Economic crisis slams technology sector
Any doubts that the financial crisis and troubled economy would hit the technology sector are dismissed. This week has been bad for Internet companies, and a growing number of analysts are saying there will be almost no company in the tech sector immune to problems, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday. UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter lowered third-quarter estimates on Google, Yahoo and eBay, whose shares dropped 2.7%, 8.1% and 6.2% respectively. Amazon.com dropped by 8.2%.
Schachter said in a report that the economy would affect both consumer spending and online advertising. Things have been especially rough this week on Yahoo, whose shares have lost 19% of their value and were trading at $12.37 this morning -- a price not seen since 2003.
There have also been layoffs across the technology sector. The New York Times reported that
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Micron Technology closed part of a factory it shares with Intel, laying off 3,000 workers. And Hewlett-Packard slashed thousands of jobs across Europe this week after cutting 25,000 in the United States.
Oracle files more charges against SAP
The Oracle-SAP-TomorrowNow lawsuit is getting uglier, SearchSAP.com reports. Oracle this week accused SAP of planning to extend its illegal third-party support to Oracle's E-Business Suite and its Hyperion and Retek acquisitions, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. As you'll recall, the case began in 2007, when Oracle accused TomorrowNow, a third-party SAP subsidiary, of illegally downloading and copying software and support materials from Oracle's password-protected systems.
IBM revs Power Systems servers, software
IBM this week provided details on its soon-to-be-released Power Systems for midrange customers. IBM touts its new Power offerings' ability to scale as companies grow, enable servers to process more workload with fewer cores and, potentially, to save companies money on licensing.
The Power Systems will run either AIX or System I operating system. And the new Power 570 midrange server includes new processor cards that double the number of cores in the same system footprint as other comparable systems. It begins at four cores and can be upgraded to a full 32-core single-system image (32-core SMP), according to SearchDataCenter.com.
Check out yesterday's IT channel news briefs.