The phone can be pre-ordered now from the company's website for from 15 per month for a minimum plan with no free minutes to 80. Those who mainly want the phone will find it costs 195.74 on some of the cheapest calling plans.

This is the second Google Android phone, the first is the T-Mobile G1 which is already available. Along with the Android operating system the phone has a full touch screen, 500MB of internal memory and can also take a 2GB memory card.

Other details include support for 3G and Wi-Fi and a camera with 3.2-megapixels.

The phone can be pre-ordered now from the company's website for from 15 per month for a minimum plan with no free minutes to 80. Those who mainly want the phone will find it costs 195.74p on some of the cheapest calling plans.

This is the second Google Android phone, the first is the T-Mobile G1which is already available. Along with the Android operating system the phone has a full touch screen, 500MB of internal memory and can also take a 2GB memory card.

Other details include support for 3G and Wi-Fi and a camera with 3.2-megapixels.

Roger Burkhardt, chief executive of Ingres, suggested that open source products now in Oracle's portfolio such as the MySQL database and Glassfish application server would cause it a problem because "Oracle won't allow them to cannibalise the license revenues from their core database and Weblogic application server business".

"Customers won't see the long-term investments required to create a competitive enterprise-class mission and are likely to see MySQL make even more use of proprietary Oracle interfaces and management tools," he said. He believes that Oracle's intention will be to find revenue from the software that up to now has been available at little or no cost.

With the merger, Oracle which has always been a software company, now will find itself selling Sun Microsystems hardware, a position that Burkhardt believes the company has been forced into because "the revenue and earnings momentum from the string of acquisitions that Oracle has made is forcing them to buy into the hardware business as they have run out of software assets to buy".

"Really?", said in a tone of disbelief was the average answer. Some could claim to have been ready for something like it, but generally they were pretty surprised by the revelation that it was not just speculation but that, bar the usual regulatory details, it was a done deal.

Martin Fink, HP's vice president in charge of business critical systems, had the most reasoned comment to make. "We plan for various scenarios and this was one of those possible," he said. But it was not one of the most likely options, he admitted.

Fink said he could see issues though. "Sun is a place of experiment, a 'play-pen' for trying out ideas," he told ZDNet UK. "Oracle is a place where you go to make money."

It is going to be interesting to see "how that warm inclusive structure, mixes with Oracle," he said.

We will also have to wait and see what Oracle wants to do with the Sun hardware, he said. "If they decide they want to stick with the hardware then that brings a whole new competitor to the strategy," Fink said.

Franseco Serafini, the head of HP's Technology Solutions Group in EMEA was not too fazed by the prospect either and he tried to also maintain that HP, if not expecting it, thought it was a likely option.

"In a market where stock is going down there are many options for companies," he said. "What [Oracle] needs now is a plan for the next five years because everything is down and they need to be prepared for the market picking up."

Overall the HP executives thought that the news was interesting and it was not difficult to see their internal calculators trying to work out any options the move would give them. This in its own way is good news for Oracle and Sun customers. If companies like HP cannot see an immediate reason to scoff at this purchase and instead are beginning to consider the serious options, it would suggest that Oracle, in line with the company's usual practice, has at least given the competition something to think about.

Using a single interface, the aim behind Blade System Matrix is that users have a one-stop shop to build a complete data centre solution as quickly and easily as possible.

HP has its sight set on making it as easy as possible to install a complete system using an integrated pool of resources that operate in both physical and virtual environment, the company said.

Talking to HP executives at the launch of the new system on Monday it became clear that their ambitions for the new system are high. The Matrix is intended to be all you need to set up a complete data centre system in one package as an alternative to having to go out and design and build your own data centre.

No more having to work out what different resources you need, with what processing and networking capacities or having to worry about where you are going to source them from. Instead, says HP, you can get them all in one box.

On top of that, it starts at $150,000. Pricing outside the US has yet to be fixed.

HP said it showed evidence of what can be possible in terms of simplicity of approach. The aim, the company said, is to remove the complexity that makes systems expensive and hard to implement. The complete packaged system includes the new HP LeftHand P4000 SAN storage system, the StorageWorks SB40c storage system bundled in, a StorageWorks modular disk system and finally the Insight Capacity Advisor Virtualisation System.

