In Computing SA this week:

INDUSTRY NEWS:

Oracle + Siebel = business sense
Paula Beezhold

In an exclusive interview, MD of Siebel SA, Graham Mansfield, talks about Oracle's first major strategic step since the Siebel acquisition. Legal integration of Oracle SA and Siebel SA took place on 1 April, with Oracle including Siebel into its BI strategy with the introduction of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite.

Huawei available in SA
Paula Beezhold

SAAB GRINTEK HAS announced that it has brought Huawei's next generation routers and 10GbE switches to the SA market. Angelo Manzoni, managing executive of Saab Grintek's Enterprise division, says the fact that Huawei, currently the largest supplier of equipment to the Chinese telecommunications market, chose to partner with Saab Grintek shows a vote of confidence, as well as an aim to maintain and improve dominance in the sector.

Newman leaves FrontRange
Theo Boshoff

FRONTRANGE SOLUTIONS SA is looking for a new MD. Tracey Newman, MD of the company for the past five years, has decided to 'take a sabbatical', and will be leaving the company at month's end. She cited personal reasons for her departure, including taking time to spend with her two-year-old son.

Lucent sues Microsoft over Xbox patent
Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES has filed suit against Microsoft for patent infringement over technology used in its Xbox 360 game console. At the centre of the dispute is Patent No. 5 227 878: Adaptive Coding and Decoding of Frames and Fields of Video issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to Lucent on July 19, 1993, according to court papers filed by the company in US District Court in San Diego.

T-Systems adds RFID
Theo Boshoff

T-SYSTEMS SA has added Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology-related services to its portfolio of business process solutions. Jean Roux, business manager for T-Systems SA's Systems Integration division, says that the company is ready to share its technology and ideas, in a move planned since October last year.


MANAGEMENT INSIGHTS:

30 years of Apple: Assessing the impact
Cyrus Farivar, Macworld.com

APPLE TURNED 30 on April 1, no small feat in an industry where today's leader is tomorrow's answer to a trivia question. Apple has come a long way since its 1976 founding, evolving from a pair of electronics-minded buddies, trying to sell printed circuit boards at their local amateur computer club, to a 14 800-employee company with more than $14bn in sales and an internationally recognised product line.

Data centre revolution closes innovation gap
Sandra Rossi, Computerworld Today (Australia)

Known as the backbone of the business, the physical infrastructure used in data centres everywhere is undergoing a revolution after 30 years of little change. While technology has undergone massive cycles of innovation since the 1960s, the data centre has remained relatively unchanged, according to APC's Asia-Pacific data centre advisor, David Blumanis. But that innovation gap is finally closing.


TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTS:

Optimising for Opteron
Tom Yager, InfoWorld (US)

AMD HAS ITS hands in a lot of technology areas, and I track and report on all of them. I am a huge fan of AMD's Athlon FX and X2 client CPUs, Turion notebook CPUs, and Geode ultra-low power technology. But I know that the AMD you care most about is the one that will turn your entire server room into a one-rack, one-man operation.

Linux e-mail platforms pack a punch
Mike Heck, InfoWorld (US)

E-mail is a killer application. Your organisation can become immobilised when messages do not flow. Servers need to be restarted for security patches, and whole infrastructures must be taken offline for costly hardware upgrades that provide redundancy or satisfy mailboxes bloated with duplicate attachments.

Gates lays out future for enterprise apps
China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

Corporate users will increasingly combine traditional enterprise software with online capabilities to create composite applications, Bill Gates said last month. In the keynote address at Convergence, an annual conference for users of Microsoft's business software, the Microsoft chairman and chief software architect also shared his vision of a world of work, in which 'smart' tables will function as ad hoc screens for mobile devices.