IBM

IBM acquires security software maker Encentuate

IBM has snapped up security software maker Encentuate, in a move to broaden its security management software offerings, Big Blue announced Wednesday.

Encentuate develops two-factor authentication software that's designed to let users log on with a single sign-on to all their other applications.

IBM plans to roll Encentuate's software into its Tivoli product line, which includes identity and access management software products. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

IBM also is beefing up its security software efforts by opening a new software security lab in Singapore, the company said Wednesday. The lab will house more than 20 … Read more

IBM: It takes a consortium to build 22-nanometer chips

IBM's research facility in Albany, N.Y., is working toward the ability to build chip features based on 22-nanometer manufacturing technology--and drawing expertise from a diverse group of engineers and scientists.

When future generations of chips reach feature sizes in the realm of a billionth of a meter, IBM says, it will take a global village of chip companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Samsung, Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor, and Germany-based Infineon, to carry out development and manufacturing.

Currently, IBM and its partners are in the initial stages of 45-nanometer production. (Intel is already in commercial production of 45-nanometer processors.) This … Read more

IBM muscles into Microsoft unified communications turf

IBM said that it will invest more than a $1 billion over the next three years in the unified communications market, setting up another race between the computing giant and its rival Microsoft.

At a conference at it Somers, N.Y., headquarters on Monday, executives outlined the company's strategy to garner more revenue from communication and collaboration products, including its Sametime instant messaging and Lotus collaboration suite.

The $1 billion over the next three years represents "substantial growth" over current investment levels and represents the rapid growth of the market overall, said Bruce Morse, vice president of … Read more

Fire guts historic Silicon Valley building

A fire has destroyed an historic Silicon Valley building at the center of a preservation fight.

An early morning fire on Saturday swept through Building 25 at IBM's Cottle Road campus in San Jose, Calif., according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News. The building, which opened in 1957 but had been vacant since 1996, was the site where the flying hard disk drive--an ancestor to the modern hard drive--was invented.

The 40,000-square-foot building was also hailed as precursor to the modern high-tech campus for "creative engineers"...built "in true California style, (with) … Read more

AMD pays for IBM know-how in battle with Intel

AMD is leaning increasingly on IBM as it battles with Intel for next-generation microprocessor manufacturing leadership. And the payout to IBM is significant.

First some background: On Tuesday, AMD announced that IBM had successfully produced a working test chip using next-generation Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography for the critical first layer of metal connections across an entire chip. Previous projects utilizing EUV produced working chip components on only a very small portion of the chip.

Why EUV? The size of transistors and the metal lines that connect them is directly related to the wavelength of light that is used to project … Read more

IBM clears $15 billion stock purchase to boost share price

IBM's board of directors on Tuesday authorized a $15 billion stock purchase plan, an integral part of the company's growth strategy.

The company said it expects to spend $12 billion on stock repurchases in 2008. It intends to purchase shares with cash.

Acquisitions, particularly in software, and stock repurchases have been the main vehicles for meeting IBM's growth ambitions in the past five years.

"Stock repurchase is not only one of the ways we deliver this value, it is also one of the key elements of IBM's 2010 roadmap for earnings per share growth," … Read more

Moving molecules at IBM Almaden

IBM's researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area have been at the forefront of data storage for decades.

An IBM team invented the first hard drive (the IBM 350, which was part of a machine called RAMAC) 52 years ago in San Jose, Calif. The relational database came out of IBM's labs in the area, too.

Now, scientists at IBM Almaden are trying to come up with breakthroughs that will help computers sift through the "exabytes" of data that have become an inevitability for many corporations and government agencies. (An exabyte is a quintillion bytes, or … Read more

Making sense of tech's winter of discontent

Correction, 2:05 p.m. PST: This blog initially misstated Google's 52-week high. It is $747.

On his way to China last week, RSA's top executive, Art Coviello, stopped off in San Francisco for a meet-and-greet with customers in the financial sector. What with all the pyrotechnics on Wall Street, you'd think the banks would be cutting back spending on everything from encryption software--RSA's bread and butter--to thumb tacks.

Maybe that's happening and they're just not 'fessing up, but Coviello says he's not seeing evidence of a big pullback in technology spending.

Like … Read more

IBM to take Lotus Symphony apps 'Beyond Office'

IBM this week quietly updated its Lotus Symphony desktop applications with a feature that hints at its broader strategy to use the Web and standards to up-end Microsoft's massive Office business.

Introduced last September, Lotus Symphony is a free suite of applications based on OpenOffice, an open-source alternative to Office. The fourth beta of Symphony, due for release next week, will add a module that will let IBM and other software companies add extensions to these applications.

Under a strategy called "Beyond Office," IBM is developing several technologies to make Symphony an extensible development platform for business … Read more