(InfoWorld) - Building on its Jazz strategy for collaboratively building software, IBM Rational will offer versions of its products geared toward global cooperative development with an eye toward boosting SOA in 2007.

In an interview Wednesday, Daniel Sabbah, general manager of Rational, said the company is re-architecting core elements of its product set to leverage the Internet and Web 2.0 concepts such as AJAX-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Web interfaces. The goal is to accommodate community-based software development, he said.

New products bearing these changes will start to appear toward the end of the first half of this year, Sabbah said. IBM seeks to make software engineering more flexible and more reactive with its plan, accommodating agile processes.

"The aspect of it that's much more interesting is really building software engineering communities," Sabbah said.

Noting the trend toward collaboration between U.S. and offshore developers, IBM seeks to provide a platform accommodating a global, distributed model. These developers will able to work on aspects of development, such as requirements modeling, architecture, changing legacy code, documentation, and bug fixes.

According to Sabbah, the company seeks to optimize SOA development with its plan. SOA is largely about decomposing large parts of monolithic software into more flexible components, he said

As part of the effort, Rational products will add capabilities to manage architectures and software lifecycles for building more flexible software in a globally distributed fashion. Internet-based community project efforts also will be enhanced, according to Sabbah.

"There's plenty examples of people doing organizationally distributed and globally distributed development, and they need better tools to be able to do that, and they need to understand the coherent architecture," Sabbah said.

"[IBM's effort is] certainly related to ALM (application lifecycle management), but it’s a different dimension of (ALM) because in this particular case, the application itself has to be dynamically assembled with many of the parts coming from places where you couldn't predict," Sabbah said.

"Every single element of our product portfolio will have a globally distributed element to it" and feature the ability to be hosted under Internet standards, Sabbah stressed.

He raised the notion of offering Rational products via a SaaS (software-as-a-service) model, but did not openly commit to this.

"As we transform our product portfolio down this particular path, our ability to deliver a software development platform will enable a SaaS model. But we're not announcing today any kind of a SaaS model," said Sabbah.

A service supplier, whether it is IBM or someone else, could, for example, host a quality management process for distributed teams worldwide, Sabbah said. Such a process even could be used by different companies, said.

He called IBM's plan "a natural evolution of the capabilities that we provide today."

"It's a different way of delivering those particular capabilities [that is] much more amenable to the types of requests and business models that our customers are essentially under today," Sabbah said.

IBM's plan will include creating a community around Jazz with some technologies to be free and open source and others fee-based. It is similar to how the IBM-developed Eclipse Foundation functions, in which open-source technologies are melded with for-profit endeavors.

The company has been vague about its Jazz effort, said analyst Carey Schwaber, of Forrester. "I just hope they do it in a way that enhances rather than confuses," she said.

Jazz hopefully will mean shared collaboration experiences across IBM experiences, such as a discussion board that could be used across different tools, Schwaber said.

The Jazz project integrates teams across a software and systems delivery lifecycle. Users of the Jazz framework will be able to assess the full impact of changing a requirement. Jazz involves management of software development worldwide and automatic notifications of changes.

Citing issues IBM had with the Catapulse hosted development service early in the decade, Schwaber said she did not anticipate Big Blue again delving in hosting of applications. "They're not going to go into that business again," she said.

(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) is going after the virtualization market in the small-to-medium business space by offering a program to assess how an IT system might benefit from the technology.

Beginning Feb. 1, HP is offering a Virtualization Assessment Service that diagnoses a company's computer infrastructure and then draws up an assessment of it and proposal about how virtualization could be implemented, the company said Wednesday.

Virtualization technology is designed to manage a company's IT infrastructure holistically. Servers can be subdivided into multiple "virtual machines" that can simultaneously run different applications. Server workload can be more easily moved from one physical or virtual machine to another as needed.

Most virtualization projects are done in large enterprises where a company like HP would assign its own dedicated sales force, consultants, and engineers to a project. But HP plans to work through channel partners to cater to smaller businesses, said Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualization for HP.

"The channels who cover more of our midmarket, small-to-medium businesses, these (customers) maybe haven't done a virtualization project and so they need some assistance to do the first one," van der Zweep said. "Each of our channel partners tend to be regional, and we need to help them get up to speed on virtualization." He identified Avent, Arrow Electronics, and Agilysys as HP partners who'll be offering the assessment service with more to follow later.

Virtualization is a new area of competition in the technology industry as vendors tout it as a way to control costs, server sprawl and energy usage --- and to position themselves against rivals.

IBM claims the high ground in this rivalry because it has been building virtualization capabilities into its mainframe computers for more than 30 years.

"HP is clearly in catch-up mode," said Kevin Leahy, director of virtualization for IBM. VMware, the leading seller of virtualization software, uses an IBM textbook on virtualization from the 1970s in selling virtualization to its customers, he added.

HP's van der Zweep acknowledged IBM's pioneering the technology but says IBM was slow to move beyond the mainframe.

"IBM put a lot of technology onto their mainframes to make them shareable," van der Zweep said. "But we at HP brought virtualization out for our Unix (server) systems and midrange systems well before IBM took it off the mainframe."

(InfoWorld) - After many months, even years, of promising an e-mail push technology equivalent to what the RIM Blackberry service offers, it looks like Palm has finally done it.

At least it has come close, with a management component still missing.

