Acquisitions Boost ZLand’s ERM Efforts; Telenetics Goes Online
The kid gloves are coming off in the hometown rivalry between communication chip makers Broadcom Corp. and Conexant Systems Inc., if recent press is any indication. The two companies, which have barely acknowledged the other’s existence up to now, are getting more aggressive about marking their territory in the high-speed data wars.
Not that there hadn’t been hints of an impending contest between them: an article in this paper last summer suggested a growing struggle, and Broadcom chief Henry Nicholas bragged in a Forbes article a few months ago about luring away Conexant’s engineers.
But Conexant’s first clear shot was fired last week when officials there touted a new chip design that promised to shrink the price of cable modems. The move was Conexant’s most blatant signal since spinning off from Rockwell International in January that it intends to become a player in the space now dominated by Broadcom.
The move apparently got out of hand when a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times quoted a Conexant engineer who predicted the design would pass muster with CableLabs, the standards organization that tests such innovations. CableLabs’ certification is a stamp of approval designed to boost off-the-shelf cable modem sales by guaranteeing the devices are compatible with a variety of systems, and normally, the process goes unnoticed by anyone but industry insiders.
In a press release that came within hours of CableLabs’ rejection of the Conexant design a few days later, Broadcom unveiled its next-generation BCM3350 cable-modem chip , and went out of its way to remind readers that its chips are already certified.
Conexant officials, meanwhile, shrugged off the standards rejection, saying most designs aren’t approved on the first try, anyway.
It appears Broadcom won the PR battle this time around, but I have the feeling the war is far from over.
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ZLand.com, an Aliso Viejo company that designs web-based applications for small businesses, has acquired two companies that specialize in the growing market for “enterprise relationship management” software.
The company purchased ActionWare Corp. of Emeryville and EMT Inc., a company based in Atlanta. ActionWare made software in the burgeoning category, and EMT was ActionWare’s primary reseller. Terms of the deal weren’t released.
Enterprise relationship management, or ERM, is an offshoot of traditional enterprise resource management tools designed to automate and integrate different back office functions of businesses, such as billing, payroll, scheduling and ordering. Relationship management adds functions such as sales and customer service, smoothing the flow of information between different parts of an operation, allowing, for instance, a sales department to know how much merchandise they can sell or helping customer service to check the status of an order.
ZLand plans to integrate the ActionWare products into its own line by early next year.
For more: www.zland.com.
Consumers lease their cars, rent their houses and are throwing out their answering machines for voice messaging , why should they still have to buy their software?
Fountain Valley-based Personable.com is betting that computer users tired of constantly shelling out for the latest version of Microsoft Office or downloading the latest bug fixes will gladly rent the software instead over the Internet.
The company is introducing a system that will allow users to rent popular applications, including Windows 2000 and the latest Office suite, over ordinary 56-kilobits-per second connections.
Using the system, subscribers can use the software and work on a virtual desktop available on any Internet-connected computer anywhere in the world.
The concept is part of an anticipated trend toward “application service providers” or ASPs, which host popular software and rent it to customers. Instead of installing the software on desktop computers, users access it over the Internet on the ASP’s computer system.
The idea , which The Yankee Group expects to grow into an $11 billion market by 2002 , is supposed to be more convenient and cheaper than purchasing software, and leaves upgrades to the ASPs.
Though the concept has been gaining currency for corporate network environments, Personable.com is one of the first to target small businesses and individual users.
The service starts at $10 per month and comes with 10 megabytes of server space for personal files.
For more: www.personable.com.
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Telenetics Corp., the Lake Forest company that makes devices that collect data from everything from traffic lights to electric meters, is going online.
The company is introducing a system to allow customers to look up wireless data generated by its devices on the Internet. The change is designed to make the information more accessible,and therefore more useful by allowing companies to more easily integrate into a variety of computer systems. Customers can retrieve the information over a custom web site or through e-mail.
Before, users could get the data only through proprietary radio and cellular units.
For more: www.telenetics.com.
Viking Components, Rancho Santa Margarita, is releasing its first 128-megabyte compact flash memory card. Previously, its biggest flash card held up to 80 megabytes.