HP is selling Matrix through its HP Factory Express which it said is intended to make it a little easier to set the whole thing up. The company will be offering on-sight deployment services to guide users through setting up their own, complete Matrix system. Thanks to the purchase of EDS, HP has access to the human resources required to guide users through the process, the company believes.

Although the aim is to provide a starter-kit in one package, HP said it can help users build a systems architecture that can scale up to 1,000 systems.

BladeSystem Matrix is an ambitious idea. All a user's requirements for computer, storage and services available in an off-the-peg system that comes in one box and ready to go. Choosing an idea for expanding a data centre and then having to work out the different resources required and where to source them, is a time-consuming process. The idea of one system that offers a possible answer to all the problems and that can be sourced from one supplier, is bound to have an appeal.

Available in a 1.8in and 2.5in form factors the disk the SDD comes in 256,128, and 64GB capacities.

They are amongst the first SSDs to feature full-disk encryption the company said in a statement. The most common form of encryption is software based, while full-disk encryption is hardware based. When implemented on an SSD it means that the encryption should be completely contained on the SSD and so it is never held in the operating system or the applications software where it is easier to interfere with.

Other benefits include Wave Systems' management software, Embassy Trusted Drive Manager which offers remote management.

Wave also said it has life cycle management of the drive including pre-boot authentication of the drive, drive administrators and users. Trusted Drive Manager also offers backup of a drive's credentials.

Again on Thursday, Dell announced that it will be offering the Samsung SSD. It gave scant details but said in a statement that it believed Samsung and Wave were offering "one of the most effective ways to secure data" and that the SSD was delivering "some of the fastest encrypted storage available".

The company said in a statement that Buddie Ceronie, current vice president, UK, Ireland and Southern Africa, is leaving the company "to pursue other professional opportunities".

Before joining Avaya, Shorten worked at Irisys, a technology company focused on the retail sector, where he held responsibility for worldwide sales and marketing, the company said. Before that he worked for Symbol Technologies where he had joined as part of Motorola following its acquisition of Symbol.

Last month, the US District Court cut the amount that a jury had earlier imposed on the company from $184 million to $53 million in favour of the university. HP said it will increase its reserve to reflect the developments and expects to take 1 or 2 cent charge per share in its second-quarter earnings per share.

The patent dispute stems back to allegations that HP's PA-8000 microprocessor violated the patents held by the university. The HP-8000 was manufactured from 1996 to 2005. At the time it was a sophisticated unit for use in workstations and servers.

According to a report in Forbes magazine on Thursday, Dr Won-Pyo Hong, executive vice president at Samsung, has said the company's first Android phone is scheduled to launch in June.

Two Android phones are scheduled for launch inside the US, and will be "totally different" from each other due to operator preferences, according to Hong.

Samsung also plans to deliver one Android phone in Europe, Hong told Forbes, because, "in Europe, you can launch one common device with several carriers".

Samsung declined to comment on Monday about a European launch for its Android device. A Samsung spokesperson told ZDNet UK that a launch of an Android phone was due in the second half of 2009, but declined to give further details, or comment on probable carriers. According to the Forbes article on Thursday, the likely US carriers are T-Mobile and Sprint.

Currently the only company that has made an Android phone available is T-Mobile, with its G1 device.

Moblin was a project under development by Intel which has effectively handed control over to the Linux Foundation. The Moblin project "will be supported by the LF", the Foundation said in a statement.

"This is a departure for Intel,” Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation told the New York Times. “This is a company that has the resources and internal staff to create innovative technology on their own. They obviously see Moblin as a strategic platform.”

“The Linux Foundation is the perfect environment to take Moblin to the next level,” said Doug Fisher, vice president, Intel Software. “The open source process delivers multiple benefits to any project, including faster innovation and increased technology visibility.”

"Through the Linux Foundation, an even broader community can contribute to Moblin becoming the predominant Linux-based platform for mobile devices.” said Zemlin.

