Margaret Walsh

Despite a lagging economy, many workers will shop online while at work this coming holiday season, according to a survey conducted on behalf of ISACA, a nonprofit association of information technology (IT) professionals. Among those polled, the mean amount of time employees planned to spend shopping online was14.4 hours, nearly two full working days. The second annual "Shopping on the Job: Online Holiday Shopping and Workplace Internet Safety" survey found that fully half of those surveyed plan to use their company's computer to shop, putting a strain on employers' systems and potentially compromising an organizations sensitive information and security.

One in 10 plans to spend at least 30 hours shopping online at work. Survey participants also bank online (51 percent), click on e-mail links redirecting them to shopping sites (40 percent) and click on links from social network sites (15 percent). Yet nearly one in five says they are not concerned that their online shopping habits may affect the safety of their organization's IT infrastructure (See what CSO blogger Dan Lohrmann has to say about Cyber Monday). The survey also found that more than one in 10 Americans who use a mobile work device such as a BlackBerry or iPhone plan to use it for holiday shopping, further opening the door for additional security issues and exposure to data loss for a company, according to ISACA. ISACA officials also found there is a large reality gap between employees and the IT department. Most planned to do their shopping in early to mid-December. "The potential danger of shopping online is that it can open the door to viruses, spam and phishing attacks that invade the workplace and cost enterprises thousands per employee in lost productivity and potentially millions in destruction or compromise of corporate data," ISACA officials said in a statement on the findings (Read last year's report here). ISACA also noted that employees who shop online using a work computer are also likely to engage in other high-risk behaviors. A separate ISACA survey of more than 1,500 IT professionals who are ISACA members conducted during the same time period revealed close to half (48 percent) of those in IT believe employees will spend just over one work day, or nine hours, shopping online from a work computer. One in four IT professionals estimated that their company will lose US $15,000 or more per employee in productivity during this year's holiday season.

Dell has agreed to buy Perot Systems for around US$3.9 billion in cash, and intends to make the company its global services delivery division, the companies said Monday. It will also allow Dell, in the future, to address customer demand for next-generation services including cloud computing, said CEO Michael Dell in a conference call with analysts. The deal will allow Dell to expand its range of IT services, and potentially allow it to sell more hardware to existing Perot customers, it said.

Dell is counting on its international reach to turn Perot into a global services company, Dell CFO Brian Gladden said during the call. Around 25 percent of revenue comes from government customers, he said. Perot Systems is one of the largest services companies serving the health-care sector, from which it derives about 48 percent of its revenue, its CEO Peter Altabef said during the call. Perot is already working at increasing its international revenue: on Friday it announced a 10-year deal to outsource IT operations for Indian hospital group Max Healthcare. Over the last four quarters, Dell and Perot together had revenue of $16 billion from enterprise hardware and IT services, with $8 billion coming from enhanced services and support, Dell said. Dell's rival Hewlett-Packard expanded its own global services unit with the acquisition of EDS for $13.9 billion in May 2008. EDS was founded by H. Ross Perot, who sold the company to General Motors before going on to found Perot Systems, of which his son is now chairman.

Perot's contribution to that is relatively small: In 2008, the company reported total revenue of $2.78 billion. In after-hours trading, the stock traded at $29.70 early on Monday morning. At $30 per share, Dell's offer represented a significant premium over Friday's closing price of $17.91 for Perot Systems shares. The boards of Dell and Perot agreed to the terms of the transaction on Sunday, they said. Dell expects that overlaps between the two companies will allow it to cut Perot's costs by between 6 percent and 8 percent, Gladden said during the conference call. Dell expects to complete the deal in its November-to-January fiscal quarter.

Upon completion of the acquisition, Dell plans to make Perot Systems its services unit, and will put Altabef in charge of the unit. The services unit will fit alongside Dell's existing divisions for selling to large enterprises, government customers and small and medium-size businesses. It also expects Ross Perot Jr., chairman of the Perot Systems board, to be invited to join the Dell board of directors. Dell created the three divisions in a major reorganization of its business sales teams last December, shifting from a geographic structure to one aligned with customer types.

Symantec Corp. unveiled a new application that that the company promises can help companies build internal highly scalable, high-performance file-based cloud storage systems using commodity server hardware and the arrays of most storage vendors. Derrington provided few details of the new cloud service, but did note that it will to scale to tens of petabytes for corporate users. At the same time, Sean Derrington, director of storage management and high availability services at Symantec, disclosed that the company also plans to launch an online object-based file storage service, code-named S4, over the next year.

