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International Business Machines (IBM: 97.89, -0.41, -0.42%), a blue-chip tech company that has managed to continue to grow despite the global recession, is expected to eliminate a large number of U.S. employees from its global-business services unit, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Weeks after slashing nearly 5,000 jobs, IBM is expected to shift the work of a large number of U.S. workers to IBM employees working in India, the latest example of a successful company that is continuing to slash costs and take advantage of cheap Asian labor, the Journal reported. Representatives from IBM did not immediately respond to...

Commentary: Sale to IBM seems last, best hope for Sun Microsystems SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- It is ironic that an executive widely heralded for his technological brilliance likely will end up best known as a scavenger salesman. When Jonathan Schwartz became CEO at Sun Microsystems Inc. in 2006, the ponytailed software guru was expected to pull a struggling Silicon Valley icon away from its reliance on tech hardware and finally make some serious money out of the company's notable slate of software products, including the ever-popular Java programming language. Though Sun started to see revenue in the software business, Schwartz...

BANGALORE (Reuters) - IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc for at least $6.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, in a deal that could bolster their computer server products against rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. That would translate into a premium of about 100 percent over Sun's Nasdaq closing price Tuesday of $4.97 a share, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter. Sun, which was not immediately available for comment, has long been cited as a takeover target for International Business Machines Corp, HP, Dell Inc or Cisco Systems Inc, which this week unveiled its...

International Business Machines (IBM.N) is in talks to acquire Sun Microsystems (JAVA.O), the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. IBM is likely to pay at least $6.5 billion in cash to acquire Sun, the people told the paper. That would translate into a premium of about 100 percent over Sun's closing price Tuesday of $4.97 a share on the Nasdaq, the paper said.

IBM Unveils Building Blocks for 21st Century Infrastructure IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new services and products to help clients build a new, more dynamic infrastructure that will bring more intelligence, automation, integration, and efficiencies to the digital and physical worlds. As a result, it will enable businesses and governments to better respond to and manage challenges presented by today's globally integrated planet. The new products and services enable clients to use powerful computing systems to manage and gain insight from an increasing number of things in their physical infrastructure that are being instrumented with intelligent sensors. For example, a...

Canonical offers Office 'alternative'LinuxWorld IBM is today expected to announce expanded backing for Ubuntu in a desktop and collaboration software deal to challenge Microsoft's Windows and Office. Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, has agreed to re-distribute IBM's Lotus Symphony productivity suite with its public Linux repositories. More details are expected later today. The news follows IBM's decision earlier this year to offer a version of its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) for Ubuntu. Ubuntu is, according to the suits at IBM, "a Linux operating system that scores high marks on usability and 'the cool factor.'" The deal is expected to be...

IBM employees being laid off in North America now have an alternative to joining the growing ranks of the unemployed - work for the company abroad. Big Blue is offering its outgoing workers in the United States and Canada a chance to take an IBM job in India, Nigeria, Russia or other countries.

InformationWeek IBM Offers To Move Laid Off Workers To India Big Blue wants to help redundant U.S. employees relocate to developing markets, according to an internal document. By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek Feb. 2, 2009 URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000389 The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM's pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries. Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance...

Seven months after IBM delivered the world's fastest supercomputer, it has announced an even speedier one. IBM said on Tuesday it is developing the technology for its new Sequoia computer, with delivery scheduled in 2011 to the Department of Energy for use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia will chug along at 20 petaflops per second and is one order of magnitude quicker than its predecessor. The earlier machine, delivered in June to the Energy Department, broke the 1 petaflop barrier. Peta is a term for quadrillion and FLOP stands for floating point operations per second. Sequoia, and a smaller...

