These thee Microsoft stories weren’t the biggest news of the week, but they are worth knowing about if you missed them. One of the stories is merely a clue into an ongoing mystery surrounding Microsoft’s acquisition of some patents from Novell that have analysts speculating and open source advocates worrying. Each story sheds a little light on Microsoft’s strategy and where the company is headed. For example, the release of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 indicates how Microsoft is consolidating various enterprise management tools into a single interface.
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Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 Released
Microsoft released a commercial version its Forefront Endpoint Protection software this week. It’s now available from Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. IT managers can now deploy, configure, manage, update, and report on FEP protections using System Center Configuration Manager 2007.
The significance of this is that Microsoft is now firmly in the software security business as the space converges. Earlier this year, Intel purchased McAfee in an attempt to bring security software closer to hardware.
Microsoft Wasn’t Alone In Purchasing Those 882 Novell Patents
Florian Muller discovered the companies behind CPTN Holdings, the members of mysterious organization that purchased 882 patents from Novell when Attachmate bought Novell last month. It turns out that CPTN consists of Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle.
What patents these companies bought remains a mystery.
Rumor: Oracle and Microsoft in Bidding War for Autonomy
British tabloid Daily Mail “reported” that Oracle and Microsoft are in a bidding war for enterprise analytics company Autonomy. We suggest taking this rumor with a grain of salt. But if true, this could be interesting as Arik Hesseldahl writes for All Things Digital:
On its face this rumor is interesting because now that the battle to roll up the data storage firms is largely resolved following Dell’s acquisition of Compellent, one of the next dealmaking battle fronts for the large IT vendors is going to be software that makes managing data in all its various forms easier, more powerful and less costly.
This could signal more consolidation in the business analytics field, something we talked about when IBM purchased Netezza last fall.
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