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For the record 20 September
Friday, September 20 2002
by Sylvia Leatham


Ericsson and Ciena cut more jobs | Microsoft looks to tackle Hotmail spam 









Telecoms equipment maker Ciena is cutting 17 percent of its workforce,
citing tough industry conditions. The company, which makes optical networking
software and equipment, is making 450 job cuts. Ciena expects the cuts to save
between USD50 million and USD55 million a year, and the company said it expects
to take a USD75 million to USD80 million charge in the fourth quarter as a result
of the cuts.



Ericsson, the world's largest maker of wireless networks, has said it is
cutting 700 jobs in Spain, according to Bloomberg. The cuts, which equate to 29
percent of its Spanish workforce, are part of an overall workforce reduction plan
that was announced by Ericsson when it released its second-quarter results.



US mobile phone technology company Qualcomm has reported an increase in
revenues for the third quarter and forecast strong demand for its chips in the
fourth quarter. Qualcomm said Q3 revenues rose 17 percent to USD771 million, up
from USD657 million a year ago. The 3G wireless technology firm said a net loss
of USD14 million was mostly due to USD194 million in charges related to the
decline in value of the company's Leap Wireless investments. Qualcomm anticipates
shipment of 20 million chips in the fourth quarter, up from 16 million in Q3.



Software company Open Text has acquired Centrinity, a provider of
feature-rich messaging and collaboration solutions with offices in Shannon. The
two companies announced an agreement under which Open Text will acquire all of
the issued and outstanding shares of Centrinity for a cash consideration of
CAN1.26 per share. The companies expect the transaction to close in the next
quarter. Centrinity has more than 8 million users of its FirstClass
Communications Platform, a solution that provides a unified mailbox that combines
a user's e-mail, voicemail and fax messages.





A Belfast-based company has won an award at the European Call Centre of the Year.
The awards were presented by Call Centre Focus magazine and sponsored by BT
Retail. Gem won the Best Multi-Media Contact Centre award.



Research In Motion, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry handheld e-mail
device, has filed a patent-infringement suit against Handspring over some
of its Treo Communicator hand-held machines, according to the Wall Street
Journal. RIM says keyboard features of Treo models k180, 270, and 300 infringe on
RIM patents. A spokeswoman for Handspring said the company has not yet been
served with the suit and had no comment on it.





Irish-headquartered company PolarLake has released PolarLake v2.0, a new
version of its enterprise XML and Web services platform for Java technology.
Based on PolarLake's patent-pending Dynamic XML Runtime, the product can be used
for the deployment of complex XML and Web services processing. PolarLake v2.0 is
suitable for use in straight-through processing and back-end processing systems
and next-generation service creation and management.  



 

NTL Broadband has announced a series of initiatives aimed at boosting its
broadband services in the UK. NTL is accelerating the speed of its 512 Kbps
service to 600Kbps, and the company is offering new customers free installation
of the faster service. It has also upgraded its network, and its broadband
services are now available to almost 7 million homes in the UK. NTL also said it
is rolling out a new "stand-alone" broadband cable modem product.





"T-commerce" is set to take off in Germany, according to a study conducted by
Berlin media consultancy GoldMedia Consulting & Research. T-commerce
involves revenue models that use television as a transaction channel, including
Pay-TV, pay-per-view, teleshopping and Direct Response TV commercials. In 2001,
more than EUR1.8 million was generated through t-commerce services in the German
market, according to GoldMedia, and that figure is set to grow to EUR4.3 billion
in 2007.







Users of Microsoft's popular e-mail service Hotmail may soon see a
decrease in spam. The software giant is teaming up with Brightmail to incorporate
its spam-filter technology into the e-mail service. The solution uses a
collection of over 200 million e-mail addresses designed to attract spam that
help Brightmail identify and eliminate junk mail before it reaches users'
inboxes. The spam guard will be fully deployed later this year to Hotmail's 110
million users.