HP
iSeries
Legal
MACs
Recovery
RFID
Sun
Unified Communications
VAR

HP

Brazil buys more PCs than TVs, bolstering Hewlett-Packard
Brazil ranked as the fifth-largest PC market last year as bank credit offers, installment plans and growing prosperity fueled purchases, especially among low-income consumers. The shift is a boon to HP and Dell Inc., the world's top PC makers. A tax break for PC makers has allowed them to cut prices and compete with unregulated sellers whose so-called gray-market machines dominated the market. Demand in Brazil is helping PC makers expand revenue as U.S. spending slows. Total Brazilian PC shipments rose 38 percent to 10.7 million units last year, according to research firm IDC. That marked the first time that shoppers bought more PCs than television sets in the country. Brazil's PC market, which ranked seventh in 2006, is poised to take third place by 2010, behind the U.S. and China. Japan and the U.K. are now third and fourth, IDC said. The opportunity to win consumers and business customers is prompting HP, Dell and IBM to expand operations in the country. HP, which entered Brazil in 1967, has 8,000 employees in sales, research, services and manufacturing at four factories there.
Visit www.hp.com.
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iSeries

DB Technology cuts the paper chase
Grenada Lakes Medical Center faced a quandary several years ago when it was getting ready to upgrade its old AS/400 infrastructure with new hardware. The hospital had thousands of accounts payable transactions sitting on the old machine and no easy way to move them over. But a solution was found in Report Automation System from DB Technology, which allowed Grenada Lakes to efficiently mine the AP data into the RAS repository, where it is safely maintained. Running on Windows servers and PCs, RAS helps capture data from a variety of systems, including common hospital systems from Cerner, Epic Systems, Lawson Software, McKesson, MEDITECH, Oracle PeopleSoft, QuadraMed and Siemens. The software works by intercepting the print data stream, which it then converts into its own format and categorizes in the RAS repository. As a result of implementing RAS (and its counterparts, RASi for imaging and scanning, and RAS eForms for electronic forms), organizations can expect to reduce their paper use, improve financial reporting, shorten accounting cycles and comply with regulations like HIPAA. DB Technology has more than 50 customers who are AS/400 shops (or iSeries, i5, System i, or i-based Power Systems servers users, as the case may be).
Visit www.dbtech.com.
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Legal

U.S. firms turn to EU for antitrust complaints
With a key decision expected soon in a European Commission investigation of Intel, the world's largest maker of computer chips, some U.S. critics of Brussels are sharpening a long-running complaint: they say that in a series of disputes involving big U.S. companies, the European antitrust authorities have been too ready to act on complaints from runners-up, particularly American ones like Advanced Micro Devices, which accuses Intel of anti-competitive behavior. "It's an interesting thing why most of the complainants in these dominance cases in Europe happen to be American," said C. Boyden Gray, a U.S. special envoy for European Union affairs, at a recent panel discussion on antitrust law. "That's where we do see some difficulty" with the European regulatory approach, Gray said, underlining his preference for less interventionist policies. Advanced Micro Devices is trying to narrow the huge gap between it and Intel in the global market for computer chips, announcing that it planned to sell a new device, called Puma, for notebook computers, several weeks ahead of an expected update of Intel's Centrino chip set. A ruling against Intel could aggravate a simmering feud between Europe and the United States over whether entrenched and dominant companies should be allowed to use the same business tactics as other companies, or face the kinds of restrictions the EU placed on Microsoft in 2004.
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Moves, adds & changes

Cipione joins BellTower Technologies Board
BellTower Technologies LLC, provider of emergency notification services under the Instant Recall brand (for food and product recalls) and the RedPhone brand (for government and university crisis management and business continuity and disaster recovery), announced that Claymon A. Cipione has joined its Board of Advisors. Cipione brings a lifetime of development and operational experience to the board of BellTower Technologies. Most recently, Cipione was Corporate VP and CIO of AMD, a global provider of innovative processing solutions in the computing, graphics and consumer electronics markets. Prior to that, Cipione co-founded Newisys, a server and storage company based in Austin, TX (later acquired by Sanmina-SCI in 2003). He was also senior vice president of software development at America Online (AOL), where he led the company's world-class team of 800 software developers whose work supports the communication needs of its 35+ million users. He spent 25 years at IBM where his last assignment was the creation of AIX and the RS6000.
Visit www.belltowertech.com.
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Recovery

