IBM and TDK Launch Joint Research & Development Project for Advanced MRAM

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and TDK Corporation today announced a joint research and development program to develop high capacity MRAM (Magnetic Random Access Memory) technology utilizing the spin momentum transfer effect. The companies believe that harnessing the spin momentum transfer effect will allow a much more compact memory cell than is possible with present approaches.

The companies will leverage their respective expertise in areas of fundamental research for new memory technology and magnetic device development to create a high density, high capacity MRAM integrated circuit which can be used as standalone memory or embedded into other IC solutions.
"This collaborative initiative reinforces IBM's commitment to explore new phenomena for memory applications," said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. "The project will focus on creating and demonstrating advanced magnetic materials in demanding memory chip designs."

"This joint research and development will broaden the application of magnetic materials which has been TDK's core technology since 1935," said Mr. Minoru Takahashi, CTO, TDK Corporation.

IBM has been a leader in the development of MRAM memory technology and a pioneer in the fundamental research and development of the magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) and in the prediction and study of the spin momentum transfer effect upon which the memory is based. TDK Corporation is the leader in applying MTJ technology into recording heads for Hard Disk Drives. Both companies have extensive research and patents in design and materials for magnetic data recording.

The research work will be conducted at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, IBM's ASIC Design Center in Burlington, VT and TDK's subsidiary R&D Center in Milpitas, CA.

MRAM offers significant advantages over competing memory technologies including low power usage, high speed, unlimited endurance (read and write cycles), and inherent non-volatility (retains data without the need for continued power). Market adoption of MRAM has been limited by the inability to cost effectively increase capacity. Spin momentum transfer technology enables MRAM to significantly reduce cell size and thereby increase capacity cost-effectively while maintaining the low power, endurance and non-volatility advantages, potentially making MRAM a preferred solution for memory applications in the automotive, cell phone, handheld computing, and industrial controls.

For more information about IBM Research, visit http://www.ibm.com/research

For more information about TDK, visit http://www.tdk.co.jp/tetop01/index.htm

Microsoft Licenses Graphics Technology to Award-Winning Weta Digital

Microsoft Corp. and Weta Digital Ltd., an Academy Award-winning visual effects company, today announced a licensing agreement that will enhance Weta’s ability to create graphics and special effects for its movie, commercial and other multimedia productions.

“We are pleased that one of the leading visual effects companies in the world has selected computer graphics technologies developed at Microsoft Research to deliver newer, richer graphics and special effects to audiences around the world,” said Louis Carbonneau, general manager for the Intellectual Property Licensing Group at Microsoft. “We believe the graphics technologies developed in our research labs to be among the best in the world, and are pleased that we can collaborate with entertainment industry leaders, through our new graphics technology IP licensing program, to bring new visual experiences to consumers.

Weta Digital, formed in 1997 by a group of New Zealand filmmakers — including Academy Award-winners Peter Jackson, Jamie Selkirk and Richard Taylor — offers world-class visual effects for international feature films and commercials. The company is best known for its visual effects work on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy (New Line Cinema), and more recently for its work on “King Kong” (Universal Studios), all of which were directed by Peter Jackson.

“Last year, Microsoft showed us some new research in computer graphics that we thought would be a great addition to our toolkit,” said Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor at Weta Digital. “We realized that by working directly with Microsoft Research, we could develop these ideas faster and spend more time on the creative effects. It’s great to be working with a talented group, like Microsoft Research, whose aim is to open up new horizons in digital imaging for filmmakers.”

Microsoft Research will present graphics research this week at SIGGRAPH 2007, the Association for Computing Machinery’s 34th annual international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, in San Diego. Microsoft will present 13 percent of the papers on the 2007 papers program, more than any other organization. Links to the papers Microsoft contributed to the conference this year as well as in previous years are available at http://research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/publish/SIGGRAPH_2007.aspx.

More information on Microsoft Research is available at http://research.microsoft.com.