Available next week, The Treo 680 and Treo 700p Smartphones will update Palm's VersaMail to include Microsoft Direct Push technology.

Although the push capability was promised via the next Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Update, the push component of ActiveSync was delayed.

The benefits of push over push-like are in battery life and real-time immediacy of e-mail.

Prior to the availability of Direct Push, a device had to remain on and ready to receive a packet from the server, with the server essentially asking whether the user was available to receive an e-mail. The necessity of always waiting for a ping reduces battery life.

Scheduled e-mail delivery also uses power by forcing the system to check for e-mails even when no new messages have arrived at the server.

In contrast, push technology wakes the device up with the arrival of the e-mail.

As far as real time goes, however, some industry analysts such as Ken Dulaney, senior mobile analyst at Gartner, claims if a corporate user can get an e-mail within 15 minutes of it being sent, the difference between real push and simulated push is negligible.

"Once e-mail uses a more or less a delivery-activated system as opposed to a periodic check, RIM will no longer have a major advantage," Dulaney said.

Those in the financial services industry might disagree with that assessment.

Direct Push adds other benefits as well. Push as a technology gives the server a remote, control channel. With push, IT can implement a theft loss-protection strategy to delete data or add password policy enforcement over the air.

In addition, cellular companies typically charge more for a BlackBerry data service to allow push e-mail, so Palm devices with an equivalent feature will have a service price advantage.

Joe Fabris, director of wireless solutions for Palm, said if you are managing fifty or fewer Treos, however, there probably is no need for additional management software. But if you are managing 500 or 5,000 devices, you will need additional software to manage the blacklisting of nonapproved software, software maintenance and upgrades, and the ability to turn off components such as a built-in camera.

These services are integrated into the native e-mail software from Rim with the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) middleware or Good Mobile Messaging.

Direct Push will be available as a free download for VersaMail on Monday.

Mike Barton contributed to this story.

(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's net income fell 28 percent year over year for its 2007 second fiscal quarter as it spent ahead of its mass market launch of Windows Vista this month.

Revenue was up 6 percent despite the fact that the company deferred $1.64 billion of revenue and operating income from its second quarter to its third because of Windows Vista and Office 2007 coupons issued over the winter holidays.

For the second quarter, ended Dec. 31, 2006, Microsoft reported revenue of $12.54 billion on net income of $2.63 billion, or $0.26 earnings per share (EPS). Both revenue and EPS were ahead of estimates from Thomson Financial analysts, who predicted Microsoft would earn $12.1 billion, or $0.23 per share.

However, while revenue was up, net income and EPS were down for the same time period last year, when Microsoft reported revenue of $11.84 billion and net income of $3.65 billion, or $0.34 per share. Analysts were expecting a drop in earnings for the vendor as it gears up for the biggest consumer release of its Windows OS in five years on Tuesday. Microsoft has been spending a considerable amount of money to market Windows Vista, and will hold launch events around the world on Monday and Tuesday to mark the consumer debut of the OS.

The drop in net income also can be attributed to a pause in demand for Windows and other products as consumers prepare for the release of Vista, analysts said.

The deferral of revenue and operating income, as well as the deferral of $1.13 billion of net income and $0.11 of diluted EPS to the second quarter are due primarily to technology guarantee programs Microsoft unveiled on Oct. 24, 2006, for Windows Vista and Microsoft Office, Microsoft said. Those programs provided customers purchasing new PCs capable of running Windows Vista with coupons to buy discounted upgrades to Vista and Office 2007 when they became available on Jan. 30. Microsoft originally expected to have both software packages out in time for the busy holiday shopping season in 2006, but had to delay both releases.

Looking ahead to its fiscal third quarter, which ends March 31 and will reflect the initial impact of Windows Vista and Office 2007 consumer sales, Microsoft expects revenue in the range of $13.7 billion to $14 billion, including the $1.68 billion revenue deferral. Operating income is expected to be in the range of $6.1 billion to $6.3 billion, and EPS are expected to be $0.45 to $0.46.

For the full fiscal year ending June 30, 2007, Microsoft expects revenue in the range of $50.2 billion to $50.7 billion; operating income in the range of $19.3 billion to $19.7 billion; and diluted EPS in the range of $1.45 to $1.47.

(InfoWorld) - About half of the downloads claiming to be free versions of Microsoft's Vista operating system are actually malicious Trojan horse software, security vendor DriveSentry warned Thursday.

With Vista's consumer launch just days away, hackers have been bombarding discussion boards with offers of "cracked" versions of Windows Vista, which are typically being distributed on peer-to-peer networks, said John Lynch, vice president of sales and marketing for DriveSentry.

These posts offer downloads of the operating system that skip Vista's activation process, created by Microsoft to prevent users from running illegal copies.

Users who fall for the scam can end up with some pretty nasty problems, according to Lynch. DriveSentry researchers have found malicious key-logging software and spyware on about half of the downloads it has examined recently, he said.

Pirated versions of Vista have been in circulation for several months now, and one Vista "crack," called "Windows Vista All Versions Activation 21.11.06," has already been identified as a Trojan. Trojan horses are malicious programs that present themselves as harmless or useful software.

DriveSentry has also seen criminals disguise Trojans as free versions of Windows XP in the past, Lynch said.

It's an effective technique, he added. "Someone that's stealing the software to begin with is not going to raise a fuss if the software turns out to be malicious."