A heavyweight battle between chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. continued early in the month, with AMD unveiling its six-core “Istanbul” processor for servers. The company specifically designed the release for virtualization, database and other high-performance workloads.
While not directly responding to the release, Intel made news of its own a few days later, after it agreed to acquire Wind River Systems for a total of about US$884 million in cash. The move was widely seen as an effort by Intel to expand outside of the PC market and into the mobile industry.
One of the biggest news stories in June (and in the entire year, for that matter) was the death of international pop star Michael Jackson. In the hours following his death, Internet traffic surged, temporarily crashing Google and driving huge amounts of traffic to other popular sites such as Twitter and BBC News.
With 2009 poised to go down in smart phone history as the year Google Inc.’s Android platform truly started to take shape, Rogers Wireless teamed up with Canadian film and television star Joshua Jackson to launch the first two Android-powered phones in Canada. Both phones were manufactured by HTC Corp.
Rogers also teamed up with Bell Canada Enterprises Inc. and Telus Corp. to launch the Zoompass payment service. The service enables person-to-person money transfer via mobile smart phones.
In an effort to spread Windows 7 news across the entire year, Microsoft Corp. officially set an Oct. 22 release date for the operating system. It also offered discounted or free upgrades to Windows 7 for users who don’t mind skipping the reviews and pre-ordering early.
In a related story, the European Commission announced it would move forward with its antitrust case against Microsoft regardless of the fact that the Redmond, Wash. giant promised to strip Internet Explorer from the European release of Windows 7.
In Ottawa, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan tabled a new bill that would force ISPs to maintain wire-tappable technologies and hand over subscriber data to police without a warrant. Under the proposed legislation, ISPs would have to pick up the bill on new equipment and software, with the government agreeing to help compensate any retrofitting that needs to be done to existing networks.
Despite a future clouded in uncertainty, Sun Microsystems Inc. announced an updated release of its OpenSolaris operating system.
Dell Corp. increased its involvement in the enterprise IT space unveiling a set of pre-packaged server bundles geared toward virtual environments. The company also rolled out new updates to its EqualLogic storage and PowerEdge server product lines.
In the enterprise resource planning (ERP) space, Infor Inc. and its investor, Golden Gate Capital, formed a holding company to make an US$80 million purchase of SoftBrands. The deal was the latest in a string of acquisitions for the company aimed at branching out to the emerging manufacturing and health care markets.