Storix, Inc. announces full-system backup and adaptable system recovery support
Storix, Inc. announced its SBAdmin v 6.1 now supports IBM’s System i product line. In addition to daily backup management, System i users now have unprecedented Adaptable System Recovery (ASR) capabilities designed to easily reconfigure systems to their previous state regardless of whether the new hardware is identical to previous devices.  Not limited to unplanned disaster recovery capabilities, ASR also simplifies planned backup activities for IT administrators. ASR enables users to easily migrate configuration information during hardware upgrades and to provision groups of new systems by creating a master backup for cloning multiple systems. Provisioning can also be done remotely for systems that span multiple locations.
Visit www.storix.com/systemi.
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RFID

Vibrant RFID markets
The global RFID market continues its rapid growth as record orders up to $0.5 billion each are serviced. This year demand for RFID is on target for $5.3 billion globally as it powers its way to $27 billion in 2018. Recent substantial additions to the global RFID orderbook include A$350 million from the State of Melbourne to boost its public transport RFID card scheme and a forecast by transport analysts that the national RFID card for transport being progressed in the UK will cost $2 billion. Indeed, much is now happening in Europe, although it is the US and China that share the top slot as RFID spenders at present. For example, also in the UK, Raytheon partnered with Serco, Accenture, Detica, QinetiQ, CapGemini and Steria has received an additional $184 million for the infrastructure of the UK RFID e-passport scheme.  US analyst Baird has noted that retailer Metro in Germany has taken leadership in introducing RFID into general retailing now that the Wal-Mart schemes have slowed. However, it is in apparel that we see a huge surge across the world and this is covering everything from tracking the bolts of cloth in the factories to pallets, cases and above all individual items of clothing.
Visit www.idtechex.com.
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Sun

New Sun code transforms x86 servers into storage arrays
Sun Microsystems Inc. is unveiling open-source software that can repurpose any OpenSolaris-based x86 server into a block-based storage device capable of emulating the physical characteristics of a storage array. Sun contributed the new code, dubbed Comstar, or common multiprotocol SCSI target, to its OpenSolaris.org open-source community last month. Comstar promises to cut enterprise storage management costs by allowing developers to quickly add new data-transport protocols that can talk to various devices in a network.  According to Sun, the software simplifies the process of managing a SCSI target subsystem by creating independent modules that enable storage devices such as tape and disk drives to easily connect to transport protocols like Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI, iSER and SAS. The software also offers concurrent access to logical unit numbers (LUN) so users can create a singular storage management interface for the new storage devices. Developers can also use Comstar to simplify LUN masking and mapping functions, execute multiple parallel transfers via SCSI commands, and perform multipathing across various data-transport protocols.
Visit www.sun.com.
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Unified Communications

Sagem-Interstar enhances IBM’s System i Unified Communications platforms
Sagem-Interstar announced that a new Linux version of its award-winning XMediusFAX T.38 Fax over IP (FoIP) server technology is globally available for integration with the IBM System i (formerly AS/400 and iSeries) platform and Unified Communications environments provided by Nortel and 3Com. The integration of Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX FoIP technology on IBM System i Unified Communications platforms from Nortel and 3Com will empower users with robust and secure desktop faxing capabilities. SMB or large-enterprise users will be able to easily send and receive faxes directly from their Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange email clients. XMediusFAX also integrates with enterprise applications such as SAP, Siebel and Oracle to enable automated faxing. Faxes are easier to track, manage and archive, facilitating productivity boosts, improved collaboration and audit trails for regulatory compliance.
Visit www.faxserver.com.
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VAR

ParAccel and Continental Resources form VAR relationship
ParAccel, Inc., provider of the ParAccel Analytic Database, a high-speed, low-effort, columnar database management system, announced a value-added-reseller (VAR) agreement with Continental Resources, Inc. (CRI), one of the nation’s most established and respected technology solution providers. Under the terms of the partnership, CRI will provide configuration, testing, integration and fulfillment services to ParAccel Analytic Database customers so they can receive high performance analytic appliances that are ready to Load and Go and include the trust, convenience and investment protection of their standard operating hardware. For more than 45 years, CRI has provided existing environment analysis for IT organizations with a focus towards future scalability, redundancy, fault-tolerance, disaster recovery and maintainability of mission critical applications. Whether it's Sun SPARC, Intel, or AMD architectures running on Solaris, Linux, or Windows operating systems, CRI strives to help drive down support costs; reduce overhead, integration, and testing costs; and provide customers with standardized solutions for long-term stability.
Visit www.paraccel.com or www.conres.com.
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