Category: Network news

The commission’s order affirms an initial determination from an administrative law judge in December 2011. The ITC began investigating the issue in November 2010, in response to a complaint from Microsoft. The ITC found that Motorola’s devices infringe on Microsoft’s patent number 6,370,566, which describes “generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device.” Microsoft had originally alleged that Motorola was infringing nine patents, but they were eventually reduced to one. The order is subject to a 60-day presidential review, during which time Motorola must post a US$0.33 bond for any device it imports with the infringing technology. Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson said the company was “disappointed” but would “not experience any impact in the near term,” pending the presidential review and a possible appeal. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The order was first reported by Florian Mueller’s Foss Patents blog. Mueller said Motorola will likely respond by removing the offending feature. Google, which is in the process of acquiring Motorola, had filed a brief with the court indicating that the ban would not be in the public interest. The commission dismissed that argument.

HP is expected to announce a large layoff at its quarterly investors briefing on Wednesday. As many as 30,000 employees may be cut. That’s almost as many employees as Apple has added in the last two years. HP hasn’t made official any plan to chop its approximately 350,000 employee global workforce. It’s not commenting on the reported layoffs, neither confirming nor denying. But the stage is set for action. In its most recent quarter, HP’s net revenue of $30 billion was down 7% from the prior-year period. Revenue from HP’s Personal Systems Group, which sells PCs and workstations, declined 15% in that same period. When Apple was selling iPads by the boatloads, HP was having a $99 closeout sale of the Touchpad, its own tablet. Apple’s global workforce grew from 34,300 in 2009 in to 60,400 in 2011. Even areas that HP expected to see growth, services in particular, aren’t delivering. HP’s big move into services came with its acquisition of EDS in 2008, which instantly added 147,000 employees to the company. In its most recent quarter, services revenue of grew 1% year over year. Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Forrester, doesn’t see HP’s plans as a bellwether of a larger problem in IT. HP’s problem is that it is losing share to Apple, and faces a lot of competition, as are many other firms, from Indian offshore firms. “Outsourcing jobs at U.S. firms have been lost by shifts to India,” said Bartels. That’s been offset by the overall growth of outsourcing, but “India has taken its toll. “HP has been stuck in some slower growth categories overall,” said Bartels. This is potentially a big layoff for the U.S. tech sector. HP doesn’t detail how many U.S. workers it has, but the trend at large IT companies, IBM in particular, has been to reduce the size of their U.S. workforce and expand in fast-growing overseas markets. Some of HP’s job cuts may be due to cost-cutting and consolidation, thanks in part to its recently announced decision to combine the printer and PC units. The cut may involve shifting some work to lower-wage countries as well as boosting its presence in healthier economies. It is unknown how many of HP’s layoffs will be U.S.-based, whether the layoffs will be over a short period or spread out over years. But it doesn’t take too many layoffs in the tech sector to have an impact on overall employment. The TechServe Alliance, an industry group that has been tracking IT employees for years, puts the IT workforce at 4.17 million, and estimates that IT employment grew by 117,000 jobs, or 2.9%, between April 2011 and last month. Victor Janulaitis, CEO of Janco Associates, a research firm that analyzes IT wage and employment trends, said 20,600 IT jobs were added in the last three months ending in April. He sees a struggling IT hiring market, and said more IT job seekers have stopped looking for work, with participation rates, meaning unemployed and not looking for a job, at the lowest rate since 1980. Janulaitis believes any HP layoffs could hit IT areas that have been otherwise doing well, such as system and applications design. How affected employees fare post-HP may depend on where they live. Laid-off workers in Palo Alto and Boston will likely get jobs quickly, but in Chicago, Dallas and Arizona that task may be harder, he said. Janulaitis believes the layoffs may make some companies cautious about hiring. “IT is not just recovering very well,” he said. Bartels believes the problems are specific to HP. “It’s more about HP than about the tech sector,” he said.

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Aruba Networks this week unveils software designed to protect corporate data and networks when accessed by employee-owned mobile clients, whether laptops, tablets or smartphones. The software, ClearPass Policy Manager, offers a set of modules that let enterprise IT groups streamline provisioning, inventory, security and management for personal devices used for work purposes, a trend often dubbed “bring your own device” or BYOD. Aruba’s software is intended to make it simpler to securely manage a much more varied client environment, especially in mobile deployments, and to provision secure network access, a feature missing from at least some other mobile device management (MDM) applications. SECURITY MINEFIELD: ‘Bring your own device’ will bedevil IT security in 2012 ClearPass Policy Manager can be bought preloaded on a server appliance or as a VMware virtual machine instance. The application can work with the major mobile and PC operating systems in the enterprise: iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, OS X and Windows 7. The new product combines code from two Aruba acquisitions, Amigopod, for guest access and management, and from last December, Avenda Systems, whose mobile management software is the heart of Policy Manager. The new offering includes the FreeRADIUS open source software, for authentication, authorization and accounting, but the Policy Manager also can work with an existing AAA/RADIUS infrastructure. Policy Manager consists of the core application, and four separately licensed modules: Onboard, a self-service mobile provisioning portal for employees; Profiler, which creates a detailed inventory of each device; OnGuard, which is a Network Access Control application, including the quarantine and cleanup of compromised devices; and Guest, for registering and managing guest access to the network. One additional cloud service, ClearPass QuickConnect, can automatically configure wired and wireless network settings for personal devices. The actual provisioning is set up in advance by IT administrators working with ClearPass Policy Manager, which lets them set a range of policies for devices by device type, OS, user groups and other variables. Users then can register their devices for access on their own, via a Web portal, and have them automatically configured for such enterprise-standard protections and services as 802.1x authentication, a VPN client, Exchange ActiveSync, and machine IDs or certificates. When users attempt to log into the corporate network for the first time, they’re redirected to the portal, where an application wizard walks them through the configuration process. Once that happens, these personal devices become uniquely visible to IT. “By provisioning the device and giving it a unique ID, it gives us a degree of control over it that we wouldn’t have otherwise,” says Robert Fenstermacher, director of product marketing, for Aruba, Sunnyvale, Calif.A Continue Reading