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Bidding stalled on Tuesday in the closely watched auction of a piece of wireless airwaves that the U.S. government is selling, according to data released by the Federal Communications Commission. There were no new offers for the nationwide "C" block slice of wireless spectrum to top previous high bids totaling $4.74 billion. Tuesday's pause prompted speculation that bidding for the C block spectrum may have run its course, and that the most likely possible winner could be either Verizon Wireless or Internet search leader Google. Bidders' identities are kept secret until the entire auction ends, under FCC rules. The end won't come until bidding has stopped on all five blocks of spectrum up for sale in the auction, which will probably take at least another week or two. The $4.74 billion in bids for eight regional pieces of the C block on Monday surpassed a $4.71 billion offer made last Thursday for a nationwide package of the spectrum. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast said there were several possible scenarios as to which companies had bid on the C block airwaves. The most likely of those, she said, is that Verizon Wireless pushed the C block bids up to $4.74 billion on Monday in order to top an earlier bid by Google. It was also possible that the earlier, $4.71 billion offer was made by Verizon Wireless, and that another competitor is aiming to force Verizon to up its bid, Arbogast said. Bidding on the C block had temporarily stalled on Friday after Thursday's $4.71 billion offer. That bid exceeded a $4.64 billion minimum price set by the FCC and triggered a condition sought by Google that would require the winner to make the spectrum accessible to any device or software application. Analysts have said Google may drop out of the bidding after hitting the minimum price, content to let Verizon acquire the C block spectrum as long as the open-access conditions are guaranteed. The C block is one of five groups of 700-megahertz spectrum being offered. The top bids on Tuesday totaled almost $18.94 billion for all five blocks, raising more money than any previous FCC auction. The 700-megahertz signals are valuable because they can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. Other potential bidders in the auction that began January 24 range from entrenched carriers AT%26T and Verizon Wireless, to possible new competitors like Google, EchoStar Communications and Cablevision Systems. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group.

Cisco told investors on Wednesday exactly what they didn't want to hear: that growth slowed dramatically in January and may not rebound for several months. The assessment from CEO John Chambers on the company's conference call sent Cisco's shares skidding by 7% in after-hours trading to a new 52-week low. Cisco's sales for the quarter that ended in January rose 16.5% to $9.83 billion, just ahead of Wall Street estimates, while pro forma earnings of 38 cents a share, or $2.4 billion, met the Thomson Financial consensus estimate. But Chambers said sales growth slowed to less than 10% last month, and while he said that may be an "aberration," he said it was prudent to assume that the "extremely challenging" environment "may continue for the next several months," so the company lowered its sales growth forecast to 10%. Wall Street analysts were looking for 15% growth in the current quarter. "We are seeing our U.S. and European customers being increasingly cautious," said Chambers, but he added that the company remains well positioned to meet its long-term growth target of 12-17%. The news followed other weak recent economic indicators %26#151; including an unexpected slump in the service sector last month that sent U.S. stocks plunging on Tuesday. Stocks lost ground again on Wednesday, as a Federal Reserve official's warning about inflation added to slowdown fears. JDS Uniphase was a bright spot, soaring 26% after beating estimates and raising guidance, and Multi-Fineline was up 37% on its results. Micron fell 10.8% on inventory concerns. FormFactor, CNET, Riverbed, Travelzoo, CommVault, Double-Take and Radisys fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 30 to 2278, the S%26P fell 10 to 1326, and the Dow lost 65 to 12,200. Volume declined to 3.98 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.47 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 20-12 margin on the NYSE, and 19-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 69% on the NYSE, and 74% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 15-80 on the NYSE, and 41-129 on the Nasdaq.

