Software

The worldwide router market will grow six per cent over the next five years, while optical transport and mobility infrastructure won't see significant growth until 2005, according to Dell'Oro Group Inc.

Over the six months from July 2003, Debian has been the fastest growing Linux distribution according to Bath, England-based Internet researcher Netcraft Ltd. Netcraft counted active sites containing the name of a Linux distribution in the Apache Corp. server header.

On the heels of landing its largest customer, Procket Networks Inc. has lost its COO and perhaps its founder and chief scientist, Tony Li.

Oracle Corp. is showing its commitment to the South African government

IT managers at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. are weighing a multimillion-dollar project to deploy intelligent switches that could virtualize the brokerage's storage-area networks and give its technology staffers central control of the data stored on the SANs.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to release midyear the second version of its Java Desktop System, featuring new tools for centralized management of client systems

Executives from IBM Corp.'s Lotus software unit used the opening presentations Monday at Lotus' annual user show in Orlando to sketch out the strategy behind IBM's year-old Lotus Workplace platform, and to reassure users that IBM won't abandon its core of Lotus users building on the Notes/Domino architecture.

Lotus Notes and Domino users and administrators are slated to get the latest product road map and hear about upcoming features in the collaboration products at the annual Lotusphere user conference in Orlando, Fla., that gets under way Monday.