New Release of BEA AquaLogic BPM Designed To Help Drive Better Business Decisions And Give IT More Power

BEA Systems, Inc. a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, today announced the general availability of BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0, a market-leading software suite designed to integrate the modeling, execution and monitoring of end-to-end business processes to support real-time process optimization. The new release of BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 introduces improved ad-hoc collaboration and business intelligence capabilities that can help business participants share knowledge, coordinate business activities more effectively, and conduct real-time process simulations to help optimize process outcomes. It is also designed to provide IT and developers a more powerful process application platform by offering one of the most comprehensive supports for industry standards, including Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), XML Process Definition Language (XPDL 2.0) and the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL 2.0). For developers, BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 introduces a new Eclipse-based development environment and maintains its industry-leading role in extensibility to Java, .NET and emerging development languages and frameworks.

“Companies that have been successfully using business process management at the project or division level are now asking for a process platform that is designed to grow with their business needs to support thousands of complex, multinational, and often mission-critical processes. Businesses cannot take a chance on an unproven, departmental product,” said Shane Pearson, vice president of marketing and product management for BEA Systems. “IT needs a product that can scale and business users need clear and intuitive tools and this major release of BEA AquaLogic® BPM offers both in a single, unified solution.”

"We started with BPM at the tactical level to address a few processes that were slow, manual and time consuming," said Peter Haas, director of technology at the Supreme Court of Louisiana. "But with the rapid success we've seen using BEA's collaborative BPM, we're growing our process improvements to the strategic level, tackling mission-critical items that affect the overall success of the Court."

More Business Value, More Power for IT

The “B” in BPM stands for business, yet many business process management solutions underserve the diverse and nuanced needs of business users. Early business process management projects focused on well understood business processes, like employee on-boarding or order automation. Today, companies are pursuing strategic adoption of BPM, using business process management software to optimize highly complex processes, like distributed healthcare claims processing or financial trading settlement. These strategic processes involve complex decision-making and exception-handling, where the most ideal outcome is dependent on the assembly of diverse information from multiple systems and the effective collaboration between process participants.

BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to help companies evolve their use of BPM from simply optimizing the business to transforming the business. This new release delivers one of the most comprehensive support for user, system or event-initiated business processes with an expanded set of capabilities focused on the BPM business-user experience. These include:

• Smarter processes with decision activities – Many processes involve decision points where business guidelines are in place, but where the final decision must be carefully considered by a human. BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to help organizations learn from past decisions by capturing actions, offering inline quantitative data based on past decisions history, and allowing advanced simulation testing, yielding more effective participant decisions or activity automation;


• Process participation through business users’ tool of choice – An updated user experience framework within BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 called WorkSpace Extensions is designed to provide support for a variety of end-user experiences, helping participants engage in process activities through their tool of choice, including enterprise portals, stand-alone process workspaces, email clients and RSS readers.


• Define and change business rules with ease – Any well-mapped process contains a number of implicit or explicit business rules about how processes should run. BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to let users easily define business rules through web-based tools and allows them to change rules on-the-fly.


• Industry-leading service orchestration and integration – BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 is designed to allow business processes to be easily registered as services with any standards compliant Enterprise Service Bus or Service Registry. In addition, BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 features pre-built integration with BEA AquaLogic® Service Bus and BEA AquaLogic® Service Registry to optimize and automate the end-to-end management and governance of process services.

All in One

While many BPM suites are optimized for a single audience – either IT or business users - BEA is a leading company with a proven solution that is designed to fully support both groups in their collaborative quest for process excellence. BEA AquaLogic® BPM 6.0 moves beyond the limits of traditional human workflow or system-to system process technology by bridging the two into a single, unified, enterprise-class BPM suite built to support the complex, collaborative processes of today's heterogeneous enterprise.