Fifteen operating system vendors have committed to distribute Moblin-based products, including Asianux, Canonical, DeviceVM, gOS, MontaVista, Novell, and Wind River.

Called SnapshotMyVM, it is a standalone application that can do the tedious job of documenting and recording all the virtual machines that are available and that work with VMware's ESX server environments. The tool is available from the company's website at no charge.

"Documenting physical servers is one of a systems administrator's least desirable and time-consuming tasks ," VKernel founder and chief executive, Alex Bakman, said in a statement. "In a virtual data center, it becomes even more challenging as the environment is dynamic and static documentation becomes quickly outdated."

SnapshotMyVM is intended as a tool to automate the process and so make it easier to identify, document, and get an inventory of virtual machines.

One reason for the surprise was that also on Wednesday, SGI filed for bankruptcy protection with debts of $526.5m on assets of $390.5m.

A company spokesperson for Rackable said that an offer had been made and now it will wait for some details to be cleared up before any deal can be finalised. In a statement Rackable said any deal was "subject to adjustment in certain circumstances, plus the assumption of certain liabilities associated with the acquired assets" or as the spokesperson put it, "some whatnot".

The spokesperson also told ZDNet UK that it was expected that the sale of SGI's assets would be completed within 60 days.

According to Reuters, SGI's operations would be part of any sale but would not be part of the bankruptcy process.

SGI had only just emerged from a previous Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2006. That experience was blamed on declining revenue and increased competition.

For its part, Rackable said that it had suspended its previously announced plan to repurchase of up to $40m of its own stock.

In a survey conducted recently, Gartner looked at three European countries, the UK, Germany and France and looked at different applications running SaaS, including CRM and ERP which, appears to have made little headway in the field.

The survey found that companies in France and the UK "are significantly ahead of those in Germany in terms of SaaS adoption", Gartner said in a statement. However, Gartner also said that the responses from German organisations suggested "that the difference in adoption levels will shrink if users follow through on their plans for SaaS adoption in 2009".

In terms of the number of companies using SaaS, 71 percent of those surveyed said that their organisations were currently using SaaS applications. The level in the UK was only slight below at 68 percent. Only 45 percent in Germany said they were using software.

The survey also looked at actual levels of SaaS use compared with the number of employees an organisation could have using SaaS. The results showed that higher levels of usage and adoption were in France.

The survey findings on the length of time that SaaS applications have been in use across the three countries showed that France has a slight lead in terms of adoption. Only 4 per cent of French respondents said that they had used SaaS applications for less than a year, compared with 17 per cent in the UK and 21 per cent in Germany.

Gartner said that it has been "a traditional assumption" that the UK is more advanced in the adoption of SaaS than France and Germany and so it was revealing that this metric showed that the opposite was true, said Gartner.

“We believe that North American vendors have enjoyed greater success in the UK because less effort is required to localise products and sales and marketing strategies,” said Chris Pang, research analyst at Gartner.

The companies that have been most successful in driving through adoption of SaaS are Salesforce.com and RightNow Technology, Pang said. "They typify the reason why companies are able to success in SaaS," said Pang. "The most successful applications are easy to deploy and to deploy many times with more or less the same software."

For the same reason, ERP vendors have struggled to be successful in SaaS, said Pang. "They run very complex applications with lots of different parts of the software that need a lot of changes and adapting before you will get the software to run in quantity," Pang told ZDNet UK.

"Look at an application like WebEx, there is not a lot of customisation required so it has been a success," said Pang.

SUPPLEMENT ON ERP AND IDC: On Wednesday (the say after writing the blog) this came in from IDC:

"A recent IDC survey in Western Europe shows that 2009 spending on ERP applications will be strongly impacted by the current economic crisis. 21 percent of all respondents said their ERP spend would be lower or much lower in 2009 than in 2008. France will be particularly hard hit, but the Nordics and Germany will feel less of an impact. A closer look at ERP spending plans also shows that larger enterprises with more than 2,500 employees will be most vulnerable to ERP spending cutbacks.

"On a more positive note, respondents hinted at increased average spending in 2009 for all other software categories, including security software, storage software, databases, systems management, and systems software. This confirms IDC's view that infrastructure software spend will be the most resilient to macroeconomic fluctuations. There are also clear indications that CRM applications will see increased spending in 2009.

