IT executives say enormous changes are rocking their organizations, from outsourcing to new infrastructure technologies. Yet morale at IT organizations–while often a problem–is not deteriorating.

Solution providers can either follow IT spending or get ahead of what appears to be a major shift toward more applications running on fewer high-performance systems. As the general economy continues to lurch toward what the Federal Reserve Bank hopes is a soft landing that will ward off inflation, the question many folks in the channel are trying to resolve right now is whether this is a period of feast or famine?

Brazilian prosecutors asked a federal judge for permission to file a civil lawsuit against Google, alleging it was withholding user information required for a separate criminal investigation. The prosecutors want Google to pay a $61 million fine and asked that if it refuses to comply with its information request, its Brazilian unit be dissolved. In its request, the federal prosecutor’s office in Sao Paulo alleges that several community pages on Google’s popular social network site, Orkut, have been used to organize criminal activity and promote child pornography.

A U.K. teen pleaded guilty on Wednesday to breaking the Computer Misuse Act by crashing the email server of his former employer. David Lennon, 18, was then sentenced to a two-month curfew by a judge in the Wimbledon Magistrates court. On Wednesday, the judge ruled that Lennon should be subject to a curfew, which means he must stay at home between the hours of 12.30 a.m. and 7a.m. on weekdays, and between 12.30 a.m. and 10 a.m. on weekends. If he breaks this curfew, he risks a more serious sentence.

In a move to bolster its service-oriented architecture tool set, BEA Systems has acquired Flashline. The San Jose company acquired Cleveland-based Flashline for its metadata repository and will incorporate that repository into the BEA AquaLogic family. The Flashline repository will become BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository and will be a complementary product to BEA’s AquaLogic Service Registry offering, which is the company’s UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) registry.

At a time when most of the attention is on dual-core systems, IBM is growing the use of its quad-core technology. The Armonk company is announcing that it is enhancing four entry-level System p servers with a faster Power5+ chip and the Quad-Core Module. IBM introduced the technology in February with the p5 550Q. In addition, the new servers will be running a faster Power5+, which runs at 1.65GHz, rather than 1.5GHz.

Intel is preparing to launch ##"Tulsa," a dual-core Xeon MP processor## and the last of its chips built on its NetBurst architecture. Though it has been shipping Tulsa processors for revenue since earlier in the quarter, the Santa Clara company is expected to officially roll out Tulsa on Aug. 29, according to sources. Intel would not confirm or deny the date. The high-end processor, which is used in servers with four or more chips, is the latest volley in Intel’s ongoing effort to slow down the momentum of rival Advanced Micro Devices, which introduced its latest generation of Opteron processors on Aug. 15.

The future enterprise technology career path will meander in and out of the IT department, according to research presented a Forrester teleconference on Aug. 22. "Enterprise IT is going through a metamorphosis. The career path is not as straightforward as it once might have been. You used to start as a programmer or operator and move up the ladder, and this is no longer the case," said Laurie Orlov, vice president Forrester Research, based in Cambridge, MA.

IBM has become one the software industry’s most generous sugar daddies, ever-ready to buy smaller companies with technology that it covets. The computing giant announced plans in the past three weeks to acquire three software companies: FileNet, MRO Software and Webify. If they all go through, the bill will total more than $2.3 billion. And that’s just the announcements made in the last month. If all recent deals go through, IBM will have shelled out more than $9 billion (all in cash) since 2003 on acquisitions, with the bulk of the money going to 31 software companies. Beyond the benefit of added revenue, the thing that has unleashed IBM’s purse strings is the computing industry’s shift to service-oriented architectures.

IBM said Wednesday it will spend $1.3 billion in cash to acquire Internet Security Systems, which performs network monitoring and analysis services for companies. The deal values ISS at $28 a share, an 8 percent premium to ISS’s close at $26 on Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. If the acquisition is approved by shareholders, the companies expect it to close in the fourth quarter.