Stories about: Dataquest

Data will flow more freely as mobile communications networks move towards a "flat IP" model, but developers and operators will face new security challenges, according to engineers gathered at the Freescale Technology Forum in Paris.

Oracle continued to top the worldwide database market last year, propelled by companies migrating to Oracle Database running on Linux, according to figures released by two leading market research companies.

Mobile phone manufacturer LG Electronics has agreed to use a version of the Palm OS designed by Palmsource in a future smart phone, which might be the first phone to use a Linux-based version of Palm OS that is under development.

Just when you thought it was over, bar the odd bit of Microsoft licence price gouging, the PC desktop wars may be about to erupt again. We know about Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and its megaphone marketing of it against MS Office but we also know that getting a SuSE Linux desktop software package and having it run your scanner, your tape drive, your printer and any other peripheral whose operation you take for granted in Microsoft's plug-and-play USB world, is pure fantasy, fit only for the most rabid Linux geek with a wardrobe full of anoraks.

Netgear next week is expected to jump into the Layer 3 Gigabit switch market with a 24-port box that can act as a hardware-based LAN router for small and midsize nets.

IBM was the leading Linux server vendor in the first quarter of 2003, according to the latest numbers from Gartner. But the vendor is seeing increased competition from fellow Unix rival HP, and particularly from Dell, which took some Linux server market share away from Big Blue last quarter.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been a consistent thorn in Intel's side with its Athlon XP desktop processors over the last few years, but hasn't made much headway against Intel's popular Xeon processors and notorious Itanium 2 processors for servers. On Tuesday, the company will unveil its Opteron server chip, which puts a new twist on a familiar technology.

While the overall server market declined last year, fourth quarter 2002 server revenue was up from the prior quarter for the top four server vendors - thanks to Linux.

Declining revenue from servers hurt most vendors in 2002, but the future looks brighter based on strong fourth-quarter revenue growth and increasing sales of Linux servers, according to market research released to vendors Monday by Dataquest, a unit of Gartner.

Motorola will launch a mobile phone that runs Linux later this year, it said Thursday, introducing yet another software platform for mobile phones.

Revenue from servers with processors from Intel is due to exceed revenue from servers with RISC processors for the first time in 2003, bringing in close to US$20 billion, a new research report predicts.