American LaFrance, a U.S. maker of fire trucks, ambulances and other emergency vehicles, filed for bankruptcy court protection on Jan. 28, saying a botched software switch last summer involving IBM crippled production and threw its finances into chaos.

In documents filed with a U.S. bankruptcy court in Wilmington, Del., privately held ALF, which was spun off from Daimler AG’s Freightliner unit in late 2005, blamed back-office computer issues associated with that sale for its current problems.

According to documents filed with the bankruptcy court, when ALF switched the new system on in June "serious deficiencies" threw its operations into chaos and crippled production, creating a "liquidity crisis" that ultimately forced it to file for bankruptcy court protection.

Researchers at FaceTime Communications have been trying with mixed results in recent days to take down a do-it-yourself phishing program they discovered online last week. The program is designed to help would-be phishers target those using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, as well as email services offered by the likes of Yahoo and Hotmail.

A new study confirms what a great many people in IT already suspected: Companies of all sizes are vulnerable to costly and damaging email outages because they trust their messaging infrastructure to a single server and do not have an adequate backup and recovery plan in case of a disaster.

ApplicationContinuity.org surveyed 434 IT professionals responsible for email continuity in small (0-99 employees), medium (100-999 employees) and large (1,000 or more employees) enterprises. ResearchCorp.org provided the analysis.

The goal was to determine whether companies are prepared to deliver email continuity–particularly for Microsoft Exchange–and whether companies have a plan in place to secure email communication during a local or sitewide failure or downtime event.

IBM’s ongoing successes are built largely on its global reach, which is reflected in the diversity of talent represented on this list. Here are the people who drive the IBM engine.

Greek police said on Friday they have arrested a man suspected of selling corporate secrets from France’s Dassault Group, including data on weapons systems. "This 58-year-old mathematician was wanted since 2002 after Dassault contacted Greek authorities," a police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.

"He is responsible for causing damages in excess of $361 million to the company and he has sold this corporate data, including information on weapons systems, to about 250 buyers through the Internet," the official said. Police suspect the man of selling the data to buyers in Germany, Italy, France, South Africa, Brazil, as well as countries in Asia and the Balkans.

In this article, we’ll talk about Notes and Domino as it is now with the surprisingly exciting 8.0.1 point release. In the next, we’ll talk about Domino 8.5. Then we’ll move on to even more excitement over the next three and four weeks. There’s a lot to explore.

Read this DominoPower article.

Lenovo announced its intent to jump into the server business by licensing x86 server technology from IBM, helping extend its product offerings to SMBs. Under the agreement, Lenovo will manufacture one- and two-way x86 servers based on IBM’s System x technology, which Lenovo will distribute under its own brand name.

The servers will add to Lenovo’s corporate product lineup that includes ThinkPad laptops and Think workstations. The company also distributes IdeaPad notebooks for the consumer market. This will be a new business for Lenovo as the company does not sell servers outside China, said Ray Gorman, executive director of external communications at Lenovo. Lenovo will start distributing the servers worldwide within the next year.

IBM’s $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal. After examining the acquisition, the European Commission said in a statement that it "would not give rise to competition concerns, since the parties’ combined market share would be moderate."

IBM announced its intention to buy Cognos, based in Ottawa, in November, saying it hoped to combine the Cognos software with IBM’s back-end database products. They hope to close the deal by the end of March, but there are still a few regulatory requirements to be met, including the approval of Canada’s minister of industry.

Venafi, a provider of systems management for encryption software, announced the integration of Venafi Server Encryption Manager with the IBM Public Key Infrastructure Services for z/OS. The new offering enables users of IBM’s flagship mainframe operating system to easily deploy, manage and control digital certificates, significantly reducing the risk of system failure from un- or under-managed encryption while assisting efforts to increase operational efficiency, improve data security and facilitate compliance with new industry regulations.

Cognos President and CEO Rob Ashe talks about competition and product differentiation in a consolidating market.