"IT cost reduction was the most popular IT priority for 2009, selected by 23 percent of all respondents. However, this implies that 77 percent of all respondents had other IT priorities besides cost, including IT security, support of new business requirements, IT infrastructure consolidation, and business applications, each of which were selected by at least 10 percent of all respondents."

Designed for use in servers, the range available, include a 16GB inline memory module and an 8GB registered dual inline memory module (RDIMM). Last year, Samsung used 50nm technology in 2Gb DDR3 module in PC applications.

DDR3 RAM memory is technically known as double data rate three, dynamic random access memory and is used in storage applications that require a high-bandwidth so that they can operate more quickly.

Part of the synchronous dynamic random access (SDRAM) family of chip technologies DDR3 is an improvement over its predecessor SDDRAM 2 as it can transfer twice the data rate so that the memory bus is faster and it supports higher peak rates.

However, even as the performance of memory continues to improve the semiconductor market is having a difficult time because the price of DRAM is falling. According to the analysts, Gartner, the industry is facing a consecutive decline in annual revenues for the first time in its history.

Worldwide semiconductor revenue for 2009 is forecast to total $219.2bn (142.7bn) — a 16.3 percent decline from 2008 revenue, Gartner said in December. The decline between 2007 and 2008 was 4.4 percent.

"This market was originally forecast to do a modest loss and then revenues fell off a cliff," said Andrew Norwood, a research vice president at Gartner at that time. "Next year, we get the full brunt of the downturn."

The sale was due to be completed for 560m. The acquisition is intended to marry Autonomy's strength in enterprise search with Interwoven's skills in web-content management. The combined customer base is more than 20,000.

Autonomy immediately went to work when it said that on Thursday it would be ready to announce its first product that would integrate software from the two companies. However, the company would not release any details ahead of time.

As a result of the acquisition, Anthony Bettencourt, who formerly was chief executive of Verity when it was bought by Autonomy, will be chief executive of the Interwoven part of the joint company, Autonomy Interwoven.

Joe Cowan, who was chief executive of Interwoven, will now be part of the group management working for Dr Michael Lynch, OBE, Autonomy's founder and chief executive.

Lynch commented that, "with the addition of Interwoven to the Autonomy group, the intelligence of Autonomy's Idol technology can be used to extend Interwoven's web content capabilities across 100,000 corporate websites, intranets and extranets already powered by Interwoven".

Autonomy's Idol software is one element of Autonomy's plans to expand its market share of the regulatory, legal and compliance market. Idol, or 'intelligent data operating layer', is part of Autonomy's infrastructure software, which helps organisations automate the analysis of their information.

However, the WSJ did say that, "it is unclear whether the negotiations will result in a transaction".

The two companies have a common interest in the use of open source, Linux and Java, in the data centre which could free them from being reliant on software from Microsoft.

Any deal would also strengthen IBM as it fights with HP to be the number one in the systems market and in the data centre. HP took the number one spot from IBM when it purchased EDS in 2008.

It is too early in any transaction to know the value of a possible sale of Sun to IBM but the WSJ did suggest that "IBM is likely to pay at least $6.5bm (4.6bn) in cash to acquire Sun".

This is a time of likely change in data centre strategy by the major companies. Part of this will be as a result of Cisco's move into data centres on Monday. Both IBM and HP will have been working out how to react to Cisco's move into their specialist area and a move by IBM to buy Sun would be a first step.

Tony Lock, an analysts with Freeform Dynamics said that a possible purchase of Sun by IBM would be a "logical move" but that the companies had "very complementary strategies".

Aimed at the data centre but for use in networks from medium scale to high-end, Juniper Networks are intended to keep it ahead of its much bigger rival, Cisco, the company said.

Juniper has a hard task ahead since Cisco is far ahead in all round networking and it is planning a new product launch for Monday, themed, "Unified Computing".

