Groklaw reports, quoting documents filed by Novell, that SCO’s bankruptcy is inevitable and imminent. Novell was replying to SCO’s opposition to its motion for summary judgment, which could end the case. Pamela Jones of Groklaw also says the documents hint Microsoft and Sun were actually buying SCOSource licenses, and that revenue helped fund its legal campaign.

The IT hiring recession is over, according to a 2007 IT Salary Survey to be released in mid-January by Janco Associates. IT executive salaries were up 1.92 percent in large enterprises in the fourth quarter of 2006, but down 0.80 in midsize companies over the same period. This same trend had a more pronounced effect among IT middle managers; those in the larger enterprises saw gains of 2.14 percent while those in midsize ones lost 1.2 percent.

UGS and IBM are entering into a new partnership centered around UGS’ Teamcenter Express software, designed to meet the collaborative product data management needs of small and midsize businesses. The companies have agreed to jointly market Teamcenter Express software and services to SMB customers in China, France, Canada, Germany, Japan and the United States, UGS officials said. In addition, the software can be coupled with a wide range of CAD applications, including UGS’ Solid Edge and NX products.

Technology-related companies accounted for three of the top 10 great employers and–surprise!–Google was number one, shooting to the top in its very first appearance in Fortune Magazine’s annual list of the 100 best places to work, released Jan. 8.

Cisco Systems’ purchase of email security specialist IronPort Systems is another sign that big-name vendors are taking over the spam fight, analysts say. Upon completion of the $830 million cash and stock deal, networking giant Cisco will join Symantec and Microsoft as a leader in the email security arena. Those other companies entered the market via acquisitions and product development of their own.

Docudesk Corporation announced the release of deskUNPDF PDF Converter. deskUNPDF was developed to meet customers’ most frequent requirement–to be able to recover a PDF for editing or use in other applications. An extremely frequent problem people have who work with electronic documents, is that they regularly need to be able to convert PDFs into a document format better suited to making changes, whether Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, or another editable format. deskUNPDF was expressly designed to address this problem. Coupled with many features unique to deskUNPDF and an attractive price point, deskUNPDF will appeal to Docudesk customers, those who use Adobe Acrobat, as well as individuals who have a one-time requirement to recover a PDF and open in Microsoft Word. In other words, use deskUNPDF to take a PDF and "un-PDF" it.

Revelation Software has introduced OpenInsight for IBM U2 and announced that under an agreement with IBM, Revelation Software will market and sell the IBM UniVerse and UniData Servers as part of its OpenInsight offering. OpenInsight is a repository-based applications development environment that enables development teams to work collaboratively to design, develop, deploy and scale high-performance business solutions. OpenInsight’s complete tool set (including a Form Designer, Editor/Debugger, UI Workspace, XML Workspace and more), advanced BASIC+ scripting language and powerful client/server development combine to deliver a complete environment for deploying and evolving network applications.

Avalon Business Systems, developer of mail reduction utilities for use with Lotus Notes mail systems, announced the addition of ReduceMail Pro Attach to its suite of ReduceMail Pro mail management products. This newest solution helps reduce excessive email through a centralized attachment consolidation process. Many organizations have identified the excessive use of attachments in the email environment as one reason for sub-optimal mail system performance. These attachments, which are often large files distributed to many recipients, are often duplicates which do not require retention of multiple copies. ReduceMail Pro Attach removes these duplicate attachments and places them in one or more databases, improving mail performance while still allowing unimpeded access to those documents by the end user.

BoxTone announced that the company’s BoxTone for BlackBerry software is now trusted by more large enterprises and US government agencies than any other solution to monitor and manage their complex BlackBerry deployments. BoxTone for BlackBerry software can centrally monitor and manage in real-time thousands of users provisioned across multiple geographic regions, multiple BlackBerry Enterprise Servers for Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino, and multiple wireless carriers.

A study focusing on information systems says that quality and usefulness trump user satisfaction in the quest for success. The findings are the subject of a paper in the Management Insights section of the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.