ShadowRAM: March 10, 2003

EMC is also rumored to be making a deal. The storage vendor is said to have offered $750 million to purchase storage management software vendor Legato Systems. Neither side is talking. However, EMC has made no secret of its plan to focus on software in the future. And it has signed more storage API agreements than just about anyone else, giving it plenty of hooks to extend its software's capabilities.

The cult of personality that seems to permeate everything in the software industry reached new highs or lows last week, depending on your point of view. At BEA Systems' eWorld conference, attendees were given one of three bobblehead dolls featuring likenesses of BEA CEO Alfred Chuang, CTO Scott Dietzen and Chief Architect Adam Bosworth. While we're sure these will become collector's items that will eventually engender their own eBay aftermarket, we prefer action figures to dolls any day of the week.

Meanwhile, one member of BEA's relatively new management team, who most recently hailed from Microsoft, was calling for Scott McNealy to step down from the top spot at Sun Microsystems. He said McNealy is alienating longtime partners and turning off potential allies.+

Is Dell Computer getting ready to turn the heat up on Hewlett-Packard? That's the word from sources in Austin, Texas, who claim Dell is looking at making some job cuts to improve its cost structure. Meanwhile, Wall Street is buzzing about the accounting methods used by HP to post a $33 million profit for its PC business.

Ingram Micro won't say, but we hear the distributor is talking with Comergent Technologies about the possibility of building Web storefronts for solution providers. We hope the third time is the charm for Ingram Micro after a couple of spectacular failures with pcOrder and i2 Technologies, both of which ended in lawsuits between distributor and developer. The good news: Ingram reportedly won't insist that the storefronts be Ingram-branded.