NEW YORK -- With the $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence provider Cognos formally concluded last Thursday, IBM wasted no time unveiling a slew of new products and its plan for integrating the company into its information-on-demand (IOD) strategy. Addressing analysts and press in the rooftop suite of the St. Regis Hotel here in Midtown Manhattan, Steve Mills, IBM's software group executive, heralded Cognos as the culmination of two years of acquisitions and initiatives to improve how companies store, organize, retrieve and visualize data. "The Cognos acquisition completes %26#91;an%26#93; end-to-end set of capabilities IBM can offer," Mills said, adding quickly that IBM would continue its aggressive pursuit of the business-optimization market. "It's not just the roadmap we've been on -- it's the roadmap going forward." Ottowa-based Cognos's visualization and reporting applications will put a face on IBM's IOD initiative, begun almost exactly two years ago. Through purchases of companies like FileNet, Princeton and Solid Information Technologies, IBM amassed the core information-management and in-memory database infrastructure to build a suite of dynamic business-data storage solutions scalable to companies of all sizes. But Big Blue still lacked one element. Cognos delivers the visualization and reporting that allow companies to peer into their data to make better business decisions -- "the top of the iceberg that carries the whole thing forward," Mills said. Because IBM and Cognos both use open standards and architectures, businesses can tap their tools to aggregate "any data, anywhere, %26#91;using%26#93; any application," he said. That's fortunate, since according to IBM, enterprises face a lack of advanced BI and IOD tools. While every business that IBM consults with has a clear idea of what products they want to put in place to improve operational inefficiencies, they rarely have a vision for their "information agenda," said Ambuj Goyal, IBM's general manager of information management software. For IBM, that is the difference between business automation and business optimization. Slippery terms, to be sure, but Goyal summed it up in brief: "Information on demand is about unlocking the business value of information." The goal is to level the barriers created when an organization's data is siloed, said Rob Ashe, who previously served as Cognos's CEO before assuming the position of vice president of IBM's newly created Business Intelligence and Performance Management division. Ashe said a unified BI application produces "coordinated decision making." For instance, it can ensures a company's marketing and customer service departments are able to access the same information packaged in a customizable, user-friendly dashboard. He will have 35,000 employees across IBM's three major units of software, hardware and services supporting the BI efforts that he is to lead. Cognos' operations will remain in Ottawa. When BI companies like Cognos burst on the scene, they offered "whiz-bang reporting," Marc Andrews, IBM's director of IOD and Cognos integration marketing, told InternetNews.com. Yet, two reports could produce wildly differing data, he said. As a result, the problem of flashy but faulty data representations highlighted the precariousness of the standalone BI industry. That's where IBM came in. Cognos will become the face of IBM's underlying IOD campaign, advancing its business-optimization services for companies of all sizes. Business optimization -- what Ashe called the "marrying of future data with historic data to get a complete picture" -- is the fastest-growing segment of IBM's industry, the executives said. IBM wasn't the first enterprise computing powerhouse to recognize the need to add BI capabilities. The acquisition followed SAP's $6.7 billion bid for Business Objects in October, and Oracle's $3.3 billion purchase of Hyperion last March. Fortunately for IBM, a 15-year relationship between it and Cognos, and the open standards and architecture that each uses, has helped it move quickly to integrate the smaller company into its operating structure. "They fit hand and glove," Ashe said, noting that the buyout received approval of 99 percent of Cognos' shareholders. The integration seems to be proceeding briskly also given the laundry list of products announced today, less than two months after IBM announced the acquisition. IBM showed off 10 Cognos-enabled industry-specific applications that (according to IBM's promotional literature) "turn information into a strategic asset." These include shelf-space management and store planning for retailers, financial risk-planning for banks and crime-management insight for government agencies. Company executives also introduced a Compliance Warehouse -- a unified software, hardware and services environment to support a business's legal compliance efforts with Cognos reporting. The Compliance Warehouse includes a content repository, records management services, e-mail archiving and Tivoli and Lotus software, among other features. The other new products IBM announced today included a Cognos 8 BI "starter pack" for IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, pre-integration of Cognos 8 with IBM's information server platform and bundling of IBM's Dashboard Accelerator with Cognos 8 BI. Given Big Blue's long business history with Cognos, Mills said he had often been asked why IBM opted to purchase the company, rather than continue operating as independent partners. "The world around us is changing," he said. "The phenomenal escalation of data volume demanded tightened integration" of the two companies' applications. Citing projections of a 100-fold increase in the number of bytes over the next four years, Mills said consolidation of the two companies was a natural move. He also said IBM would continue to invest further in Cognos technology, research and development. "We acquired Cognos for leverage," Mills said. "We buy companies for lift, for growth, for strategic advantage -- not just for mass." After all, he said, "anytime you invest $5 billion to acquire a business, there must be some important reasons."