The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries. Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil. His challenge? Creating open environment for Internet users without compromising information security and privacy."IBM has established Project...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- While a number of technology giants have been making public disclosures about job cuts in recent weeks, IBM Corp. has been quietly eliminating positions in a number of divisions including its storied research unit, according to an organization seeking recognition as a union with the company. nearly 200 jobs have been cut from the research group, 1,200 from the systems technology group, over 300 from finance nearly 100 from human resources. an IBM spokesman, said the company is not commenting on the number of job cuts underway or on which business units are affected. Alliance@IBM believes...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- With the recession forcing tech companies to announce thousands of layoffs, IBM Corp. is joining the fray -- but not advertising it.The Armonk, N.Y.-based company has cut thousands of jobs over the past week, including positions in sales and the software and hardware divisions. IBM says the cuts are simply part of its ongoing efforts to watch costs, and the company won't release specific numbers, even as reports of firings stream in from IBM facilities across the country.Workers have reported layoffs in Tucson, Ariz.; San Jose, Calif.; Rochester, Minn.; Research Triangle Park, N.C.; East Fishkill, N.Y.;...

US mainframe maker T3 Technologies has filed a lawsuit against IBM with the European Union's antitrust authority for alleged illegal bundling of mainframe software and hardware. The company is accusing IBM of violating antitrust law by refusing to sell its z/OS operating system to clients who want to run the software on systems manufactured by T3. It also accuses IBM of harming competition by withholding patent licenses for its mainframe operating system and certain intellectual property. The company has asked the EC to investigate IBM's market price for its mainframe systems. It said that based on data from San Francisco-based...

IBM Corp. is forecasting significantly higher profits for 2009 than Wall Street expected, a sign that the company's focus on high-margin services and software contracts is paying off even while overall sales are slumping. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company predicted at least $9.20 per share in profit in 2009. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting $8.75 a share. The rosy forecast came as IBM reported that fourth-quarter profit rose 12 percent, beating analyst estimates, . . . [but] sales fell 6 percent, missing the consensus estimate.

IBM Research scientists, in collaboration with the Center for Probing the Nanoscale at Stanford University, have demonstrated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with volume resolution 100 million times finer than conventional MRI. This result, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), signals a significant step forward in tools for molecular biology and nanotechnology by offering the ability to study complex 3D structures at the nanoscale. By extending MRI to such fine resolution, the scientists have created a microscope that, with further development, may ultimately be powerful enough to unravel the structure and interactions of proteins, paving...

After a great deal of courtroom drama and mounting legal fees, the SCO Group is expected to file its Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan in court tomorrow. Jeff Hunsaker, SCO’s president, wouldn’t provide exact details of the plan, but he said the reorganization will hopefully help the company come out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which the company filed for in September 2007. Utah-based SCO has been up to its ears in legal battles over the years, a notable one being a suit against Novell over who was the true owner of Unix. In August 2007, a U.S. District Court Judge ruled...

The final judgment [PDF] from Utah is here at last. It recites what the August 10, 2007 and July 16, 2008 orders said, but it also resolves the recent dispute over SCO's desire to voluntarily waive some claims and then bring them back to the table after an appeal, should it prove successful. Here's SCO's motion to voluntarily dismiss, and Novell's response, so you can verify that this judgment indeed represents another loss for SCO. You'll see that it was Novell that suggested the wording regarding SCO's voluntarily dismissed claims that we see in the judgment, that they be dismissed...

Commentary: Jobs has the cash, and may want more control of devices SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- A brewing battle between Apple Inc. and its frenemy, IBM Corp., over the role of an executive who at one time managed Big Blue's PowerPC chip business may be an early sign that the Silicon Valley wunderkind is considering designing some of its own semiconductors. On Tuesday, Apple said it was hiring Mark Papermaster from IBM as a senior vice president of devices hardware engineering. Apple made the hire despite a lawsuit last week by Big Blue against Papermaster. IBM wants to keep him...

IBM (NYSE: IBM) is showing that some companies can still raise cash in these troubled times. Big Blue is selling $4 billion in debt in a multiple maturity offering. The company is showing that the credit market terms may not be ideal but the credit markets are at least somewhat available for strong companies. It appears that the company is selling 5-year noted at a spread of 387.5 basis points over treasuries. The deal spread for a 10-year issuance was also at a spread of 387.5 basis points over treasuries, and its 30-year component has a spread of 400...

IBM Corp. announced its third-quarter results earlier than expected Wednesday, and the company beat Wall Street's profit estimate and reaffirmed its full-year 2008 guidance. The stock, a component of the Dow Jones industrial average, gained nearly 4 percent in after-hours trading on the news.