Ed Scannell

IBM Corp. on Friday rolled out a Unix-based supercomputer capable of churning out up to a half trillion operations a second and that will be aimed at applications involving scientific and computing and business intelligence.

IBM Corp. appears to be wasting little time moving its recently announced on-demand computing strategy forward, as the company detailed on Thursday a program that permits software developers to adapt their applications so they can be offered as Internet-based services.

During his keynote address on Wednesday at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference in Orlando, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer is expected to unveil plans for developing a new desktop application, code-named XDocs, that promises to streamline the cumbersome process of gathering and distributing data from multiple sources.

Making good on promises made earlier this year, IBM Corp. and VeriSign Inc. on Tuesday will deliver their first set of jointly developed Web-based security services intended to help users bake trust and security into their e-business applications.

Trying to help users get more out of their existing legacy applications by exploiting the latest in Web services technologies, IBM Corp. has rolled out a new version of its WebSphere Host Integration software.

IBM Corp. this week at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco continues its ongoing attempt to rip customers away from arch-rival Sun Microsystems Inc. using Linux as its crowbar by announcing a new Solaris-to-Linux migration program.

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released the first beta of Content Management Server (CMS) 2002, which features support for XML-based Web services, improved content authoring, and tighter integration with Visual Studio .Net programming environment and support for ASP.Net.

Making good on earlier promises, IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., and VeriSign Inc. on Thursday submitted their latest version of the Web Services Security spec to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) for ongoing development.