SiliconBeat

What is it with those demonic sheep?

IBM rolled out a new line of Unix server systems under the Power 7 nameplate on Monday. Analysts said IBM appears to be positioning the new machines as a counter to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s ambitious plans for selling high-end Sparc servers from newly acquired Sun Microsystems.

Both companies are angling to sell powerful (and expensive) systems that combine hardware and software, engineered and optimized for specific uses such as running complex financial operations. IBM’s press release lays out all their technical specs in detail.

But IBM didn’t stop there. Ellison has been trash-talking IBM for months now, and Big Blue answered back today with a feisty Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ServersForTruth) and a YouTube video that digs at Oracle on several points, including an episode last fall when an industry standards group fined Oracle $10,000 for using the group’s name in ads that didn’t meet its rules.

The video, which IBM says it produced in-house, is a fun spoof of a typically over-heated political campaign spot. Borrowing from former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and her much-discussed ad attacking rival Senate candidate Tom Campbell,  IBM even threw in a cameo appearance by a sheep with glowing red eyes.

You don’t usually think of Hewlett-Packard as a food business. But with food contamination growing as a public concern, HP this week announced a new cloud-based recall service that it’s hoping the food industry will adopt as it searches for ways to address the issue.

HP said Canada’s GS1, a non-profit trade group that works to improve supply chain efficiency, will use HP software, services and infrastructure to operate a system that tracks food products as they are manufactured and distributed to retailers.

The system is intended to let different companies use consistent technical standards to share information — which safety advocates say is often lacking during contamination scares — and to distribute specific recall instructions as needed.

IBM rolled out its own cloud-based approach to food “traceability” earlier this year, built around software developed at its South San Jose research lab. HP reportedly competed with IBM for the Canadian contract.

HP’s announcement didn’t draw as many headlines as some of the other food-safety news that broke this month, including reports that authorities had linked another salmonella outbreak to beef from a Fresno packing plant, and that Congress was debating a bill to give the U.S. Food & Drug Administration more inspection and enforcement power. But HP and IBM both see a big market for technology aimed at this issue.

That $7.4 billion deal for Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems will take a little longer to win Department of Justice approval. It seems anti-trust regulators are still scrutinizing how the sale would affect Sun’s Java software platform, which is widely used by IBM and many other companies.

 Oracle, however, is doing its best to downplay any concerns. The company got out in front of the news with a press release late Friday that quoted one of its attorneys, Dan Wall:

“We’ve had a very good dialogue with the Department of Justice and we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline,” Wall said. “All that’s left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed …”

In slightly more neutral terms, Sun filed a report with the SEC this morning that said the DOJ had issued on Friday a “second request,” or a request for additional information on the deal. The effect of that request is to extend the DOJ review period, Sun explained, adding that it is gathering information to respond to the request.

The Obama administration has been giving a little closer scrutiny to some anti-trust issues, compared with its predecessor, according to some experts. Still, that doesn’t mean the Oracle-Sun deal won’t go through.

Wall said in his statement that the Java issue “is never going to get in the way of the deal. I fully expect that the investigation will end soon and not delay the closing of the deal this summer.”

It’s a sunny day in Silicon Valley, and still we can’t help thinking about clouds. Maybe it’s because in recent days, some big tech companies have been talking up their efforts in the business of cloud computing.

Cloud computing, in which software and services are accessed from a remote data center “cloud,” has been the focus of much industry hype. But all that talk has left many businesses uncertain about how to use the technology, as IDC analyst Frank Gens said in a recent statement. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard clearly see this as an opportunity.

HP, which already sells hardware and software for data centers, rolled out a new package of consulting services earlier this week, including workshops and “road maps” of recommendations on design, testing and security for businesses considering the use of cloud-based services or building their own clouds for internal use.

IBM, meanwhile, announced its own portfolio of new cloud products and services just last week — including software and services that customers can access from IBM’s data centers, services based on internal clouds that IBM can build and run for its clients, and systems of hardware and software designed to work together.

Even Larry Ellison got into the discussion during Oracle’s quarterly earnings call this week, as he told analysts that Oracle is preparing to make more of its business software available on a subscription basis, to compete with companies like Salesforce.com. Ellison said Oracle will host the software on its own data centers or install it on a client’s data center, with Oracle operating it as a service.

One analyst said that sounded like Ellison was talking about cloud computing, which the Oracle CEO has famously derided in the past. Ellison did not disagree.

And if that’s not enough cloud news, some top execs from HP, Amazon, Sun and other companies were trading ideas at the GigaOM Network’s Structure 09 conference in San Francisco this week. The Register had an interesting account .

The New York Times is reporting on its tech blog that Sun Microsystems has cancelled a long-running, but star-crossed, effort to develop a high-performance computer chip that the company once considered a key element of its turnaround strategy.

The report comes just weeks before Sun’s stockholders are scheduled to vote on a deal for the company to be acquired by Oracle, the business software giant, for $7.4 billion. A Sun spokeswoman declined comment on the report, which the Times attributed to unnamed sources.

Sun has been working on the chip, code-named “Rock,” for more than five years. The company is better known for making servers and software, although it’s had some success in recent years with other high-performance chips of its own design.

But much of the computer server industry, meanwhile, has shifted to machines built with lower-cost commodity chips from companies like Intel and AMD. Sun was hoping the Rock would help it move ahead at the high-performance end of the market, where it competes with bigger rivals such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

The Rock had 16 processor cores and was designed for high-end servers that would be used to crunch huge amounts of data quickly. But it reportedly suffered from development glitches that forced Sun to postpone its debut from 2008 to later this year.

Let’s see. An  historic presidential election is coming to a climax with a surge of voters causing long lines at polling places. The nation, even the world, shivers with anticipation over the results. Good time to release significant pieces of personnel news?

That’s what Apple did this morning by posting a press release announcing the hiring of an ex-IBM vice president, Mark Papermaster, to head up its devices hardware engineering division. The news had actually been reported last week by CNet, via a court filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in which IBM claimed that Papermaster would be working closely with Apple CEO Steve Jobs in what IBM believes is Read the rest of this entry »