Dell is ready to join the Opteron fold. The company, which for the past three years stuck by Intel as its sole chip vendor even as Advanced Micro Devices gained market share thanks to its Opteron processor, will introduce on Oct. 23 the first of its AMD-based servers.

Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man. The company has created a service that combs through thousands of blogs, news sites, chat rooms, and other Web sites every day and then surfaces rumors and news reports that might be of interest to stock traders or corporate public-relations executives. Start-ups like Monitor 110 provide similar services. The idea is to give traders back the early and easy access to critical data that they used to have when this information came through many fewer channels.

IBM announced it has completed its acquisition of Internet Security Systems. IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire ISS, an industry leader in preemptive enterprise security, on August 23, 2006. IBM acquired ISS to bring its unique ahead-of-the-threat security approach to a broad range of customers worldwide. ISS provides security solutions to thousands of the world’s leading companies and governments, helping to proactively protect against Internet threats across networks, desktops and servers. ISS software, appliances and services monitor and manage network vulnerabilities and rapidly respond in advance of potential threats.

What are the biggest concerns among CIOs for the data center in 2006? The Gartner Group in its 2006 survey of IT executives gives the following four as the top of the list.

Starting salaries for IT pros are expected to increase an average of 2.8 percent in 2007 over 2006, and more than 4 percent in high-demand areas, according to the 2007 IT Salary Guide from Robert Half Technology, to be released Oct. 24.

Veteran malware researcher Joe Stewart was fairly sure he’d seen it all until he started poking at the SpamThru Trojan–a piece of malware designed to send spam from an infected computer. The Trojan, which uses peer-to-peer technology to send commands to hijacked computers, has been fitted with its own anti-virus scanner–a level of complexity and sophistication that rivals some commercial software.

The data center has grown from the glass house to the greenhouse. Read up on the latest about the changing role of the data center in the enterprise in this eWEEK Special Report.

Life is never dull when you’re a Domino admin. Just before after she went on vacation, Nancy Hand’s company installed a Storage Area Network (SAN). And life just got more interesting.

Read this DominoPower article.

IBM believes the future of business intelligence involves unstructured information, real-time analytics and semantic search–but the present revolves around partners not purchases. IBM’s Information on Demand event this week had a special BI keynote speech and several relevant sessions, but despite Wall Street speculation that IBM would buy a BI vendor like Business Objects or Cognos, there were no big acquisition announcements.

IT managers at smaller companies are mostly likely not involved in key technology buying decisions, according to a new survey. Instead, they’ve been relegated to researching technology for non-IT decision makers and implementing that technology. Soon, many of them will find themselves with a new CIO as a boss.