The S4 service is similar in name to to of Amazon.com's S3 cloud-storage service , which enables its resellers to set up SaaS offerings of their own using Amazon's grid-based backend storage architecture. Meanwhile, Symantec said that the new FileStore software product is being pitched as a tool to help enterprise-class companies economically build onsite cloud infrastructures using commodity x86 server hardware as well as any configuration of backend storage systems, including JBOD. For the past several months, Symantec has been using FileStore as the file-based storage architecture in the cloud services it offers to consumers. Similarly, Symantec's S4 is will enable companies to provide public cloud services to their customers. The service currently has some 40 petabytes of online storage for more than nine million active users. The software also integrates natively with Symantec's Endpoint Protection security software and Symantec's Enterprise Vault e-mail, file and instant messaging archive application, he added. "We've designed this to support diverse workloads - applications that have requirements for hundreds of millions of really tiny files like ringtones or tens of millions of larger files, like online auction sites," Derrington said. "It can scale from the low-end to the high end with near linear scalability. Derrington said that FileStore lets users add or remove storage logical unit numbers (LUNs) dynamically without taking systems offline and without disruption to applications.

The server nodes on the front end of FileStore are all actively participating and sharing the load." A single FileStore system can support up to 16 storage nodes, and two petabytes of storage capacity, Derrington said. "On the backend you can use anybody's storage that you want to. FileStore is available immediately and is priced per CPU, regardless of how many cores exist in each processor. All the major storage vendors we support with Veritas Storage Foundation are supported with FileStore," he added. For example, a server with two CPUs, will cost the same whether they're duo- or quad-core processors. A two node configuration of FileStore will start at $6,995.

Scientists at MIT have have used a combination of silicon and gallium nitride, a hard material frequently used in LEDs, to create a hybrid microchip that they say is smaller, faster and more efficient than today's processors. The predicted upgrades have continued since then, though some observers have long predicted that leakage and energy consumption could keep Moore's Law from continuing at some point. Researchers around the world have been working for decades to create such a hybrid microchip that could help chipmakers keep Moore's Law alive . The more than 40-year-old prediction by Gordon Moore holds that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years.

However, if scientists can find new ways to increase efficiency while continuing to make the chips smaller and faster, then the law stands a much better chance of holding true for years ahead. "We won't be able to continue improving silicon by scaling it down for long, so it's crucial to find other approaches," said Tomas Palacios , an assistant professor at MIT, in a statement late last week. Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat, said the new hybrid chip is important because it shows that the industry is moving beyond a singular silicon focus. "We're really in a situation where we're now playing with the entire periodic table and experimenting with different combinations of materials," McGregor said. "The silicon is the basic building block that we put everything on. He added that besides microprocessor chips, the new integrated technology also could lead to more efficient cell phone designs, for instance, by combining the functionality of several different chips onto one. We've been messing around with the silicon and now we're adding something to it ... so we can change the properties and do things with the chip that we couldn't do before." McGregor said he suspects that MIT's hybrid chip design could reduce leakage and thus increase chip performance. "Chipmaking is becoming the ultimate chemistry and physics experiment," McGregor added. "We're using more and more parts of the periodic table and we're down to nanometers and looking at how many electrons can flow from transistor to transistor. Instead, they embedded it into the silicon substrate, which is an underlying layer.

It's important for the entire industry, which is focused on this type of research." MIT noted that Palacios, along with student researcher Will Chung, didn't add the gallium nitride as a layer on top of the silicon. Because the semiconductor industry already uses the same type of silicon substrate, MIT contends that the hybrid chip could be made using today's manufacturing processes, which would be less costly than using different substrates. "We are already discussing with several companies how to commercialize this technology and fabricate more complex circuits," said Palacios, adding that it could take several years before the technology is ready to be commercialized. The nanotubes should someday be used to replace the copper wires that connect the transistors and also may even replace the transistors themselves even further down the road. The move was the latest in a series of recent chipmaking announcements by MIT. Last week, the university announced that researchers there have found a new way to grow carbon nanotubes that could be used by manufacturers to build smaller, faster computer chips. Last year, MIT announced that a research team at the school had created a new chip design that could be 10 times more energy efficient than processors now used in mobile devices. The design is intended for use in portable electronics, like cell phones, PDAs and even implantable medical devices.

There are a lot of reasons why Dell Inc. agreed to buy Perot Systems Corp. for $3.9 billion, but Congress' vote earlier this year to appropriate billions of dollars to spread the use of electronic medical records may be a key one. Even before today's announcment that Dell plans to buy Perot, the PC maker and IT services firm had agreements in place develop platforms dedicated to electronic health care applications. Perot, which says that about half of its $2.8 billion in annual revenue is derived from health care projects, is in a good position to gain a significant chunk of the $36 billion the federal government is poised to spend on IT related health care projects. During a conference call with reporters today, Michael Dell, CEO and chairman of Dell, called the move "the right acquisition" for his company, and that the two Texas-based firms share several similar characteristics. "Our products, services and structures are overwhelmingly complementary," Dell said.

