Siebel Systems Universal Application Network (UAN) will get a boost this week with Microsoft scheduled to announce that its BizTalk application integration server will support the UAN platform for application integration. In addition, Siebel this week will take the wraps off the first release of its process library for the UAN architecture, which is designed to take a standards-based, vendor-independent approach to the development of application-independent business processes that can be executed by various integration servers.
Microsoft Corp. said on Sunday a surge in first-quarter sales was not sustainable and forecast tough business conditions ahead. "We're not trying to say that we think the sales results of our first quarter will be sustainable. It is kind of a one-time anomaly," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told Australia's Nine Network. "We're still seeing the business as being reasonably tough, at least compared to, let's say, the good old days, reasonably tough around the globe."
Ballmer also hinted Microsoft was unlikely to partner with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for a second stab at satellite television provider Hughes Electronics Corp. "A lot of our strategic interests have shifted since the deal fell apart the first time," Ballmer, who visited Australia last week to shore up relations with major corporate clients, told Nine's Business Sunday program.
Microsoft must face a lawsuit by the University of California accusing the world's biggest software maker of using patented technology without permission in its Internet Explorer Web browser, a U.S. court ruled yesterday. U.S. District Judge James Zagel rejected Microsoft's bid to dismiss the suit, ruling that too many issues are in dispute.
"What the parties have provided me with are arguments that criticize each other's contentions and limited evidence with which to determine how the browser and operating system work together in identifying and locating an executable application," Zagel wrote.
Microsoft sought dismissal of the case, arguing that Internet Explorer didn't work the way the patent described.
Continuing its years-long growth curve, Microsoft Corp. again posted impressive earnings numbers yesterday, a result largely of its new licensing program and of strong sales of its Windows XP operating system and Xbox gaming console. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, net income more than doubled, to $2.73 billion, or 50 cents a share, from $1.28 billion, or 23 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue hit a record high, climbing 26 percent to $7.75 billion, from $6.13 billion.
The Redmond company's first fiscal quarter continued a trend of year-over-year sales growth each quarter since 1986. The quarter surpassed expectations of analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call, who had a consensus estimate of 43 cents a share on revenue of $7.1 billion.
Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer is telling his employees to focus on the threat that Linux and other free programs available on the Internet pose to sales at the world's largest software maker. The programs are called open source because thousands of developers on the Web can collaborate to tweak and customize the underlying code. They may undercut Ballmer's plan to counter slowing sales of personal computers by selling more software for the server machines that run company networks and Web sites.
"We have told our sales force to really understand that this is kind of job one," Ballmer, 46, said in an interview last week. "People are saying by and large, 'It might be easier for me to move my Unix apps to Linux than to Windows,' although we're pretty close to making that untrue."
In its first year, over 67 million copies of Windows XP have been sold in the OEM and retail channels alone, the company noted. This makes Windows XP the fastest selling version of Windows ever. Microsoft also tried to counter recent reports about slow corporate adoption of WinXP by noting that 63 percent of all WinXP sales are of WinXP Professional, the business version of WinXP. But if this past week's security road show was any indication, corporate customers are well on the way to adopting WinXP. In non-scientific "show of hands" crowd surveys, I was rather surprised by the number of people already using WinXP in the enterprise.
Stoking speculation about how the two companies will work together, Siebel Systems CEO Tom Siebel denied rumors that Microsoft is set to acquire or invest in his business applications company. During a third-quarter earnings call Thursday, Siebel addressed recent analyst reports that suggested Microsoft would soon make a minority investment in Siebel in conjunction with an expanded marketing and development partnership.
A technology pact with Microsoft would make sense, analysts said. JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens said Siebel 7 isn't J2EE-compliant, an issue since J2EE's gained acceptance by enterprise customers. For its part, Siebel disputes Walravens assessment. Nevertheless, if Walravens assessment is common among corporate customers, Siebel could be teaming with Microsoft to ride .Net into enterprises. In addition, Siebel is unlikely to place its architecture bet on J2EE because "rewriting the component in Java would be a time-consuming and very expensive process."
French-owned mobile operator Orange SA will launch a color-screen handset in Britain on October 22 which will be one of the first to use Microsoft software, a source close to Orange said on Friday. A prototype model seen by Reuters allowed a user to view streaming video clips from Ananova, the news service with a computer-generated female news reader which was sold to Orange by Britain's Press Association more than two years ago. Microsoft hopes its dominance in the personal computer market will translate into a strong position in wireless, as more people rely on phones for basic computing capability.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., better known as Panasonic, and Microsoft have jointly developed a new way to store, access, and retrieve digital multimedia stored on recordable optical discs, they announced in Tokyo on Friday. The technology, called HighMAT (high-performance media access technology), spells out a common way to store data such as digital music, photos, and video and also specifies the way in which devices can access this media and is intended to make accessing the data faster and easier for consumers.
At the base of the system is a set directory structure under which images, audio and video are stored. In addition, a metadata file is also stored on the disc providing information about the files and what they contain. Access to media is fast because HighMAT-compatible devices will be able to determine disc contents by accessing the single file rather than reading the disc's directory structure and having to fetch in turn information about each file stored on the disc.
Siebel Systems Chief Executive Tom Siebel denied rumors Thursday that Microsoft is set to either acquire or make an investment in the business applications company. During a third-quarter earnings call, Siebel addressed recent analyst reports that suggested Microsoft would soon make a minority investment in Siebel in conjunction with an expanded marketing and development partnership. The CEO confirmed that the company plans to make an announcement next week about its relationship with the software giant, but added that "it is not Microsoft buying Siebel or Microsoft making an equity investment in Siebel."