Lands' End, software vendor at contract impasse after 20-year relationship

Lands' End is at legal loggerheads with its longtime payroll software vendor over how much longer the clothier can lawfully use the application, with US$1 million in potential fees hanging in the balance. Lands' End signed a 20-year contract with Genesys Software Systems in January 1993, but the software didn't go live until Oct. 28 of that year, according to its complaint filed this week in U.S. District Court for the Western...

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CA upgrades workload automation software

CA Technologies has released the latest update to its Workload Automation software (WLA) featuring more powerful analytics tools, a streamlined user interface and expanded functionality for managing business processes throughout the enterprise. CA competes with IBM, BMC and others on workload automation. The newest release expands support for SQL Server and has enhancements to the variety of job types that can be...

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Violin Memory buys Gridiron for fast flash storage access

Flash storage vendor Violin Memory has acquired Gridiron Systems for an undisclosed sum and plans to use the company's application acceleration smarts with its flash arrays. Gridiron's operations units have already been integrated into Violin. The two companies are set to formally announce the deal on Monday. Both companies are privately held. Gridiron sells an appliance that slots in between an enterprise's storage and servers...

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Jobs' house burglar gets seven-year sentence

The man who broke into the Palo Alto, California, home of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs and stole laptops, iPads and other possessions has been sentenced to seven years in a California state prison. Kariem McFarlin, 35, was arrested in August last year by officers from the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, a Silicon Valley-based high-tech crime unit formed by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. REACT officers...

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5 PC industry omens hidden in Intel's financial statements

Multiply the joy of watching paint dry by the sheer pleasure of watching grass grow, and you'll get a decent idea of how exciting it is to parse the average corporate earnings report. But everything changes when those numbers come from Intel. Don't get me wrong: Intel's Thursday afternoon earning's call was still soul-suckingly boring. But as one of the cornerstones of the old Wintel homogeny, Intel's yearly results and...

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Wouldn't it be nice if you could always access your data from anywhere?

A business idea starts simply enough: You identify a need, and then you fill it. It seems that a number of innovative entrepreneurs have identified the need to access data from mobile devices no matter where it's stored, and we're seeing an explosion of solutions designed to address that need. Where is your data? Mine is all over the place. I have data stored locally on my PCs and tablets, and data stored on external USB hard...

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