BEA AquaLogic® Business Process Management 6.0 is now generally available and downloadable at: http://commerce.bea.com/products/aqualogic/bpm/albpm.jsp.
For more information, please join a Web seminar titled “Collaborative BPM - Bridging Business and IT” on July 31, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. PST. To register, please visit http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=bea_albpm_31jul2007.htm&FP=/content/news_events/events. For additional information, please visit http://www.bea.com/bpm.

About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: BEAS) is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. Information about how BEA is enabling customers to transform their business by building a Liquid Enterprise(TM) can be found at bea.com.

HP Resolves Ink Patent Infringement Suit Against Pelikan

HP today announced that Germany-based Pelikan Hardcopy Deutschland GmbH and the Swiss Pelikan Hardcopy (International) AG have admitted claims asserted by HP in an action for patent infringement filed with the Düsseldorf Regional Court in Germany.

Based on this admission, the court issued a judgment ordering Pelikan to stop importing and distributing the infringing cartridges and to pay damages to HP. Pelikan also was ordered to recall all infringing products that might still be in the distribution channel.

In May, HP alleged that Pelikan infringed multiple HP patents related to the print cartridges and the ink formulation found in Pelikan products. Pelikan has admitted HP’s claims regarding all patents.

The accused Pelikan products were new cartridges, as opposed to remanufactured, and had been sourced from a third party and imported into Germany. They were sold under the Pelikan brand and designated as H06 and H08 color cartridges.

"At HP, we take our investment in intellectual property very seriously and are pleased to resolve this matter without extensive litigation," said Michael Hoffmann, senior vice president, Supplies, Imaging and Printing Group, HP. “We will remain vigilant in monitoring Pelikan and others for possible patent infringement as part of our ongoing worldwide testing and enforcement efforts.” ntries where such patents are held, and promised to withdraw infringing products from the market in those countries.

About HP

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $97.1 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

Dell Plans to Acquire ASAP Software

Dell announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire ASAP Software, a leading software solutions and licensing services provider and a subsidiary of Corporate Express.

The acquisition will strengthen Dell’s existing software business by integrating ASAP’s complementary expertise in managing software licensing, purchasing, renewals, and compliance.

Under the agreement, Dell will purchase ASAP for approximately $340 million. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. It is anticipated to close during Dell’s fiscal third quarter.

“Merging Dell’s software business with ASAP is part of our effort to re-invent and simplify the way our customers get access to IT,” said Paul Bell, senior vice president and president, Dell Americas. “After the acquisition is completed, our customers will have one of the world’s leading software solutions providers as a single point of expertise and accountability for software licensing, compliance, renewal and asset management.”

ASAP is a provider of IT products and services to corporations and government organizations. Its subsidiary, License Technologies Group, specializes in licensing and e-commerce services for software publishers and their partners. Dell is increasingly being asked by corporate, government and institutional customers to deliver solutions that simplify software management. The ASAP acquisition is a key step in answering the needs of Dell customers.

“Maximizing the value of our customers’ technology investment is a hallmark of ASAP,” said Paul Jarvie, ASAP president. “We're excited about the opportunity to leverage the systems, processes, and teams we've developed over the past 23 years to serve Dell customers.”

The acquisition of ASAP furthers Dell’s long-term initiative to radically simplify IT for customers by removing cost and complexity and making technology more efficient, manageable and flexible. Dell’s strategy, developed through millions of direct conversations with customers, is based on a set of core beliefs that: Information technology shouldn’t be as complex as it is.
Customers should spend less on maintaining IT and more on innovation.
Every IT project should not require an army of consultants.
Computing should have minimal environmental impact.
Superior information drives efficiency in an IT environment.




About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS



About ASAP

ASAP provides IT products and services to corporations and government agencies headquartered in North America and Europe. Since its founding in 1984, the company has helped thousands of clients evaluate, purchase, deploy, and manage their software assets. Its expertise in volume licensing and innovative asset management solutions makes ASAP the single-source provider of choice for organizations whose objective is to maximize the value of their technology investments. With over 600 employees, ASAP serves customers through sales offices in 48 locations across North America and Europe. For more information, visit www.asap.com