EDS was spun off in 1996 as an independent firm and remained that way until it was acquired last year by Hewlett-Packard Co. for $13,9 billion . Ross Perot founded Perot Systems in 1988. Harry Greenspun, chief medical officer for Perot Systems' health care group, told investors garthered at an industry conference this month that there's tremendous opportunity for companies like Perot in the health care market. "Most hospitals, most physicians' offices are very immature in their adoption in their technology," he said, according to an archived recording on Perot's web site. Ross Perot, the chairman emeritus of Perot, added, "We saw this as a cultural match, and we saw what we could do together, and I think that made it a lot easier to jump on Michael's vision to build Dell," Perot founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962 and sold it to General Motors Corp. in 1984 for $2.5 billion. Dell hopes to complete the deal by year's end, just after the federal fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, which is when federal spending on electronic records is set to begin in earnest. Dell and Perot are already jointly offering what Greenspan called a "dumb box" without ports of disk drives. The demand for help in implementing new health care IT projects should come quickly - Under the law, health care providers have to start upgrading e-health systems by 2015 or face federal penalties. The Software-as-a-Service system delivers electronic records to virtual desktops that charge customers on a subscription basis. "This is a different way of delivering this service," said Greenspun.

Bendor-Samuel said improved revenue from health care projects should be a strong side effect of the merger, but contended that Dell's primary interest is gaining access to a broader base of enterprise customers. "It's great to be a dominant player in the fastest growing segment of the economy, but I view that as a nice thing to have," he said. The purchase of Perot Systems will also give Dell some credibility among large users as a service provider, said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Group, an Dallas-based outsourcing consultancy. "It both significantly improves their delivery capability and tremendously improves their credibility," he said. Dane Anderson, an analyst at Gartner Inc., believes that the deal shows only that Dell is finally embarking on a services strategy. It has not offered the broader consulting and integration services provided by IT services firms like Perot Systems, he added.. "Really, where the opportunity is in the nearest term is to bring more capabilities to the table for that Dell installed based of clients, he said. Dell's support operation has traditionally focused on providing services to meet the needs of existing users. Anderson said that he doesn't expect Dell to quickly gain new services contracts due to the acquisition of Perot.

Enterprise aren't likely to exit existing contracts with other services providers.

Avaya has emerged as the winning bidder for Nortel's enterprise business, reportedly beating out Siemens Enterprise Communications over the weekend. Avaya will also contribute an additional pool of $15 million for an employee retention program. The firm will pay $900 million for the unit, Nortel's Government Solutions group and DiamondWare Ltd., a Nortel-owned maker of softphones. That price is nearly twice what Avaya was initially said to be buying the enterprise business for back in July before auction bidding kicked in.

Telecom carrier Verizon, however, is expected to contest the sale on the grounds that Avaya does not plan to retain customer support contracts between Nortel and Verizon. Slideshow: The rise and fall of Nortel Avaya has sought Nortel's enterprise business in hopes of boosting its share of the enterprise telephony and unified communications markets, and getting more customers to migrate to its IP line of communications products.  The sale, expected to close later this year, is subject to court approvals in the U.S., Canada, France and Israel as well as regulatory approvals, other customary closing conditions and certain post-closing purchase price adjustments. Nortel is confident the sale will go through without any snags. "We do not expect the Verizon interaction to impact court approval or the close of this deal," said Joel Hackney, president of Nortel Enterprise Solutions. "We will continue to go forward in supporting customers." Hackney would not say whether Nortel is engaged in the negotiations between Avaya and Verizon on the future of certain customer support contracts, mentioning only that Nortel supports Verizon as a customer as well as the carrier's customers. Nortel customers hope the deal works out in their interest. "Nortel earned the trust of our user group members by delivering innovative, reliable communications solutions and ensuring high-levels of service and support, " said Victor Bohnert, Executive Director of the International Nortel Networks Users Association, in a prepared statement. "With the announcement of today's purchase by Avaya, we look forward to extending that relationship forward to serve the business communications needs of our constituency base across the globe." Nortel will seek Canadian and U.S. court approvals of the proposed sale agreement at a joint hearing on September 15, 2009. The sale close is expected late in the fourth quarter. Hackney also said there were two bidders for the enterprise unit but would not identify the second suitor.

In some EMEA jurisdictions this transaction is subject to information and consultation with employee representatives. As previously announced, Nortel does not expect that its common shareholders or the preferred shareholders of Nortel Networks Limited will receive any value from the creditor protection proceedings and expects that the proceedings will result in the cancellation of these equity interests.