IBM announced the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of free desktop applications based on the OpenOffice.org open-source product. Separately, on Monday afternoon, Yahoo said that it paid $350 million to acquire Zimbra, a start-up that developed a Web-based e-mail and collaboration package comparable with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

Meanwhile, Google on Monday introduced Google Presentations, an online version of Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation application that complements Google’s Web-hosted document editor and spreadsheet.

In response to Big Blue’s release of the Office-competitive Lotus Symphony, Microsoft’s PR team blanketed journalists with a solicitation to get Microsoft’s side of the story. Here’s what Microsoft’s director for Microsft Office Jacob Jaffe had to say.

Visto Corporation, global provider of mobile email, announced a marketing and enablement relationship with IBM that will leverage IBM Lotus Notes Traveler and help enable delivery of Visto’s Mobile for IBM Lotus Domino to millions of IBM Lotus Notes users.

Under the terms of the agreement, Visto and IBM will collaborate on the enablement and marketing of a connector for Visto Mobile for Lotus Domino, providing existing and new Lotus Domino customers with mobile access to email, calendar appointments, contacts and other data pushed directly to their mobile phones.

Avalon Business Systems, developer of mail reduction utilities for use with Lotus Notes mail systems, announced the addition of a compression management feature to its ReduceMail Pro Attach product. ReduceMail Pro Attach helps reduce excessive email through a centralized attachment consolidation process.

In a typical Notes email environment, many attachments are not compressed. Old email attachments, and any new ones coming in from the Internet are not compressed and, typically, no attachments are compressed with the optional LZ-1 method. This feature in ReduceMail Pro Attach compresses all attachments resulting in significant disk space savings with no service changes at all for the end user.

The research on silent data corruption has mainly been theoretical or anecdotal, not statistical. But now, finally, some statistics are in. And the numbers are worse than you could imagine.

IBM announced it has completed its acquisition of Princeton Softech Inc., a privately held company based in Princeton, New Jersey. IBM announced an agreement to acquire Princeton Softech on August 3, 2007. Princeton Softech’s operations will be integrated into IBM’s Information Management software business.

The acquisition of Princeton Softech furthers IBM’s global Information on Demand initiative, which is aimed at the growing market opportunity around helping clients use information as a competitive and strategic business asset. Princeton Softech is a leading provider of data archiving, test data management, data privacy and data classification and discovery software. These offerings enable customers to overcome information management challenges and improve database performance by segregating historical data from current data and storing it securely and cost-effectively.

The information technology services market is set to grow 8.7 percent globally to more than $730 billion this year as companies continue to cut costs and seek new ways of doing business, research firm Gartner said.

"Despite the slowing U.S. economy, growth in IT services is expected to remain solid," Gartner said in a report on Monday.

Hewlett-Packard’s decision to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the U.S.

In August, HP announced a Linux desktop for small and midsize companies Down Under. The HP Compaq dx2250 system comes preloaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop and can be equipped with several processors from Advanced Micro Devices, including its Athlon dual-core chip. The Linux-based system starts at $600 Australian (about $505 U.S.) at the current exchange rate.

Defining the most ominous security threat to businesses today isn’t easy; apparently there are just too many to choose from.

At The Security Standard conference held in Chicago, industry executives and experts took the stage to discuss the current threat landscape. Decade-old concerns about external threats such as malware infecting a network or intruders causing a data breach were still hot topics, joined by newer concerns about the insider threat.

Barracuda Networks is getting into the Web application security business. The security vendor has acquired Santa Clara, California’s NetContinuum, a vendor of Web firewall appliances. Barracuda already sells Web filtering devices that prevent Web surfers from visiting malicious sites, but the NetContinuum products can be used to protect Web sites themselves.