Meanwhile, Juniper's new firewalls the SRX3400 and SRX3600 SRX series, extend the company's SRX3000 line of network and security products for the data centre. Juniper said that the gateway products can lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 65 percent but, perhaps more significantly, it said that the arrays need less rack space and can reduce power consumption.

The arrays have different footprints based on the types of services and number of input/output and services processing cards (SPCs) stocked on each array. The idea is that unlike single-purpose security appliances or traditional chassis platforms which will only handle one type of service the SRX Services Gateways can have a range of services at the same time.

The aim, said Juniper's solutions marketing manager for Europe, Gilles Trachsel is to offer a flexible network solution."With others you get one chassis, one network, one service, but with this solution you could have one chassis with multiple networks," he told ZDNet UK.

The idea is flexibility, Trachsel said. When asked how Juniper could compete with the largest company in the market, Cisco, Trachsel said, "They cannot offer the service level we have, and I think we score on network access control (NAC)."

At the end of February, the first rumours started that the company was about to be sold to Oracle. No surprise there as Oracle is the traditional recipient of rumours at times like this.

Virtual Iron appeared to be as good a candidate as any other. It easily satisfied the main requirements of good technology, a good name and working in an up and coming field, such as virtualisation.

I was waiting to see what happens next until I read an article that brought this issue into sharper focus for me. Writing in Information Week, Charles Babcock, pointed out the following in answer to the question, why buy Virtual Iron?

"There's an obvious answer. Oracle VM is based on open source Xen, as is Virtual Iron's hypervisor. So the tools that Virtual Iron has built out around its hypervisor, such as LiveMigration for moving virtual machines around, and LivePower, for detecting and decommissioning underutilized VMs, could be useful in an Oracle customer's environment."

Of course, this does not mean that any sale is going to happen, that will be down to the finance people, but it suddenly means the idea make a lot of good sense. Still, how often do things happen because the idea makes good sense? Well, sometimes perhaps.

SQL Data Services is a scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility service.

This is what Microsoft apparently said through the director of its Software Plus Services (software-as-a-service or SaaS as the rest of world calls it) strategy Shannon Day:

" … there is definitely a movement afoot to let you resell services, and you would own the paper and agreement with the customer."

In other words the news, as reported by the trade newspaper and web site CRN, was good for resellers of Microsoft software. They could "own" any relationships they had with Microsoft and Microsoft's customers and Microsoft would be happy with a cut of any deal.

We asked Microsoft to comment or enlighten us further but received no direct reply until Tuesday. Microsoft it now seems had made an error, or rather a Microsoft executive had unfortunately given us a misleading message.

We received a statement from Microsoft:

"In Q2 2009, Microsoft will give Microsoft Online Service partners the opportunity to create a Microsoft Online Services order tailored to their customer. Once enabled, partners will populate an order with recommended services and quantities while designating themselves as partner of record. The order generates a URL the partner sends directly to the customer to confirm and complete the order. Partners continue to own and manage their customer relationships, while Microsoft manages the billing process."

So there it is. Yes, resellers can "own" the customer/Microsoft agreement but when it comes to the real heart of it, which is of course the money, Microsoft is still keeping control.

The issue is important for the development of Microsoft's software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy, which Microsoft prefers to call Software plus Services (S+S) . This is the delivery method for Microsoft's business productivity online suite (BPOS)

Shannon Day, director of Microsoft's S+S program told CRN and the Xchabge conference in New Orleans on Saturday that, "there is definitely a movement afoot to let you resell services, and you would own the paper and agreement with the customer."

In other words, the resellers would retain control over any agreements with customers. This is potentially a good thing for customers as well as resellers since customers will be buying the software through resellers and it should mean there are clear lines of responsibility. For customers, if they are unhappy, they can go after the reseller rather than having to tackle a company as large as Microsoft.

The Microsoft BPOS bundles hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, and LiveMeeting.

"This underlines the point that there is no gorilla in the market for SaaS," said analyst Jon Collins of Freeform Dynamics. "Microsoft would like to be that gorilla, but it isn't. Nobody is and that is what makes this an interesting market."

What we are seeing now, said Collins, is "a number of companies like Microsoft and Salesforce and others, all trying to see how much of this market they could own".