build single 10 Gbit Ethernet chips today supporting up to 24 ports. What the prototype demonstrates is that Sun has found a low-cost way to make and align the capacitive coupling pads that send signals between chips at a Gbit/second. That has been one of the big hurdles in bringing the Proximity technology to market.
Visit www.sun.com.
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