SunGard announced a partnership with VMware. This strategic partnership will help organizations leverage VMware's proven virtualization platform with open access to SunGard's vast infrastructure, providing secondary data center facilities. Ensuring availability and recoverability of applications, systems and technology in the face of disruptions is a requirement for today's organizations. While 24-48-hour recovery windows were commonplace five years ago, many business leaders now require IT to recover systems in less than eight hours, with even more aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) coming soon.

Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's cross-platform prowess, important to Microsoft's place in the data center. Microsoft has released a public beta of so-called Cross-Platform Extensions to its System Center Operations Manager 2007, which for the first time can manage HP-UX, Red Hat, Solaris and SUSE out-of-the-box.

Virtualization is quickly becoming a staple technology for enterprise IT. The theme of this November's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo is 'The Next Generation of Virtualization.' The Call for Papers, which is now open, welcomes submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not only of how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is fundamentally altering the way that businesses run IT.

International Virtualization Conference & Expo faculty alumni include such notable speakers as: Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat; Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware; Vern Brownell, founder and CEO of Egenera; Simon Crosby, founder and CTO of Citrix XenSource; Hubert Yoshida, vice president and CTO of Hitachi Data Systems; Jeffrey Nick, CTO of EMC; David Greschler, director of Virtualization Strategy for Microsoft; Hal Stern, vice president and distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems; Andrew Hillier, founder and CTO of CiRBA; Alex Vasilevsky, founder and CEO of Virtual Iron; Jack Zubarev, founder and COO of SWsoft; Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin; Brett Adam, founder and CEO of rPath; Kevin Brown, founder and CEO of Kidaro; Bob Lozano, founder and CEO of Appistry; and Harry Ruda, founder and CEO of Desktone.

ClearCube announced the company's latest successes with strong market demand, technology innovations, customer and partner success. ClearCube's continued high standing in the centralized computing space is demonstrated by the company's momentum in a series of corporate developments over the past year.

A lot of developers get forced into writing SQL as part of their jobs. Should they be doing it? I don't think so. It's not necessarily the best of ideas, and in MOST cases should probably be avoided at all costs. Besides, developers cannot be experts in every language or technology right? Something has got to give somewhere. It's usually their SQL skills that suffer.

Brightcove announced distribution partnerships with Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh, giving media companies new opportunities to expand the reach of their online video, while maintaining control over their content and advertising inventory. Now media companies using the Brightcove Internet TV platform can program and syndicate advertising-supported content into social networks, social media applications, and online video destination.

More than 30 million mobile phone users in the Philippines now have access to the latest in mobile communications with a new video SMS service offered by Smart Communications (SMART) and built on NMS Communications' proven Video SMS solution. SMART, the leading wireless services provider in the Philippines, launched a 'Video Avatar' service in December 2007 that allows users to send and receive video messages featuring either live video or a chosen avatar.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), defender of the GPL's honor, said Monday that Xterasys Corporation, one of the companies it sued in November for not providing users with the source code to the GPL 2-protected Busybox Unix utilities as the license requires, has settled out of court. That makes two renegades brought to justice. Monsoon Multimedia, the first company SFLC sued on behalf of Busybox' creators, also settled. And a few days ago SFLC sued Verizon Communications, the phone company, for patent infringement because it's not publishing the source code for the Busybox widgetry embedded in the Actiontec router it distributes connecting customers to the Internet, TV and phone. Verizon has maybe nine million FiOS customers.

Limelight Networks announced that Blockbuster has exclusively selected Limelight Networks' rich media CDN and Microsoft Silverlight to provide the technical streaming capabilities for the first studio-backed feature streamed in its entirety -- JACKASS 2.5 -- to be distributed directly online by Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, MTV New Media group from MTV Networks and BLOCKBUSTER.