Microsoft announced this week it has released both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing %26#150; the final stage before a product actually gets into users' hands. In the case of SP1, at least, there is one catch. If you're waiting on the edge of your seat, you still have a while to sit on your hands -- until mid-March. Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 %26#150; Vista's server counterpart -- has also been released to manufacturing (RTM) and will be available for purchase to new customers starting March 1, the company said in a statement. Volume licensing customers with Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreements can download the server near the end of February. "Vista SP1 is something all of our customers on the business side have been waiting for %26#91;so%26#93; we can now ring the SP1 bell," CEO Steve Ballmer said during a meeting with financial analysts Monday morning that was Web cast. Ballmer was referring to enterprise customers' penchant for waiting for the first service pack of a major Microsoft operating system upgrade before beginning wide-scale deployment. Officially, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 will be launched at Microsoft's planned "Heroes Happen Here" event in Lost Angeles on February 27. Visual Studio 2008 became generally available last week. At the same time, delivery of SQL Server 2008, the third product being launched at the end of this month, has been postponed until the third quarter, the company disclosed late last month. Meanwhile, after more than four months of testing, and repeated test releases, it's a little hard for some analysts to get excited about the final release of Vista SP1, but it's important nonetheless, not least because Vista and Windows Server 2008 have been positioned by Microsoft as complementary operating systems offerings. Gaining synergy "It's a good sign that they're done, and done at the same time, particularly for those people who want to gain any synergies from running the two products together," Michael Cherry, lead analyst for operating systems at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. Both Vista and Windows Server 2008 share the same software core, as well as having some key interlocking features such as Network Address Protection or NAP, which quarantines new devices on the network until they have met specified security requirements. Microsoft has seemingly taken its time getting Windows Server 2008 done. The first "release candidate" or RC of the server software was released to testers simultaneously last fall with the first beta test copies of Vista SP1. The delay in providing Vista SP1 to customers has to do with coordinating availability across various distribution channels, according to a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog Monday by Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management. That includes PC OEMs, retail packaged product, and download sites. "In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1," Nash's post read. "In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically," he added. However, a small set of specific device drivers known to not follow Microsoft's guidelines for driver installation can cause problems for some users, and thus the delay. "We will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers," Nash said. Besides its connection with Vista, the release of Windows Server 2008 is important for another key strategic reason. "This starts the countdown clock for Hyper-V," Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization technology, Directions on Microsoft's Cherry said. Hyper-V, Microsoft's challenge to VMware and Citrix's XenSource virtualization hypervisors, is due out 180 days after availability of Windows Server 2008. "Now, you can start to calculate availability of Hyper-V," Cherry added.

Google today reduced pricing significantly for its line of on-demand security software as it continues to fine-tune the software applications it acquired last year when it bought Postini. "What was once a convoluted and complex product line is now three nice chunks of applications at an aggressive price," Scott Petry, founder of Postini and product management director at Google, told InternetNews.com. "Before we would try and get more dollars for every feature," he explained, "but now that we're part of Google there's a great democratization of the product line that lets us reach a huge market." The three areas Google offers are in security and compliance services: Google Message Filtering, Message Security and Message Discovery. Filtering, which covers incoming spam, malware and other e-mail threats, is available for $3 per user per year. According to Petry, the volume of spam doubled last year. "If you're an administrator, do you want to double what you spend on security appliances?" Alternatively, Google's approach of offering software as a service (SaaS) (define) and storage online lets IT better maintain its infrastructure costs, he said. Messaging Security includes filtering and adds "enhanced virus detection," outbound processing and content policy management at $12 per user, per year. Administrators can use the service to enforce policy rules -- for example, prevent Social Security numbers and credit card information from being transmitted via e-mail. Message Discovery includes Security and adds one year of message data archiving, retention and discovery. The service is designed for companies looking to improve their readiness for legal discovery and compliance issues. Cost is $25 per user for one year of archived data. "This shows Google is making a more coordinated effort to go beyond the Google Apps Premier brand and get into other areas like archiving and compliance," Michael Osterman, principal at Osterman Research, told InternetNews.com. "The pricing is very significant. When you start at $3 per user annually, compared with what some other companies charge, that's almost nothing. Also, the fact you can mix and match only what you need gives companies a lot of flexibility," he said. According to Osterman, Google faces a near-term challenge of letting potential customers know they don't need to be running Google Apps to use the security and compliance software. "The market of Apps is growing, but Microsoft Office is what most people use, and I don't think companies realize Google's messaging and security services are completely independent services that can be purchased separately to use with the software they already use," Osterman said. Petry said his group is working on tighter integration to Google Apps but will continue to offer the security products as an add-on that can be used with competitors' software. "When we were independent as Postini, we sold a service layer that works with any customer's infrastructure and we will continue to do that with security and archiving that works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SunMail and others."