IBM announced plans to deliver a breakthrough IBM mainframe specialty engine that will reinforce the System z9 as a trusted data platform. The System z9 Integrated Information Processor is a specialty engine that will run eligible database workloads and is designed to help free up general computing capacity and lower software costs for select workloads such as business intelligence, ERP, and CRM on the mainframe.

German software maker SAP said it had a more optimistic outlook than was expected for the coming year in both profitability and licensing, shooting its shares up by more than 9 percent. Analysts originally predicted an increase in SAP’s licensing sales of 13 percent, however, the company said it would increase licensing by up to 4 percent more than was predicted, for an increase of 15 to 17 percent.

It looks like the jazz is back in the Lotus biz. This Lotusphere rocked! Everyone we talked to was pumped, excited, and optimistic. After a bunch of years of downer reports coming from Lotusphere, it’s really good to see the mojo on the move. In this short trip report, we summarize some of the more interesting announcements.

Read this DominoPower article.

ChoicePoint, the data broker that set off a national debate after disclosing a data breach early in 2005, will pay US$15 million in fines and other penalties for lax security standards, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday. ChoicePoint’s $10 million fine is the largest civil fine in the FTC’s history. Under a settlement with the FTC, the Georgia company will also set up a $5 million fund to aid victims of identity theft that resulted from the data breach, and the company has agreed to implement new security measures and have an independent auditor review its security every other year until 2026.

GSX Groupware Solutions, a tools vendor for IBM Lotus Domino administrators, announced the latest extensions to its product line. New versions of both GSX Monitor and GSX Server Guard were unveiled at Lotusphere this year. GSX Monitor is a Lotus Domino server-monitoring tool that is easy to install and use. With no code to install on servers, it will notify the administrator for all kinds of problems, such as downed Lotus Domino, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, IBM Lotus Sametime, Web servers/clusters/network, non-responsive tasks, such as HTTP, LDAP, and BES, replication of key databases, mail problems, such as pending and dead mail or routing issues, and Log file errors. GSX Server Guard 6 introduces improved scheduling for Automatic Rebooting, freeing up accumulated lost memory due to memory leaks and dead processes, and enhanced problem detection and corrective actions that automatically detect problems and take actions without any manual intervention.

Teamstudio, provider of software integrity solutions for Lotus Notes, offers the latest update to its Teamstudio Migration Filters, enabling Lotus Notes organizations to identify issues and audit database designs for a trouble-free migration process before they become problems in the production environment. To catch conflicts that arise with applications written under older Notes versions, Teamstudio Migration Filters search Notes R4.x/R5.x and R6.x designs for compliance to Notes/Domino 7. This new set of filters is used with Teamstudio Analyzer, a code auditing and documentation tool to help organizations establish a best practices development environment.

Teamstudio, provider of software integrity solutions for Lotus Notes, introduces Teamstudio Policy Manager, a unique product that enables organizations to maximize the value of their software assets by managing massive ACL changes and automatically enforcing ACL policies for increased security and control. Many organizations that have mission critical Lotus Notes applications understand the enormous risks and costs associated with migrating away from Lotus Notes, and now must improve their security practices to bring their Notes environments in line with other platforms. Teamstudio Policy Manager helps to secure an organization’s software assets enabling it to meet compliance standards and receive full value from its Lotus Notes/Domino infrastructure.

Identity theft continues to plague consumers, topping the list of fraud complaints reported to the Federal Trade Commission last year. Consumers filed more than 255,000 identity theft reports to the FTC in 2005, accounting for more than a third of all complaints, the agency said Wednesday. Bogus Internet auctions, foreign money offers, catalog sales and sweepstakes rounded out the top five fraud categories. Also on the list were fake Internet and telephone services.

BrightCom announced the release of an instant on, business quality integrated video solution for Lotus Sametime users. As Lotus rolls out their next exciting generation of their Sametime product at their Lotusphere 2006 show, BrightCom extends it with a low cost, simple deployment solution for high end video. Simply place a BrightCom ClearView card into your Windows PC and click on your Sametime link as you normally would to launch a business quality audio/video meeting. This high end video solution can support up to 5 way audio and video conversations.

Technology giants Google, Lenovo Group, and Sun Microsystems are funding a nonprofit effort to combat something called "badware," a new term for all of the nasty spyware and computer viruses that users never wanted installed on their computers. The Stop Badware Coalition launched a StopBadware.org Web site, which will be modeled on the Consumer Reports WebWatch site, and will be run by staff of about 12, operating out of two prominent university departments: Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and University of Oxford’s Internet Institute in the U.K. The site will compile a list of companies that stick computers with annoying pop-ups, spyware, and other malicious code and will give users a central place to get information on this growing problem.