Briefs: January 16, 2006

MANAGEMENT SHAKE-UP AT JUNIPER

Jim Dolce, executive vice president of worldwide field operations, is leaving the company to pursue personal interests, according to a statement. He joined Juniper in 2002 with its acquisition of Unisphere Networks and will be replaced by Eddie Minshull, vice president of sales in charge of Juniper's EMEA operations for the past five years.

Also departing are executive vice presidents in charge of Juniper's infrastructure and applications product groups, Carrol Mills and Jef Graham. Mills, who is leaving to pursue outside interests, will be replaced by Kim Perdikou, associate general manager, on an interim basis, while Paulette Altmaier, a nine-year Cisco veteran, will replace Graham, who is leaving to become CEO of a private company. Juniper also named Jeff Lindholm, previously head of its worldwide sales organization, as chief marketing officer.

SEC LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO IBM FINANCIALS
IBM last week said that it has received notice of a formal, nonpublic investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning the company's disclosures relating to its first-quarter 2005 earnings and expensing of equity compensation. "The SEC has informed IBM that the investigation should not be construed as an indication that any violations of law have occurred," according to an IBM statement.

IBM disclosed last June that it had been cooperating with the SEC on an informal investigation into the matter.

GOOGLE HAS GAGGLE OF MINIS
Google last week unveiled two new Mini search appliances. One of the new Mini appliances promises to search up to 200,000 documents for just under $6,000 and another up to 300,000 documents for just under $9,000.

The latest appliances come as Google celebrates the original Mini's first birthday. The original Intel-based appliance searched up to 100,000 documents for about $3,000.

"We still see a large, underserved market [in small and midsize companies]," said Rajen Sheth, product manager for Google's Enterprise Division. "We hear all the time about intranets where they now discover hundreds of thousands of documents. With this release, we'll bring the same ease of use to those companies."

The new Minis will be sold direct, but Google now has dozens of partners working on bringing Google search to internal documents that it currently doesn't reach. The new appliances could expand the potential customer universe for those partners.

NAME CHANGE, FRESH FUNDING FOR COMPUTERREPAIR.COM
Technology services network ComputerRepair.com closed out 2005 with a name change and is starting 2006 with full pockets in the form of $15 million in funding. Now known as OnForce, the company last week said it closed the Series A funding round from investment firm General Catalyst Partners. With the new round of funding, OnForcea national network of VARs and service providers with more than 12,000 techniciansexpects to grow its customer base from thousands to tens of thousands, President and CEO Jeffrey Leventhal said in a statement. The company's name change, unveiled December 30, reflects the evolution of its business from an initial focus on break/fix work to a broader range of technical services, according to the statement.

CA ADDS AUTOMATED SUPPORT WARES VIA CONTROL-F1 BUY
CA last week acquired Control-F1, a privately held provider of support automation solutions that aim to prevent, detect and repair end-user computer problems before they disrupt critical IT services.

The acquisition will enable customers to both significantly improve the productivity of their IT help desks and maximize service levels to end-users, according to a CA statement.

It also supports CA's Enterprise IT Management initiative to enable self-healing enterprise computing environments.

"IT organizations have reached a critical point as the complexity and volume of technology rises and support resources remain limited," said Jacob Lamm, senior vice president and general manager of Business Service Optimization at CA, in the statement.

"By augmenting our industry-leading service management portfolio with Control-F1's automation solutions, CA is helping organizations relieve a significant portion of their daily workloads so they can focus on strategic projects."

CA already had an earlier partnership with Control-F1 through which it has certified the company's solutions as interoperable with its own Unicenter Service Desk. New products gained through the acquisition will be marketed as stand-alone offerings as part of CA's Business Service Optimization portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SYMBOL PREPPING DEVICE WITH BEVY OF WIRELESS FEATURES
Symbol will soon begin shipping the MC9097, a 23-ounce device that combines wireless Internet, VoIP, Nextel walkie-talkie service, Bluetooth, RFID and bar-code scanning and data-entry functions all in a single shock-resistant chassis, said Chuck Dourlet, vice president of product management at Symbol. On a single battery charge, mobile employees who perform tasks like warehouse inventory management, package delivery and field maintenance can get a full 10 hours of realtime data and voice communication from the MC9097.

The new product is the first from Symbol to give network administrators the ability to upgrade or reboot the firmware of a device remotely. An Intel XScale PXA270 processor running Windows Mobile 5.0 Phone Edition powers the device, which will cost between $3,100 and $3,800, according to Symbol.

COLUBRIS BRINGS IN NEW TOP EXEC FOLLOWING LAYOFFS
WLAN infrastructure vendor Colubris Networks last week named Robert Eisenberg as its new president and CEO.

Prior to joining Colubris, Eisenberg was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Alta Communications, a private equity firm. He also founded and spent four years as CEO of Navisite, an infrastructure management provider.

He succeeds CEO Barry Fougere, who had led the company since 2001.

The executive change follows layoffs of approximately 10 percent of the Colubris workforce last month in an effort to cut costs.

Eisenberg said Colubris will be evaluating its existing channel partners in terms of productivity and performance.

"We plan to add partners as we need to, and revisit our existing ones. If we have to make adjustments, we will," he said.